PU #251 - WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS - Inaction and Foreseen Consequences
It’s been a long summer, hasn’t it? And yet, as always, also far too short. Much as I enjoy writing Philosophy Unleashed every week (when school is in session), knowing that I am sitting down to write this necessarily means that summer is over:
PU only comes out during term time,
This is a new PU,
Therefore it is term time and I am back at work.
After several months of heatwaves, it was disconcerting walking to the dentist on my final day of the summer holidays yesterday and seeing piles of golden leaves everywhere, scattered across the roads and pavements. Autumn is early. As I write, leaves are blowing past my window and the sky is a dreary grey. Collectively, it could be argued, we lost our minds a long time ago, but now we have lost our seasons too.
Could the state of the environment be a metaphor for why we will never have nice things? Global warming, climate change, the “greenhouse effect” — these are all things known about and taught to me since childhood, nearly half a century ago, and yet little has been done to halt or change our impending climate disaster. I’m not even sure it can be called impending anymore — in many places it seems to already be here.
All these eager young minds we have encouraged into STEM subjects, and we’re still facing the same threat that loomed back when one could study the Humanities with impunity. What was it all for?
Talking to friends with young children over the summer, we lamented how the current generations will never know higher education as we once did. As a place to find yourself, grow, and explore. We were the first generation to miss out on university being entirely free, but the costs then were still relatively affordable. Parents who had the money didn’t yet mind the idea of paying a few thousand quid to get you out of their hair for a few years so you could learn how to cook and clean for yourself, make some new and interesting friends, and discover who you really were. But now, with the astronomical costs of a university education, as with all things capitalism ruins, an actual return on their significant investment is sought. That their child grows up and becomes a fully-fledged person is not enough. They also need a job which will yield a salary high enough to reimburse them for the nearly thirty thousand pounds they have spent on the project.
Once education is no longer for its own sake and becomes only an instrumental stepping-stone to future qualifications, the intrinsic value of learning is lost. Three years spent reading poetry or thinking deep thoughts about philosophy for £9,000 a year is a bourgeoise privilege few can afford. Literature degrees, philosophy degrees? They are now only the bastion of the economically wasteful or the super-rich. Another thing we could long see coming but did little about. First they came for my SAT grade and I did not speak out because back in my day they didn’t test me at that age. Then they came for my GCSE grades and I did not speak out because O-levels were harder…
It should come as no surprise that an education system narrowing itself towards only standardised tests and economic outputs at primary and secondary level would eventually lead to a similar transformation in higher education. But that’s what you get when all the academics are myopically hyper-specialised into their own specialist silos and not keeping their eye on the bigger picture around them. There are no more frontiers of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, only opportunities to put something on your CV which will make you stand out from your competitors, or research into product development so that some private company funding your endeavour can make more money.
So what is all this about — my rambling and slightly depressing stream-of-consciousness rant about the slow and inevitable decline of both the environment and our education systems? Well, like all things these days it’s about AI.
What began a few years ago as a gnawing discomfort I had about how quickly people were outsourcing their thinking and creativity to generative Large Language Models (LLMs) now feels like being one of the few people who noticed a pattern of minor symptoms (coughs and rashes) appearing in the years before a deadly plague wiped out a whole civilisation.
We all were intrigued enough to play with it and give AI a go at first. But many of us saw quickly enough that complex algorithms determining a statistically probable series of words in a sentence was not quite the machine intelligence we had been promised. Mistakes were spotted quickly and frequently. (A few weeks ago, for example, Googling cooking instructions for a particular brand of vegan meat substitute, I tried to find out if the product could be cooked from frozen. “Of course it can” — Google’s impossible to ignore AI overview told me, before giving me the instructions on exactly how to do it. Luckily, I actually checked the source, where specific danger warnings reminded you to NEVER cook the product direct from frozen. But for an LLM, doing probability with words, the word “frozen” was frequently paired with the words “cooking instructions” and so it made an unfortunate calculation. One which could have made me very ill!)
