Tales from the MegaSphere

TL;DR All very rambly and jumping around. Just look at that title! Basically, I think we’re not talking about the real issues with kids and generative AI. I think that liberals are missing the point, in a very PMC kind of way. And I make a plea: how about community as a solution?

So, I was watching a video essay on youtube, exploring the issues with “Gen Alpha” — also, who is coming up with these garbage names for the generations — and it all sounds really serious: they can’t read; they can’t pay attention for more than 10 minutes; they can’t write by hand; and they’re using generative AI to do all their homework for them. I mean, this all sounds really bad… What are we gonna do? The essay was about 40 minutes long and I made it the whole way through. But it worked me… I found myself on my daily walk, going over the points and thinking through the arguments. And now I’m gonna share a bunch of that with you, dear reader, maybe in the hopes of clarifying what I think to myself. I always imagine these articles like messages in bottles. But that’s grist for another mill.

The kids today

Ok. This shit is really old. People use their frame of reference to try and define it, but they fail to see that this argument goes back into antiquity. Here’s a quote. Take a guess who said it and when:

“I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words… When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly disrespectful and impatient of restraint.”

What do you think? I mean, it sounds a lot like this YouTuber, clutching her pearls over how no one wants to learn anymore, and “what’s happening to the world?”. I think it’s important to say that this person states at some point in her essay that she was born in the 90s. I was a teenager in the 90s, and people were saying stuff like this about us, for sure. Go have a look at the film, “Pump up the Volume”, for a snapshot of America in that time. So, the quote, maybe 19th century? Some Victorian lamenting the state of 1880s London? Well, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that quote is attributed to Hesiod… a contemporary of Homer who was writing in the 8th Century BCE, or 2725 years ago. Just let that sink in for minute. People have been bitching about “the kids these days” for quite a while.

You see, we live in this environment where we think were so technically advanced, even convinced about it. We think that all the problems facing us are new. “It’s generative AI. We’re in undiscovered territory here! Terra incognita! Here there be dragons!” Yeah… kind of. Yes, it’s new. But humans, as they currently, physically exist in the world, have been here for 250,000 years; the oldest human construction is 25,000 years old; and written history goes back about 5000 years. Do you really think that a species that has reached this kind of stability and kept its form and intelligence can be changed so drastically in a few generations by the computer? Anything that can be done to a human by environment can be undone. Still, I grant you, if you don’t master certain skills at certain ages, the chance that you’ll ever learn those skills starts to shut off. Take the case of children that have been found, raised in a state of nature — this has happened a ridiculous amount of times, but there’s a famous one from France that was recorded — and without access to spoken language. Once you hit a certain age, if you haven’t learned to speak, you never will. You might learn to understand speech, but you’re never going to be able to talk yourself. And there are a lot of skills like this, just take perfect pitch. If you don’t have it by a certain age, you never will. Them’s the brakes, kid. However, if you have kids, they will totally be able to learn language or develop perfect pitch. It’s still part of the genome, despite what happen to you through the environment.

Quick aside, I’m just going to keep calling her the “YouTuber” and not post a link to the essay here. First, I don’t feel like helping her channel with eyeballs, but also because I’m not reacting to her per se, but rather this whole collection of arguments about how the sky is falling, and the computers are taking over. The computers are not taking over, despite the hype. But, I will try to break down her arguments: “tech” is destroying gen alpha’s collective mind; gen alpha has no interest in learning, and sees no consequences in not learning; gen alpha has a whole host of psychological problems and can’t pay attention for more than 10 minutes. Compare this to Hesiod above. When Tuber was making these statements, backed with various interviews or testimonials, I was thinking, “wait a minute… I’ve heard this kind of thing before.”

