Category: Thinking

The Other A.I.

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The academic community – a community to which I have belonged for decades – trades in ideas, and thinking is our currency-in-trade.

Throughout my teaching career, as I’ve offered elsewhere, I’ve devoted my practice to helping people make thinking a habit:

Thinking is the value in our ideas, and since we’re accountable by means of personal responsibility to defend these, there’s our incentive for thinking to be informed by knowledge, practised with discipline, and weighed by healthy scepticism. Discussing and testing ideas is the purview of thinking, and as such, thinking’s an invaluable skill.

Along the way, as our thinking skills mature, we yet retain at our core something personalised and uniquely individual: let’s call this integrity, which literally derives from roots that combine to mean something “untouched,” i.e. something “pure.” As puzzle pieces integrate to form a whole picture, so we might imagine all the pieces that form 'ourselves'. Full integrity finds every piece contributing, no piece erroneous or superfluous although, unlike puzzle pieces, ours we are able to enhance and improve. Distinct from “integrity the buzzword,” integrity is the character and experience to cope, or else not cope, with real consequences. Integrity is how we spot adversity, and it fuels our will to leave comfort zones in order to measure how much we’ve grown.

As a coach since 1990 and a teacher since 1999, I’ve long felt my responsibility, on behalf of people, to help players and students find ways to grow and contribute in accordance with their own integrity.

Fuel for this growth includes the earnest effort we expend in the academic setting to develop and explore imaginative, inventive, even original ideas, and then to properly credit the earlier thinkers who provided our source material. Citation is a formal way to indicate where other thinkers’ ideas ended and our ideas began. But such ‘academic integrity’ goes beyond formal citation.

Academic work is an investment – rigour now for pay-off later. Investing in the development and expression of ideas now, out of what came before, not only works the thinker’s valuable skill, it also advances the growth and maturity of broader confidence and social esteem into the future. This is one reason, from my experience, for tying student success directly to engagement with others in a classroom… p.s. that’s hardly some revelation, but it remains important enough to justify reiteration.

When I teach, I need to hear from students too, particularly in person, although whatever the case, in their own words. Of course, I also appreciate the utility of a Zoom call. But in-person contact time between students and teachers is such a precious commodity that face-to-face teaching-and-learning – for me, anyway, not sure for you – is simply irreplaceable and will never be going away… not unless we so utterly lose our broader social integrity that we just stop being human.

That said, we do manage to prove, now and again, that the pieces comprising our integrity seem to contain at least a few impurities. For instance, you may be surprised to learn how, even before the Digital Age, we found ourselves facing opportunities and enticements not only to draw upon others’ ideas, words, images, and videos but also to risk presenting these irresponsibly as our own.

These days, as we have access to scads of text and media literally in the palm of our hands, legitimate schools are left to counter our worser nature by emphasising quaint abstractions like honesty, fairness, and respect. Such schools expect students and teachers to behave as honest and responsible members of an academic community by complying with policies, regulations, and prohibitions that uphold that academic integrity thing.

One common prohibition is plagiarism, which means submitting the oral or written ideas, words, images, or videos of another person as one’s own without giving that other person proper credit or acknowledgement. Plagiarism is intellectual theft though, more simply put, plagiarism is cheating, by which I mean falsifying anything that is subject to formal evaluation or peer review. And again in my experience, I’ve found plagiarism is far more common than most students ever realise. But whether it is or isn’t tantamount to stealing or cheating, plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty that we absolutely must not tolerate, much less accept. Why?

Plagiarism is a serious academic obstacle that poses significant, permanent consequences, whether detected or not. Ideas that are not one’s own must be given credit at all times – perhaps this is the fundamental precept of academics – because, without respecting this credit, any pursuit or growth or refinement of existing knowledge is fruitless, and any working of the skill of thinking utterly ceases for having no available fuel… well, apart from ‘How can I steal and get away with it?’ or maybe ‘How can I justify being lazy?’ or how about ‘How can I excel at being an ‘Enter’ button presser?’ Presenting the same or substantially the same work more than once, in the longer-term, gains us nothing beyond the muddled growth of thinking about ‘how to cheat and prosper at the same time’.

