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"Dad, what am I doing wrong?" My 16-year old daughter was flustered. She was trying to get the car the go uphill from a dead stop. She kept stalling the engine and embarrassing herself in front of other drivers.
"Deep breath" is all I said. By the end of the week, she could make the car go without also making it chug and squeal.
It may not appear logical. Should not the kids' car have an automagical transmission? It would avoid lots of fuss. But that is not what my wife and I think. Kids should start on a manual transmission even as manufacturers make fewer and fewer of them; even as kids are not likely to own them as adults.
As a parent of four children, I am concerned about children's development. Too much technology can damage that development. Only when confronting difficulty and surmounting a challenge do humans grow stronger, learn skills and maintain meaning in their lives. Strength, brains and meaning are highly interrelated.
This takes me to a problem with artificial intelligence that goes beyond our fears of mass unemployment. As a professor, I had always assigned writing. I wanted students to stew on the topic for a week and write and rewrite. I would also gather their problem sentences into one document that we called "the museum of silly writing" where we could review how to correct them. As a result, and after some embarrassment on their part, I always saw improvement in their writing.
Late last semester, however, after the proliferation of Chat GPT, I read a student's paper that sounded as smooth and bland as a magazine article. I uploaded a passage of it to an A.I. detector. It told me that 9% percent was "human generated."
The student probably cheated. But what could that 9% mean? ChatGPT simply uses everything available on the internet to assemble words according to your directions and the rules of proper English. If we teach students to do the same, use the internet to assemble words, then the A.I. detector could flag students' actual work as generated by A.I. I cannot flunk a student because a machine said a machine likely wrote the paper. I am stuck.
If you don't drive a stick shift, you will never learn how a clutch works. If you don't practice piano, you will never learn piano. If you don't speak, you will never learn a language. There are so many things we are not required to do because we have machines to do them.
If you don't write, will you write well? Will you learn how to organize your thoughts? Using ChatGPT to write a paper may be like taking a forklift to the gym. You can suddenly lift the weight, but you will not grow.
This opens a window into a serious contradiction in our modern lives. It takes enormous thought and coordination to make technology, but technology may obviate thought and coordination. Will the product of our ability destroy our ability? Will this split the population into "cans" and "cannots;" a world of Elon Musks and drug addicts? Are we part way there already?
Perhaps we are well into this history and have only fooled ourselves into believing that technology enhances our skills and self-worth. We developed drywall to make the plasterer's job easier and quicker. Are we now able to fire the drywaller and replace him with another, destroying his power and dignity? We developed materials like PVC to make the plumber's job easier and quicker, but now I own glue and pex ring crimpers and I have never called a plumber.
For the last several years, we tout trades like welding for our young people. But from a historical point of view, electrical welding is a less magical form of blacksmithing. I began on an old Hobart stick welder that required the finesse and feel that only came from practice. Today, you can learn to lay a bead with a Millermatic in about 30 minutes. In factories, machines do most of the welding.
Could it be that our talk of skills is just talk? And could it be, in spite of Mike Rowe and his baritone voice lending credibility to the welding trope, that the economic system that we have created has no interest in delivering "family wages" and dignity? Humans do well when they are necessary. It gives them direction, drive and esteem. What happens when we make them less necessary?
Drive forward girl. Run that clutch like a moonshiner.
Greg Walker is professor of sociology at Commonwealth University at Lock Haven