Blog #2

In the distant 1990s, Artificial Intelligence was playing chess. Deep Blue, an IBM and Carnegie Mellon “super” computer, defeated the reigning chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in a six-game series (Deep Blue, n.d.). This was a milestone of engineering – a computer was now able to recognize the rules of a game and respond to the moves placed against it. It was able to be better at chess than the human who was best at it.

In recognition of the varied and monumental implications of this fact, the nationwide conversation around AI turned immediately and exclusively toward AI’s very non-artificial effect on the American labor force. The article which I have read for this post – “Imagine How Great Universities Could Be without All Those Human Teachers.”– is an interesting case study in this thought experiment. A college professor created and implemented an AI teaching assistant (an AI TA, if you will, though this means something quite different on Reddit) with such naturalistic language patterns that the students did not realize anything was amiss (Schrager & Wang, 2017). The article explores this phenomenon to its logical end – what if artificial intelligence could replace human teachers in an educational setting?

Before we can answer that question, we must ask another – could artificial intelligence replace humans in any setting? Aside from the fear-mongering and the profit-mongering that surrounds AI as a concept, is there actual evidence that AI is replacing human labor?

Some studies would argue that there is less replacing than augmenting. In the June 2015 edition of Harvard Business Review, Thomas Davenport and Julia Kirby cited an MIT economist as saying “journalists and expert commentators overstate the extent of machine substitution for human labor and ignore the strong complementarities that increase productivity, raise earnings, and augment demand for skilled labor” (2015). This perspective, optimistic instead of apocalyptic, belies the true concern of middle Americans. People are not just afraid that AI will take over jobs, they are afraid that AI will take over jobs classified as “unskilled” labor.

Unskilled labor is, broadly, a term given to labor that does not require a college degree and possibly not even a high school education. As of 2019, the latter made up a higher number of the population of those aged 25 years and older (28.1% to 22.5% with four years of college) (Bureau, 2021). The amount of Americans in this same age range that have a bachelor’s degree has risen 7.5 percentage points since 2011 (Schaeffer, 2022), at a time when the bachelor’s degree has what may be its lowest value ever. College graduates are not guaranteed any sort of entry into the work force, which means many are pursuing graduate education just so they may have a better chance at finding a job that pays them something approaching a living wage, all while racking up student loan debt that will follow them for the rest of their lives. With AI looming over the labor market, many fear that the jobs they are working so hard to qualify for will be taken by AI or made irrelevant by it in the new future (Rajnerowicz, 2022).

One area of the workforce that AI seems apt to replace, according to this article, is the teaching sector. This is interesting, as the teaching force is going through a marked shortage of people. According to a poll conducted by the National Education Association early this year, 90% of teachers recognize burnout as a serious problem, and 55% of them say they will leave their career in teaching sooner than planned, citing staff shortages and abysmal salary (Kamenetz). On the other hand, I have seen firsthand that when young college graduates realize that their chosen field has no room for them, or no money, or no opportunity, they turn to teaching, a field with openings everywhere and limited insurance benefits.

If the job of teaching can be suddenly automated, none of these problems would be rectified. It would not solve any of them, it would just silence the hundreds of thousands of educators who so desperately want to do their job, but can’t. Furthermore, the structural problems with the American educational system do not start and end with teachers. Machines are perfect, but they remain subject to the humanity of their creators. The education system in this country is notably susceptible to racism, classism, historical revisionism, and bad actors. The children and young adults most affected by the policies in place will not be freed from human error, they will be more stringently oppressed by it. Despite the problems with the system, there are good teachers, and there are great teachers. Artificial Intelligence, programmed by those in positions of power, will only ever be the system.

Silicon Valley is excited by emergent  AI technology, and if they had their way, education – which, as outlined in this article, seems so perfectly adaptable to question-and-answer AI – would be the first test of many, used to straighten out kinks and seduce investors. But the education of America’s youth is not a game, and should not be used as a playing board for rich technocrats to test their algorithms. Teaching, more so than perhaps any other section of the labor force, should be repaired and reformed. It should not be used as an economical pawn.

References:

Acemoglu, & Restrepo, P. (2020). The wrong kind of AI? Artificial intelligence and the future of

labour demand. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 13(1), 25–35. https://doi.org/10.1093/cjres/rsz022

Bureau, US Census. “U.S. Census Bureau Releases New Educational Attainment Data.” Census.gov, October 8, 2021. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2020/educational-attainment.html. 

Davenport, Thomas H., Kirby, Julia (2015), “Beyond Automation,” Harvard Business Review,    June, 59-65. 

“Deep Blue.” IBM100 – Deep Blue. IBM. N.d. Accessed August 4, 2022. https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/deepblue/. 

Kamenetz, Anya. “More than Half of Teachers Are Looking for the Exits, a Poll Says.” NPR, February 1, 2022. https://www.npr.org/2022/02/01/1076943883/teachers-quitting-burnout. 

Rajnerowicz, Kazimierz. “Will Ai Take Your Job? Fear of AI and Ai Trends for 2022.” Tidio, March 23, 2022. https://www.tidio.com/blog/ai-trends/. 

Schaeffer, Katherine. “10 Facts about Today’s College Graduates.” Pew Research Center. Pew Research Center, April 12, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/04/12/10-facts-about-todays-college-graduates/. 

Schrager, Allison, and Amy X Wang. “Imagine How Great Universities Could Be without All Those Human Teachers.” Quartz. G/O Media, September 20, 2017. https://qz.com/1065818/ai-university/.