Tech Reflection - Two Sides of AI

“This Halloween, I’m dressing up as generative AI. I’m going to show up to the party without a costume and just start stealing pieces of other people’s outfits.”
— An X dispatch my niece screenshotted for me

Introduction

Is AI the amazing new technology that’s changing the world, or a petty thief that just steals people’s ideas and passes them off as its own? Does it actually carry out anything approaching thought, or is it just a zombie, stalking humans’ digital relics and muttering “brains … brains … brains” as it angles to get a piece of us?

In this post, I examine the two most fundamental functions AI chatbots can carry out, and draw a distinction between the two. I believe this can give us useful guidance in deciding how we ought to use this game-changing technology.

Ecclesiastes vs. Barthelme

AI is evolving fast, perhaps faster than our ability to understand it. I’m having to adapt; for example, I’ve stopped spelling it “A.I.” because leading media outfits like The New Yorker and The New York Times have now eschewed the periods. So if you’re reading this on your phone in a sans serif font you may have initially thought I was writing about there being two sides of Albert or Alfred. I asked ChatGPT what to do about this ambiguity between a capital “i” and a lowercase “L,” and it suggested I could “kern or tweak the glyphs.” I’m not exactly an expert at kerning glyphs, so I asked the chatbot how. It gave me all kinds of strategies, the best one for my blog format (HTML) being this:

AI <!-- default -->

A<span style="letter-spacing:0.05em;">I</span> <!-- slightly looser -->

So you can see, GPT is right there with an answer when queried about a technical operation that has been done before. But what about doing something creative and original? This is a fundamental distinction and I am going to propose we look at AI from two largely separate perspectives, for which I’ve invented labels:

• Operational mode – I thought about calling this Ecclesiastes mode, for “no new thing under the sun.” This mode is about helping with a nuts-and-bolts operation (e.g., HTML scripting, DNS routing) that somebody else, probably many people in fact, already figured out and documented out there on the Internet for AI to gobble up, distill, pretty up, and present. Here, AI is basically a really good large language model that excels at combing through gobs of chaff to find answers, and organizes and summarizes information very clearly. I wouldn’t say it’s as parasitic as what’s suggested by the X epigram above, because lots of people freely post technical stuff to the Internet just to be helpful, without thinking of it as sacrosanct intellectual property.
• Creation mode – I think of this as Barthelme mode, named for the writer Donald Barthelme, because I think he’s the epitome of totally original, wacky, one-of-a-kind creative types with an absolutely distinctive voice. In other words, this is the intelligence that I am quite convinced AI could never approach. By creation I mean using the full capability of your own mind to advance ideas that are new, and yours.

The trouble is, many people don’t make any distinction between these two general areas of AI, so on the basis of its prowess as a natural language search engine, they are be led to believe it can do a perfectly good job at creation mode. And since most people aren’t English majors, and in fact don’t respect English majors, AI platforms get to roll out some pretty inferior writing and everybody thinks it’s genius. (This widespread lack of sophistication is also why McDonald’s makes so much money.)

So what?

For many years, as I’ve lamented at length in these pages, kids have been told all the jobs are in tech, and they need to study STEM. And now, many of the kids who dutifully followed these marching orders are graduating from college with Computer Science degrees and not getting jobs, and tech is laying off gobs of people. Next time I meet a STEM major I’m gonna ask him, “Computer Science? What are you gonna do with that?”

So how did STEM go from meal ticket to a food stamp? Well, I think it’s largely because AI is actually getting pretty good at the operational mode. It writes software so well, all industry needs is a seasoned coder to check it. Will we still have seasoned coders in 20 or 30 years, when all the current ones have retired and nobody has come through the ranks to replace them? Probably not, but that’s a whole other blog post somebody has surely already written. (I did blog about ChatGPT’s prowess with operational mode earlier this year, here.)

So as we look at AI, and particularly its role in our personal and professional lives, I think we need to ask ourselves what we have to offer that is rare and valuable, and how AI can help. Specifically, I believe we should be asking the question: how do we use operational AI to handle rote stuff, so we have more time to develop our unique, original ideas—so as to bring out our inner Barthelme?