Right at the top, I would argue this is all a lot of “bad faith” — you know, that Sartre guy — where Tuby here is more interested on flexing about how she, a person looking for likes on youtube, “loves learning and reading” and that the lack of this has her worried for the future of the species. “What are we all going to come to if no one wants to read anymore?” Well, we’ve been here before. For most of human history the majority didn’t know how to read or were only functionally literate. But are the kids somehow responsible for this situation? Did the kids go and buy the cell phones? Did the kids decide to be part of an extremely exploitative ecosystem of “tech”, designed to turn them into products and get them addicted? That was their choice, then? At one point the YTer says, “the point of social media was to connect.” And I screamed at the monitor, “are you delusional?! The point of social media is to make money! Period!” Facebook, or twitter, or whatever doesn’t give a wet shit about your ability to connect with people; these companies want your free content, and they want your data, so they can sell it. They want to make money, and they love to suck up your free labor to make as much lucre as they can. End of story. These systems and platforms are not designed for you; they’re designed to take advantage of you.

Kids are really great at detecting bullshit

Children may be born into this world knowing nothing; but the blank slate hypothesis has been thoroughly disputed. We are born with a whole host of adaptations that give us skills from birth. We are born with the capacity to learn language; that’s not something that we have to overcome. There are other advantages and disadvantages that we get just from our genome. But, I would argue, kids DO have a great nose for bullshit. We are intelligent creatures, and we can tell pretty quickly when we’re being lied to, despite being children with limited frames of reference. If someone is telling you how important it is to read and write, but you never see them reading or writing — or actively avoiding it — you get the message fairly quickly that this is all nonsense. Why should I hold to values that you, yourself, don’t? If you want children to be interested in reading and value learning, you have to show them that you too have a passion for these things. And, if were being honest here, most folks don’t see a lot of value here, especially in America with its history of anti-intellectualism. If I was a kid growing up in 21st century America, I would totally use generative AI to get out of work. Just like the very adult lawyers who submit pure AI hallucination or the very adult journalist who “wrote” a reading list where all the book titles on it were AI hallucinations. It all looks so pointless. I’m being asked to produce essays about books or topics when no one is interested in either the source, nor what I have to say about the topic. Why not slap together a prompt and have a computer spit out the assignment? The only thing that matters is getting through the nightmare and getting my credential. If no one else cares, why should I?

Society is full of these double standards. There’s what you say, and what you do. Learning is terribly important, it’s just that no one actually cares about it, or about thinking. Can it make money? Ah! That’s what’s important. All the rest is distraction. There’s a great anecdote about the publication of the first Harry Potter book in America. It had become a great success in the UK and they wanted to introduce it to American audiences. The first note from the publishing house? “Well, we totally have to change the title. ‘Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone’?! That won’t do at all! No one is going to buy a kids’ book with ‘philosopher’ in the title.” Thinking and engaging is hard; people generally don’t like to do it, if it can be avoided. And none of this is new, despite how much you might wring your hands at the future of the species. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t think, engage, or come to love the life of the mind. They have to be drawn into the process; and the way of doing that is by demonstrating that it’s a worthwhile pursuit.

When we live in a world of scams and exploitation, I think kids are able to read the room. They get that we are exist in a paradigm where going deep into a given subject is not a path to prosperity. Credentials are what matter, and it doesn’t matter how you get them. You just need one so that you can find your bullshit job and make the money you need to have a nice life. And in that job, it doesn’t really matter what you do either. Nothing matters. We’re living in a nihilistic, ahistorical, dystopia — like fucking goldfish, circling the bowl — and it’s every person for themselves. Why not use AI to get past the latest set of nonsensical, needlessly sadistic set of hurdles. I would.

So what are we going to do?

Generative AI is not the danger that we think it is; it’s good at some things, but really bad at a lot other things, because it doesn’t really know or understand what it’s talking about. I use AI everyday for lots of stuff — it’s an amazing bit of tech — but I also understand how limited it is. I’m not worried about my job. I’ve been working in tech for over 20 years, and I can see that this is not the golden bullet that the execs seem to think it is. In fact, I would go one further and say the trend in software development went off the rails long before AI hit the scene. That’s one of the reasons that I’m really into retro computing; it allows you to get closer to the machine. When you strip away a lot of the abstractions, you can start to understand what the tools you’re dependent on are doing for you. Before there were physical computing machines, there were people thinking about computing itself. You need to get down with those guys, and their thinking. What problems are we trying to solve here, and have they already been solved?

