The most telling sentence in Daniel Susskind’s article (I’m a father of three who studies the impact of artificial intelligence: this is what parents need to know about AI, 6 September) is “human tutors are too expensive to provide to everyone”. Too expensive in relation to what? If instead of allowing tech lords to amass untold wealth we provided tutors for all, this would avert anxiety about job losses and provide the kind of quality that the screen-averse wealthy currently expect only their kids to have.
The students protesting against AI are not just concerned about their graduate outcomes, but rather understand that its imposition serves only to enrich the few and worsen the labour conditions of the many. A good future for our children will not come from education technology scammers. They do not need more datacentres and environmentally catastrophic, resource-intensive automation.
Susskind is impressed with the ability of software to mimic existing cultural outputs like stories and podcasts, but if we want new ideas rather than rehashed versions of old ones we need to turn away from the narcissistic seductions of the infinite customisation offered by chatbots. He distinguishes educational AI from “dehumanising” social media, but whereas social media at least used to provide connection, AI fundamentally does not.
Susskind seems to share Sam Altman’s idea that it’s cool to make a podcast about your kids’ interests for the car journey, but the point of cultivating them is actually talking about them. Society isn’t made of problems to be solved: it consists of meaningful interactions with others who do get tired and distracted, but whose time is precious for precisely these reasons.
Pil and Galia Kollectiv
London
Three cheers for Daniel Susskind. As he said, we are letting our children down if we prepare them for the world that we grew up in rather than the one they will inhabit. I am, however, puzzled that he thinks that yesterday’s basics will still be basic in the world they will inhabit. I recently signed an estate-planning agreement online by clicking a link and I am dictating this letter to the editor into a microphone on my desktop computer. Need I continue?
Susskind is absolutely right that we must use AI critically, not blindly. But to accomplish this, we must also think critically, not blindly, about a school curriculum that was designed to prepare children for adulthood in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Jane Roland Martin
Professor of philosophy emerita, University of Massachusetts
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