How about the uncredited use of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, as in ‘Gen A.I.’ – the other A.I.… is this also plagiarism? Honestly, how can it not be? In order to draw upon what’s available, Gen A.I. scours and indexes all available ideas, words, images, and videos, and these not just from some other person but from most everybody out there who’s accessibly published on-line.

Not a search engine in sight… no people either
Image Credit (edited): hyeok10_12 on Pexels

This being the case, then what of any work completed with Gen A.I. – correctly cited or not… what isn’t plagiarism? Good question, one that evidently poses an inconvenient truth yet to be addressed by the euphoric mania, beyond watery defenses like “pattern matching,” “fair use,” and “non-human agency”… bullshit excuses as evasive and lazy as the humans whose use of Gen A.I. warrants all concern for academic integrity in the first place.

“Always ask when you are unsure…”

Thus far, to students who ask me, I’ve found myself able to suggest that Gen A.I. – like Wikipedia before it – makes for a poor academic resource, which is to say, “An easy place to start is rarely a good place to finish.”

Upon saying this to students, I’ve occasionally faced a reminder that the analogue world of my past experience is something to smirk at. Don’t get me wrong, we did have electricity and computers back then, but I’ll grant it was also a time when TVs received broadcast signals, telephones had a dial tone, the Commodore Amiga was cutting-edge technology, and everyone wore Lacoste. More to the point, though… back then, when the encyclopædia on your shelf was all you had, it was also your motive to visit the library, or a magazine stand, or your friendly neighbourhood teacher, who’d also done those same things.

As for those students who smirk at me today, I gather that somebody they’ve never met must have laid my past to rest on their behalf, and therefore nothing – repeat, nothing – from that past had better even try holding threat upon their attention, especially not when it can’t be accessed via smart phone.

By the same turn, I hold what seems to me a reasonable expectation on behalf of these Students of the Digital Age, namely that they appreciate their responsibility to…

  1. understand how ‘academic integrity’ applies to each activity across a program of study
  2. clarify not merely what constitutes ‘academic misconduct’ but also why its consequences threaten our whole endeavour
    • p.s. while you’re at it, also take note whether your school has any kind of “Student Declaration of Responsibility” to which you may have assented upon registration – and then, whether you find one or not, respect it anyway

I should say, I never smirk when I expect all this because, at its core, academics is about broader growth and human progress. It’s about human lives and our livelihoods underway. It’s about how well we expect to be doing once we pass things on… things like ideas and how to think them through.

And hey, if you don’t feel like this endeavour requires work compelled by sincerity and integrity, then maybe it’s time to re-think your involvement. Or maybe just get out of the business altogether because it’s every scholar’s responsibility on everyone else’s behalf to respect the principles of academic integrity, foremost by applying those principles in your own practice.

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Tech Trade-Off: II. Learning to Think Differently

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Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: I. Time to Think Differently

II. Learning to Think Differently

A gerund is a verb that ends with “ -ing.”

Gerunds are a verb form that often function as nouns, indicating some specific ongoing action or process underway, e.g. washing, drying, folding.

Generic gerunds are specified by accompanying words, to help fill in the picture:

“Doing… what exactly? Ohh, doing the laundry.”

At a minimum, we might describe ‘doing the laundry’ as a two-step process, the second being when we turn on the dryer. Some people even add a third step: ‘Folding the laundry’.

But whether specific or generic, gerunds do little to convey any sense of the stages or steps to that ongoing process. If anything, a 2–3 word gerund phrase reduces a series of steps – ‘the ongoing process’ – to ‘a singular thing’ or ‘a discrete event’, e.g. “Doing the laundry is such a chore!”

In Part I, I called this manner of thinking “shorthanding,” as we conceive and describe and reduce multi-step complexities into solely singular events, and I wondered whether innovation, progress, and technology might be having a longer-term influence that reiterates this reductive effect upon our outlook and our thinking…

(a) We develop technology for doing Task ‘A’ so that we don’t have to,
which yields surplus time

(b) We develop an accompanying frame-of-mind, which reinforces itself
more and more with each innovation that comes along

For all its efficiency and time saved, Technology teaches us a commitment to surplus. Think Wall-E and all those people buzzing around the Axiom spaceship in loungewear and e-chairs.