But, to get back to gen alpha, what do we do? Well, if you’re kid can’t read at 8 or 9, don’t you, as a parent, have an interest in that? Did you not notice in 9 years that your kid can’t read? How did that happen? The same thing with kids that can’t write or find learning to be a waste of time. That shit is on you. Look, I know that raising kids is mad hard. I get it. But, if you’re too exhausted at the end of your day — working two or three jobs in some gig economy — where do you think the problem is? A terribly underfunded school system? Your ability to be a super human and juggle everything, including pedagogy? Or the demands of the society you’re living in? The public school system in America has failed you; so, what are you gonna do about it? And, if you’re kids are constantly on their phones, why is that? When you’re spending time with your kids, are you also constantly on your phone? Because your kids are looking at you, and taking in your values, while understanding the values you state (e.g. learning and reading are important) are bullshit. How often are you present for your kids? Because they know. If you want gen alpha to be less neurotic, less ADHD, and less dispassionate about learning, well, you have to show them that all these things are important. Your difficult, illiterate children with the attention span of a goldfish are a reflection of you. And when they use AI to get out of things that smell like bullshit, you shouldn’t blame them. We are the damn adults in this equation. If our offspring are disgusted and bored with the world WE have created, then we need to start asking ourselves some serious questions.

Look. I understand that we are all living in different circumstances. But, instead of blaming schools, or the children themselves, I would like us to think more about the general society. Blaming the kids is just such nonsense that I can barely stomach it; these humans were born into this world that we have created. Because humans take a really long time to become functional members of the group, we have to have a lot of patience. If a child is using “tech” — something that is designed to capture their attention and then exploit it — in a way that is harmful, can we really blame them? Or howl about the state of things? And I get that parents are struggling to find time. We are isolated. But do we have to be?

Humans are great at building community: top predator and dominate force on the planet because we work together. We are receding back to the 19th and 18th century in my opinion: a time where the guard rails and safety nets that we grew up with in the later half of the 20th century are gone. Community is where our strength lies. The environment we find ourselves in is trying to isolate us. Instead of pearl clutching and hand wringing, ask yourself, “how can I build community around me? What about talking to other parents in the local school and organizing tutoring groups? After school sessions that deal with the lack of support in the public system? Yes, it’s hard to raise kids; but, what if you could raise kids with the community around you? What if we worked together? That’s where we excel as human beings!

Up till now, we have relied on the systems around us to provide what we needed for a regular existence. That’s over. But we still have each other. We should use the strength that we developed 250,000 years ago to advance and enhance what we are. When you speak the truth, without the double talk, the kids will listen. Do you have passion for learning? Then the kids will follow. Your children love you, and they will follow your true values. They understand that what you do is different from what you say. The outside forces of AI and tech isn’t ruining our next generation; we are.

People often give me a funny look when my typewriter collection comes up. I’ve got 7 of these things — 1 QWERTY, 5 QWERZ, and 1 AZERTY — and I think I’m about topped out; I wouldn’t want this to get out of hand. I try to use them as much as I’m able, writing letters and postcards; I even have one that’s small enough I can take it on vacation with me, typing up postcards from exotic locales. They’re just a joy to use in a way that writing on laptops or computers isn’t; there’s a tactile feedback mechanism of the noise as the character strikes the page and a letter is printed into existence. Letter follows letter and word follows word until you have a text: a text that can not be easily undone: a physical piece of paper, a physicality really missing today. And then, when you send this physical letter, and it travels through space to arrive at its destination — a message with an audience of one — unlike Facebook, Google or any of the other giant platforms who can do whatever they want with the trust of your texts — or “content”, if you want to call it that — it is actually illegal for anyone to open this letter aside from the recipient. The Postal stamp on your letter is a symbol of sacred trust between the sender and the postal service — or chain of services — who deliver it. The contents can’t be used for some advertising end; it can’t be feed into a Large Language Model (LLM); it can’t be used for some other profiling; it can’t be profited from, manipulated, or used in anyway by a third party. But now, as seductive as the physicality and total privacy are, we have a whole new use case for these machines: defense against AI slop.

