We saw this movie, the plot laid out clearly: Don't empower AI

My weekend movie was this afternoon. It was The Marching Band at the Detroit Film Theater at the Detroit Institute of Arts. There is one more showing tomorrow afternoon. In this French film Thibaut is an in-demand orchestral conductor. He is diagnosed with leukemia and needs a marrow transplant. Surprisingly, his sister is not a match – she’s not even his biological sister. That’s when he finds out he was adopted. His chances of a transplant are still good because he learns he has a brother, Jimmy, who didn’t know about Thibaut. Jimmy did know their mother, briefly, and was raised by friends in a poor village in the north of France. Jimmy agrees to be a donor and Thibaut goes into remission. A few months later Thibaut visits Jimmy again to say thank you. That’s when Thibaut learns Jimmy is in a community band. As the two get to know each other Thibaut realizes Jimmy, a cook at a school, has some real musical talent, which Thibaut tries to get him to develop. Along the way there is a clash between Thibaut’s well-to-do life and Jimmy’s working class life. Jimmy resents the meddling. And they ponder what would have happened, how would their talent have developed, if their adoption circumstances were different. Thibaut had started music lessons at age 3 and Jimmy didn’t. This movie is well done and I enjoyed it. Though it only now released in the US it came out in France two years ago and is a big hit. It was nominated for seven categories of the César Awards (the French Oscars). And having several sequences of music, some of them classical, is a big plus for me. On Sundays All Things Considered on NPR has been having a feature they call Cineplexity, how cinema highlights the complexity of life. Last Sunday the topic was AI. Host Elissa Nadworny talked to Scott Detrow and Geoff Brumfiel. At a time when the news is full of AI agents that go beyond what they’re taught to do they looked at movies that feature such a story. They discuss Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Terminator, and The Matrix. Speaking of The Terminator movies Detrow said:

I love them. But I do not love that they feel relevant to real life right now 'cause this - you have this latest wave of stories about AI right now. You have what's been going on in the Ukraine-Russia war where more and more of these drones, in particular, are being taken over by AI operatives. And I'm thinking like, friends, we saw the movie. James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger laid this out very clearly to us. If you give too much power to AI, it will seize control of power and come to kill you. ... I cannot believe we live in a world where '80s and '90s James Cameron movies feel like really important real-life warnings.

And talking about The Matrix.

But, you know, when Agent Smith - we heard that clip there - he talks about how humans have acted throughout history and just kind of, like, seized power and pushed other species to the side and changed the environment for our whims. And you start to see the smatterings of these autonomous AI agents, as they gain more and more power, starting to think about doing things like that. It is a little scary.

I see a distinction made here I want to emphasize. There are AIs that are able to synthesize information and explain things. And there are AI agents that do things for us. The first would tell us the shop that has the best price for a particular item. The second would actually buy it for us. An AI agent could automatically order components to keep an assembly line running smoothly. An AI could investigate and report on the security of a computer installation. An AI agent could try to crack the security of that installation. The agents appear to be what excites the tech bros, though what they are selling to the public (it will tell us how to cure cancer!) isn’t the agents. Yes, the agents can make a business run better. But the agents are what will harm us. Back on September 2 Terry Gross of Fresh Air on NPR talked to Natasha Singer, a New York Times reporter covering the intersection of technology, business and education and author of the new book Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle To Remake Public Schools. She found tech giants are using their money and might to “influence nearly every step of the education supply chain.” Each big company had a division to sell to schools. Some districts already refer to themselves as a “Google” or “Apple” district. Students get computers or tablets of that particular brand plus education software of the brand. They teach the teachers and students to use their software and AI. That means a competitor can’t break in. It also means: The company and its education products and biases shape the worldview of the teachers and students. If a student learns on a particular product they will use products from that company for the rest of their lives. That worldview is machine-centered. Teachers are to prepare their students for an AI-driven future (all the companies uses similar phrases). What is not included is: Do you want an AI-driven future? The hard questions are skipped. About 15 years ago the tech companies made a big push to get students trained in coding. They called it a national emergency because they said they needed so many coders. There was an effort to teach every kid how to code. There was a promise of high paying jobs that would change the world. They were told you can steer the products or the products will steer you. There was a big increase in students in universities majoring in computer science. Just ten years later some of those same companies released AI which can now write code and do it reasonably well. What’s the responsibility of society and those pushy tech companies to those kids who were promised the world and are now in the lowest rungs of the workforce finding their training is now close to useless and the job market dried up? Schools are now trying to figure out how to use AI in the classroom. Teachers are now having AI give feedback on a student’s essay: Does the word choice match? Is there a thesis statement. Is that thesis supported well? That feedback can come quickly. The busy teacher needs to read only the final product (plus the AI feedback). When students figure out how to get AI to write the essay it is then fed into the AI for evaluation. And what does the student learn? Is this how parents what their children to be taught? Do they want their children to be guinea pigs for AI? This stuff hasn’t been well studied yet. And some studies don’t look favorable to AI. Last year Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, the teachers' union, pushed for teachers to use AI, or at least know how to use it. The AFT announced a deal with a couple of the companies. Teachers would get a seat at the table with these companies to shape their products. A year later Weingarten said she had been wrong. Chatbots hook kids and were being used as friends and shouldn’t be. One possible reason for the change is Weingarten saw the whole country turn against AI. On hearing a tech bro declare the glorious benefits of AI in schools Singer has two concerns. First, that glowing world is hyped to sell products. Second, the purpose of school isn’t to train kids on the latest skills, it’s to help them learn how to learn, to discover their passions, to be an active citizen in a democracy. The tech companies are not asking what is in the best interest of the students and of the society. Estonia asked for an AI specific for Estonian schools in which the AI use the Socratic method of asking questions and not answering them. It asks the student what do you think? They use it in high school, not younger, and are studying how well it is working. Big Tech tilted education in ways that benefit Big Tech and also obscure more important things. The companies went big on coding. But not on data science, how to analyze big datasets. That includes important questions. Has the data been manipulated by researchers? Are you using the right statistical methods? Are the results statistically significant? Data science is crucial yet tech bros aren’t pushing it as an amazing career. Maybe they don’t want those important questions answered.