We can depend on A.I.!

Down here, closer to Earth, think ‘Gen AI’ or ‘self-driving cars’.

As we grow more accustomed to the surplus, our accompanying frame-of-mind more readily reconsiders matters of ‘process’ from being a series of steps to being a singular moment or event – this is shorthanding. This feedback loop is training us to think in ways that are more and more accustomed to shorthanding, and on it goes.

All this I’m deliberately claiming informally – it was me who picked the word, “shorthanding,” with zero empirical science to back it up, so…

Sorry, STEM – blame it on STE(A)M, if you like.

And, sure, shorthanding’s a bit abstract and hard to define. For starters, it might be more akin to Pitlick & Gregg than Pitman & Gregg.

Two minutes for… cross-checking?
Image Credit: Public Domain

And language shorthands like this all over the place – look no further than the gerunds and nouns, already mentioned: ‘vacations’, travelling’, living’, life’.

But we’re not simply trading up on Technology for time and convenience, nor on chores and labour for preferred activities. We’re trading in one kind of living for another, by way of a specific manner of who we are and how we live, which is to say by way of how we think. And we appear to have been doing all this without much concern for the price of the trade-off. Whatever that price might be, I suspect we’ve been the ones left short-changed.

For all its marvellous ease, Technology has been feeling more and more to me like a bad habit none of us can resist, and that gets me wondering where else we’re shorthanding. How else have we been altering some ongoing process into a misleading singular notion or concept, like ‘doing the laundry’? And what might be the nuance of such abbreviated shorthand thinking?

One altered concept, I’m afraid, is the process of ‘learning’.

Image Credit: Gerd Altmann on Pixabay

Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: III. Thinking Differently about Learning

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Tech Trade-Off: I. Time to Think Differently

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“Tech [Anything]” grabs attention these days, so don’t be too miffed once you start reading because this is me literally giving it away inside thirty words.

I. Time to Think Differently

Fill the washing machine, add some detergent, set the dial, and push ‘Start’.

It’s a 25min cycle… now, why not grab a coffee, or something to read…

Technology is a marvel… and if there’s one benefit we enjoy, thanks to Technology, you’d have to think it’s surplus time. Take that laundry off your hands, and all that time’s now on your hands.

So close that door behind you, and grab that coffee, and something to read – after all… you are, technically, still ‘doing the laundry’ – we all respect that… why else even invent a washing machine? Listen closely, behind that closed door: can you hear it? That little machine chugging merrily along, doing the laundry while you slip away, guilt-free!

Like I said: Technology is a marvel.

Photo Credit: Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash

And only a fool would disagree – next time you find yourself faced with doing the laundry, just weigh your surplus time against all that hand-wringing labour … unless, of course, you prefer leaning over a washtub down by the creek, or beating your clothes with a rock.

From delicate hands Technology lifts all the toil we prefer to avoid, and in the process, what we learn while ‘doing the laundry’ is how surplus time is the expectation we once never knew we couldn’t live without. Listen more closely, behind that door, and what you’ll hear is not the intrepid little washing machine but the sterile drone of some finger-raw laundry fool processing their foolish foolishness. But you’re nobody’s fool – you set that dial and went to grab a coffee, and owned that fool in the process.

We seem to shorthand a lot of things this way – or, rather – we seem to invent a lot of Technology that shorthands things for us by compressing something lengthier into a more singular ‘process’… whatever took time over several steps to complete, now just a mere leap ‘from there to there’.

We also seem to talk this way – or, rather – we seem to think this way. For instance, you’ll hear people shorthand their vacation: “We did the Louvre, did the Eiffel Tower, did the whole Paris thing…”

And hey, when you only visit a few days, that means squeezing in as much Paris as you can while you can because, like any process, that ‘vacation’ you start will eventually be coming to an end. Added bonus: back home, when someone asks, “How was your vacation?” you can shorthand the whole trip with that cool touch of insouciance about all the places you “did.”