Yet there was no doubt that the LLMs enabled us to outsource annoying tasks we hated doing ourselves, and get them done in seconds rather than hours, and so, fairly soon, despite the many imperfections and dangers of the AI-generated end-product, we were being encouraged to use them anyway by those who wanted those end-products expedited.
Again — capitalism’s disastrous logic: rather than eliminate pointless and time-consuming tasks because they are not really needed, bosses (or teachers!) still demand they get done but encourage you to prompt an LLM to do it for you. Then, for tasks which are time-consuming but not pointless (tasks for which the time spent crafting them might even be the point), the desire for economic “efficiency” leads to encouragement that these tasks, too, are outsourced to AI. And, of course, while you could hold out and refuse — do the hard work yourself because you believe it to be necessary, even desirable — if the system in which you operate (your workplace, your classroom) assumes AI will be used, you are no longer given the time needed to complete the task properly and are forced into compliance with the system-norm of using AI. A task for which you might previously have been given a deadline of several weeks is now given a deadline of only an hour, the assumption being you will write a prompt and quickly forward the LLM’s output as your own.
All of this is done because of a persistent myth, peddled by the companies who stand to profit the most from our adoption of their products, that if we don’t get on board with AI now, we will be left behind. The self-fulfilling prophecy (good for shareholders, but maybe bad for humanity) that these flawed and worrisome products will be used everywhere in the future driving us all to learn how to use them, then — because we’ve put in the effort to learn — using them, thus making the myth come true, even though there are so many warning signs that our dependence on such technologies will lead to skills atrophy and cognitive and creative decline.
And then there’s the environmental impact. The water-guzzling data centres contributing further to the climate change we are still yet to stop. Another kick to the planet’s guts every time we accidentally click on one of the integrated AI products’ disruptive-by-design tabs smuggled unhelpfully into one of the computer programmes we have used for years previously without the help of AI so that “usage” data of our accidental clicks can get some programmer a promotion. Let alone all those times we intentionally use it too. Floods and heatwaves because we couldn’t be bothered to do our homework or write that blog post ourselves. Droughts brought on by the creation of “hilarious” deepfakes idly noted, then ignored, by scrolling eyes on TikTok.
It was depressing to note the change in people’s communication over the last year. Social media posts, school assemblies, speeches, essays that all had that distinct cadence of generative AI. A change, or just a growing awareness? Some friends and I started posting each other images of every poster we found that was lazily generated by AI to advertise a business. It stopped being funny pretty quickly and soon became sad.
Noticing the outsourcing of aesthetic and creativity in so many public places makes me feel like “Rowdy” Roddy Piper in John Carpenter’s They Live, seeing the previously hidden subliminals through my sunglasses: I have no personal taste or ideas, or, if I do, I found this particular task not worth using them on.
I guess what I am saying is that we have known about the devastating impact of human-created climate change on our planet for decades and done little to stop it. Just as we have known that we were sacrificing any pretence to “education” within our public schooling systems to build a more efficient sorting system for employment and unemployment, yet let it happen anyway, even as inequality became more and more embedded as a result. And these two consequences of human apathy towards well-known threats have now reached a perfect storm in our latest mass inaction about another: our use of AI. Schools with little interest in genuine learning anymore unthinkingly encourage the use of environmentally destructive AI to their students, using spurious and under-scrutinised industry arguments about competitive advantage, so students can skip to the end-product of their qualification with as much efficiency (and as little deep thought or intellectual struggle) as possible. To me, this seems like something that will not end well for us as a civilisation. There are already reports, for example, of university students using LLMs to write assignments which are then marked by LLMs, meaning no human has been involved at all in the work.
Although some schools are doing what they can to stem the tide rather than add to it, the general trend seems to be heading in the wrong direction. But disastrous and well foreseen outcomes have, sadly, never seemed to stop us before.
It’s been a long summer…but there are, I fear, many far longer days for us ahead, so buckle up.
Author - DaN McKee (he/him)
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