Well, here’s an idea. Get yourself a typewriter, and learn how to use it. When you receive a type written text, you can be pretty certain that it’s not AI slop. Sure, you could have AI generate a text for you, and then type it out, but at least you will have read it once. Nothing says, “I’m totally out of fucks to give”, like handing in a paper where the first sentence is a robot apology!

Hopefully, if you went to the trouble to prompt an AI and then type out its answer on your typewriter, you would avoid the obvious self-incrimination.

So, handing someone a typewritten document today has turned into a seal of, “a real life, human being with fingers, made this. It might still be plagiarized, but at least the human who made it had to read the text and then hit the keys to commit it to paper.” Thus teachers can be sure that their students are doing at least something outside “copy”, “paste”. Students can also be sure that lazy — or rather very over-worked and under-paid — teachers won’t lift a “j’accuse” finger at them for cheating. It’s win-win people!

All of this stuff about cheating and incompetent students has a much deeper root in how ugly our educational system has become. We have really lost our way here; and the whole thing has turned into form over function. Just like “Bullshit Jobs” (see David Graeber) have taken over the work place, “bullshit credentials” are causing a crisis in schools. This is simply an unthought-out, left-over from an earlier time when the school system was there to create factory workers, or low-level office workers. Dictatorships around the world have always struggled with how to approach education: you need to have workers who can function in society; they HAVE to be able to read, write, and do some basic math; but, and very importantly, they can’t have the tools to think about or synthesis the world around them into something coherent. These drones might just start asking some unwanted questions, foment, and maybe even…plot. This is exactly why everyone has such a hard-on for STEM, while laughing their heads off at the humanities. And, in America, this attitude isn’t entirely wrong. When an undergrad credentials will put you in soul crushing debt, only a few really wealthy people can commit to humanities: people who won’t have to worry too much about supporting themselves financially afterward. You know? Kind of like how things used to work in the bad old times?! The school systems don’t really know what to do about any of this; so they keep going through the motions. They keep hauling out the old standards, but the goals — spoken or unspoken — become spongier. We’re writing essays about this or that, because that’s how we’ve performed “learning”. And we need to go through these old forms so that we get the credential and then move on. When NOBODY gives a wet shit about any of this, why should the kids care? Kids are pretty smart, and they have a keen nose for hypocrisy. If you keep talking about how important it is to read and do well in school, but they never see you pick up a book or write anything longer than a grocery list, they start to catch on. Why shouldn’t they use an AI to check the box, get the stamp, and pass go? We need to have bigger and deeper conversations about what we’re doing in education, instead of clutching our pearls about the kids today.

Ok. This is spinning out of control and I’m going on another of my side tirades. To return to the topic, buy a typewriter — you can get one for about 200$ or so from a reseller that can guarantee its condition — and learn how to use it. Each one is unique and has its quirks. Play with it, write some letters, whip up some postcards, and don’t be afraid of mistakes; mistakes are all the more proof that a human wrote this and not a cryptic, AI blackbox. You’ll find it’s pretty amazing to have a machine that does one thing — prints text onto a page — and isn’t tracking you, distracting you, fighting for your attention, or profiling you; you can really focus on something in a way that the tech world doesn’t want you to anymore. And, when you have a text ready, the person who receives it can reasonable believe that you wrote it: you, a free-range human and not a robot; an out-of-band text that can not be harvested, scrutinized, or profited from. The typewriter could well be the symbol of the new AI resistance.

So, I ran across Rob Conery a while ago; I watched a few presentations of his on youtube, and thought his book would be worth checking out. Yeah, sure, I had a C64 in 1988 and I played around with BBS in the early 90s; but that didn’t really set me up with the basics of complexity theory or big O notation. I knew that I liked playing with computers, but still didn’t understand what computing meant, or the science part behind it.

Conery gives you a quick paced tour through all of the foundational ideas in Computer Science. He doesn’t go too far into any given topic, but he does give a nice survey course, stopping at all the big points that make up the field and giving a quick run down in approachable, humor filled language. If you have come to tech in a round about way, give this book a read.