Photo Credit (edited): Margarida Louro on Unsplash

And sure, maybe this shorthanding is a checklist mentality bereft of politesse, but for anyone who really knows, an embrace of surplus is a sophisticated taste grown accustomed to efficiency. Besides, it wasn’t just anybody who “did Paris,” was it? As they would say in the City of Light: “Comme tu penses, donc tu es.” They’d say it fluently, of course.

As for this post, I’ll grant that a two-sentence leap from laundry to the Louvre is a little abrupt. But if you’re struggling to spot the Technology thread in this Paris bit, that is sort of the point.

Beyond e-devices and microprocessors and the digital stuff typically considered these days to be Technology, think about process and all the simultaneous design and infrastructure we simply take for granted… I mean beyond obvious stuff, like WiFi and satellite communications, or fibre optic networks and transmission towers, or even jet engines and global travel. Think way back. Think like that fish who suddenly notices all the water… but this time, instead of noticing the water, notice how long you’ve been immersed in it.

Take Paris trips and leisure time. Take the whole concept of ‘vacation’, for being a great example of technological surplus. For one thing, ‘vacation’ now means it’s not ironic that hotels, restaurants, and tourism have become an industry unto themselves.

Think past museums and exhibits and architecture… magnificent towers, world cities, global infrastructure… stable governments, world commerce, industrial agriculture, economies of scale… think past all that and, instead, think how all that stuff has developed really gradually over a long, long, long, long time. A long time. Centuries, I mean – not days.

Think how all that stuff had to be rethunk and revised and rebuilt again and again and again through multiple versions and earlier forms in how-many-other-places across Planet Earth – so, think ‘actual history’, the process of life underway. If you can, even think back further than the 21st century – ikr!

Think of the manner by which all our Technology has been developed and refined in dozens of countries by gazillions of people over centuries of accidents and mistakes and trial and error and serendipity. Think about all the discovery and extraction and refinement of raw materials for manufacturing, and all the supply chains that had to be invented from scratch to keep it all circulating, and all the sales and retail and finance that were established, not just to keep all those things viable but supplied and chained in order to be sustained. And think about all the years and decades and centuries of time during which all this came to be. Think about another way to conceive of “technology” – think not “tech” but “-ology” – and think at least once-removed from 21st century glee. As opposed to surplus time, think committed time. Think historical time and geographical time (which would be time- and place-time). If possible, think about all this stuff from any perspective that is beyond your own.

Oh, and think with no defined horizon, no particular pinpoint. As each ‘present moment’ arrives, and moves on, then arrives again, and then again moves on… think process in its most literal ongoing expression: think always now, with due respect for both memory and foresight. Stop thinking about what process means, and start thinking what process is.

All this is probably a lot to think about, but we are nearly done thinking: think how submerged we are in technology, innovation, progress, and euphoria, and commerce and growth and leisure, and the way things are, and the way we want them to be, and the way we’re accustomed to all of them being, all at once even if not all in concert.

… or, failing all that, at least think of our taste for efficiency and our commitment to surplus.

Recap:

(a) Time spent on process? Not on my watch!

… yet for misconstruing ‘steps in a process’ as ‘short-lived times spent on innumerable single events’, each shorthanded process gradually changes our outlook from ‘means as means’ to ‘means becoming ends in themselves’

(b) Eureka! Time saved by technology!

… yet for gradual changes to our outlook, ‘surplus time’ has a real effect upon our thinking and, thereby, upon our decisions and behaviour

What I hear called Technology someone else might call “innovation” or “advancement,” or someone else might critique as “progress.” “Pioneering,” “state of the art,” “cutting edge” – all these, also, to the point: as we stake claims of ownership for words and concepts, that seems pretty telling as to how immersed we are, living inside all this. Or maybe better to say how all this lives inside us. And the more immersed it is, the more feverish our yammering becomes: “next level,” “über-sophisticated,” “transcendent.”

We’re soaking in ourselves, it seems, and maybe it’s time for a rinse. And thus do we find our way, in the space of two sentences, back to doing the laundry.

Click here to read Tech Trade-Off: II. Learning to Think Differently

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