Reasons to Relax About Our Children's Future in the AI Era

Recently, while visiting an independent micro-school that our daughter Hannah was considering for our granddaughter, I was taken aback by a flood of emotion. Where were these feelings coming from?

Why did I choose to focus on the lesson about turkeys and Thanksgiving rather than the tour-guiding teacher explaining the school’s curriculum to Hannah and the other parents? Why did I feel so relaxed amongst the bustle and noise of an active elementary school? 

I remembered hearing Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, saying in an interview how he could judge the quality of a sewing shop by the quality of the clicking that he heard from the sewing machines. He could tell instantly whether the equipment was maintained and the staff was cared for. Was I doing the same sort of thin-slicing drawn from my earlier career as an elementary teacher? The mix of art on the wall, activity centers inviting play and exploration, the curated clutter that all vibrant learning environments eschew? That was the set-up.

Then, I overheard the teacher asking her group of five-year-olds gathered on the rug to provide words to explain what a turkey was. My focus shifted completely to this group lesson when one child said, “It’s a kind of hippopotamus”. Without comment, the teacher added “kind of Hippopotamus” to the growing list without even a hint of ridicule. The absence of giggles from these budding researchers indicated to me that the teachers followed this process regularly. Later in the conversation, when the team of young scientists had narrowed their definition sufficiently, they returned to items like the hippopotamus and decided collectively that that one didn’t really apply.

Many of our customers may not know that I spent a decade teaching in several elementary and primary school settings, from a pre-school, to a public elementary school, to a private urban one-room schoolhouse. As we roll out the launch of our new Fidget Seat - a smaller version of the Soul Seat aimed at the student population - several events (including the one above) have converged to bring me back to a close reading of my years of teaching. One result is that I am no longer worried about us knowledge workers being displaced by Artificial Intelligence. I want to share with you several of the reasons I’ve come to that conclusion. And if you are the parent of a school-aged person, “future-proofing” them simply means continuing to raise them to be a free-thinking person with their inherent agency and creativity intact, taking care to preserve their innate curiosity. You’re certainly already doing this.

There is nothing more inefficient than raising healthy, whole human beings. It’s messy, non-linear, and not easily scalable. Our country’s failed attempt to apply the factory model to education has proven that human beings aren’t products to be optimized. Teachers are not replaceable assembly line workers. I’ve been reading about the failures of American education - and the needed reforms - since well before I started my teacher training last century in the 1980s. Most teachers know to get their own kids fully on the reading path before formal school. The running joke is that if we left walking, speaking English, and potty training to the schools, remedial walking would be a subject area for middle school.

The tech bros trying to build their own intelligence in their silicon factories aren’t doing any better with that factory model. AGI, whichever of the dozens of versions people imagine it to be, is closer to being a type of hippo than anything else. Artificial Intelligence, a turbocharged algorithm isolated from the jiggling and jostling of the real world, hasn’t developed a sheath of mental models even close to what a crawling infant already has. At Ikaria Design, we’ve been designing furniture that allows us to fidget to focus, because that’s where our focus on the world began. Our intelligence is decidedly embodied and sits on the shoulders of millions of iterations of mammals, from tiny shrew to giant beavers.

Artificial intelligence is a very brittle thing. It can’t survive a power outage. It has to be fed the context over and over again. And it can only pretend to take delight in the movement of a butterfly. If all you do is measure it by way of energy input for intelligence output, there is nothing more efficient than a human mind. Or consider what a spider accomplishes with a fraction of our neurons. 

This particular school we were visiting is organized around the Reggio Emilia philosophy of education. The founders named this philosophy after their Italian city, south of Milan. One of their guiding principles was to raise and educate their children in a way that they would never have another Mussolini. When I was starting out teaching, I wish I’d known of the Reggio Emilia approach. I would have had so much more confidence as a young teacher, knowing we were continuing a well-established model. The Reggio Emilia schools are organized to nurture and support the child’s natural curiosity and innate desire to grow and develop within a supportive and loving community. I was looking through my notes from one of my early teaching jobs, an urban one-room school in the heart of Cambridge, MA. Much of what we did was in line with Reggio Emilia: student-informed curriculum with collaborative engagement amongst the teachers and the wider community. 

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the midst of rising fascism here in the US and authoritarianism around the world, our feudal lords in tech want to extract and transfer our agency to silicon. It may bamboozle us for a time, the way we’ve fooled ourselves in the past with “Manifest Destiny”, “Eternal Damnation”, and other myths that we humans foist upon each other. But ultimately, the drive for non-bio intelligence is a failed project.

Each time you read about the AI engineers struggling to transfer context, memory, ethics, or simply models of the world to their silicon creations, remember that elementary school teachers are succeeding at these goals spectacularly every day with the genuine intelligence of our children.  When we support teachers with the resources they need to guide their students to work together, navigating, mapping, and changing the world, that’s one of the best investments we can make for a viable future together on this planet. The only planet we have and share with innumerable other genuinely intelligent beings.

In this spirit, I invite you to share your favorite stories about the brilliant work of educators so that we can hold them up as the builders of our future that they are. I look forward to sharing them in future posts, and welcome you referring me to other resources where these stories are already being championed.