A Modern Prometheus, Part 5

Tying up an AI teacher's tentacles.

06/13/2024

Today we will conclude our reflections on AI teachers versus human teachers with some final remarks and a summary. In the latest salvo in this high-tech versus no-tech sibling boxing match, my brother tried to help me understand how AI technology would touch and transform virtually every aspect of modern life. I asked in bewilderment: “So, you think this would be like a new industrial revolution?” He smiled at his naïve little brother and explained: “No, bro. It will not be that small. It will be more like the discovery of the light bulb.”  That comment would have blown my hair back, if I had any. My mind scrambled like an alpinist scaling the sides of the Himalayas during an avalanche desperately clutching at the vast implications of what he was suggesting. We can already see the impact of AI all around us. People turn to AI as their new internet search engine; AI writes college term papers; AI could compose my Sunday homilies; Hollywood writers and actors are striking before AI makes their occupations obsolete, to name but a few of AI’s first forays into our world. The sweeping changes of AI technology would leave no human stone unturned, including escorting human teachers right out of the classroom.

These reflections have been a modest effort to circumscribe the limits of AI’s tentacled reach into the classroom, or at least to tie up a few of its flailing arms. We identified three such limits AI may not cross by highlighting what a human teacher can do that an AI teacher cannot. Like Gandalf in the depths of Khazad-Dûm defied the Balrog, we too said to the AI teacher: “You cannot pass!”  Or, as God declared in the book of Job: “Thus far shall you come, and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stayed” (Job 38:11).

We tied up a first tentacle when we noted that humans are capable of multivalent actions operating on both the symbolic but also on the spiritual level. For example, a meal between two human signifies not only refueling the body with food, but also refreshing the soul with friendship. And ultimately a shared meal would serve as the underlying matrix for the Mass. The AI teacher, however, needs no such replenishment, symbolic or spiritual. As a result, therefore, two humans can offer each other the opportunity for a profound and life-changing encounter whereas an AI teacher meeting a human student would only offer the possibility of a titillating but temporary experience.

We tied up a second tentacle when we considered what all teachers would be required to do in a religious school as opposed to a public or a purely private school, namely, pray. That is to say, the instructor would be asked not only to teach religion academically in the classroom setting but also to demonstrate the quintessential activity of all religions by praying in the laboratory setting of a chapel or a church. Here again, the AI teacher comes up short. Why? Well, without the divine mirror – a soul, a constant connection to God, and the hope of everlasting life – an AI teacher in the liturgical laboratory is like a fish out of water, gasping and flopping in the rarified air of prayer.

And we tied up a third tentacle by exploring an AI teacher’s limitations in a liberal arts school. In such institutions subjects like philosophy, history, psychology, poetry, literature, and religion are intended to induce existential shocks that cause the teacher and student alike – because both are acutely susceptible to them – to transcend the sensible world and even to transcend themselves. They are catapulted beyond the cosmos in order to understand and grasp the totality of things. An AI teacher, by contrast, is aloof and apathetic, entirely impervious to what Shakespeare described as “the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to.”  But that cold indifference is precisely the true Shakespearean “tragedy” – the tragedy of never experiencing a tragedy. While an AI teacher is indeed impervious, it is also thereby impoverished, trapped and tamed within its own microscopic little world; forever undisturbed, but alas eternally unawakened.

I believe C. S. Lewis articulated best of all the utter unrepeatability and infinite worth of every human being, and perhaps in a special sense, his remarks apply to human teachers. He insisted: "There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations – these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit…Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat – the glorifier and the glorified, Glory himself, is truly hidden." An AI teacher could indeed absorb and impart the nearly incalculable content of “nations, cultures, arts, [and] civilizations.” It is the veritable embodiment of all that is material and maybe even memorable about mankind. And yet for all that, standing next to a human teacher the AI teacher would be the equivalent of a “gnat.” Why? Because in the final analysis, the AI teacher is inescapably mortal and destined for the dust-bin (like last year’s smart phone), while the human teacher alone remains inherently immortal, and destined for divinity.

Praised be Jesus Christ!