What to use AI for

I have to confess, I love AI for light research when I’m blogging. The kernel of my posts always comes from my own brain, usually from pondering all kinds of things while I’m out on a solo bike ride. But ChatGPT is a great way to chase down and pinpoint something I had vaguely committed to memory. For example, when working on a recent post I asked it, “Can you track down the Lore Segal quote from ‘Her First American’ about ‘protocol is the art of not doing what comes naturally’?” I probably could have found this with Google, but the AI helped (and might have been indispensable here had I not remembered the name of the novel). ChatGPT was also super helpful when I was writing my post on induction ranges, in researching certain facts (e.g., energy efficiency info and whether government rebates are available).

AI is also pretty helpful at work, where I use a “walled garden” version my employer provides. (It doesn’t use any of my chats as training data for the AI’s ongoing education.) In fact, my employer exhorts all us employees to use AI every day. It’s like with any great tool: we’re expected to work more efficiently because we have it, so we’d better use it well. Recently, I took several product specification documents for different Internet hardware devices, fed them into an AI utility, and asked it to read them all, highlight the differences among the different makes and models, and tell me which one I want for xyz purpose. This was much faster than poring through everything myself, which is a decidedly operational task. The report it generated was clear and reasonably concise, and probably won’t be read very carefully anyway. In fact, someone will probably upload it to a chatbot and have it summarized. All this is fine with me.

One other great use for AI chatbots is to ask them for instructions for quotidian technical matters in your personal life, like disabling the child lock on your new microwave oven, charging your new bike’s electronic shifting, or restoring your playlist after updating your smartphone’s MP3 app. Sure, these are things you could look up on YouTube, but often that search can be tricky, and the videos can be agonizingly slow. The following video tutorial, which is crisp and concise and beautifully shot, is perhaps the exception that proves the rule:

I guess one benefit with YouTube is it’s less likely to hallucinate. I asked ChatGPT if my bike’s brake/shift levers have button cell batteries, and it explained in great detail how there are actually wires running from the battery pack to each lever, so they get recharged along with the derailleurs. The chatbot even drew me a nice diagram to illustrate this. Alas, it was hallucinating: the levers totally do have button cell batteries that need to be periodically replaced.  But all this being said, it’s easy enough to sanity check this kind of output, and I usually get a good answer from AI when I can’t locate a product owner’s manual or don’t feel like leafing through the 50-page one that I have, trying to get past the 14 foreign language versions.

What NOT to do with AI

I think where people get into trouble with AI is when they try to get it to do their work for them, particularly writing documents or correspondence that they then pass off as their own. In some cases this is an ethical or even legal matter; as I described here, the New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright violation, and I have firsthand evidence of ChatGPT essentially plagiarizing this blog. But I doubt you overmuch care about that. There are two bigger issues, I think:

• What this “creation mode” usage does to the quality of “your” writing
• What it does to the quality of your thinking

There’s this notion that you can ask a chatbot to write something for you, anything from an email to an invitation to a work report, and then you can just polish it up a bit, and you’re done. No more writer’s block! No more outlines, or worrying how to organize your thoughts! That might be okay for a very basic report, like what I described comparing features of tech hardware. But when you start from scratch with your own document, you’re not just leveraging AI’s impersonal, sprawling training data; you’re using your own—everything you’ve experienced, heard, read, and dreamt of. It’s your own personal muse, not the generic Internet one.

Honestly, for anything loftier than a rote technical document—that is to say, anything designed to edify, persuade, or entertain—haven’t you seen for yourself how AI can fail? Like, you’ll get this chipper invitation to a family reunion and it’s using corny phrases like “drum roll please” and joking about your family’s dance moves, and it just seems generic and clichéd? That’s all AI can do. It doesn’t know you or your family or friends well enough to say anything truly clever, and all the polish you want to give its rough draft won’t help. Your invitation will never have real style, along the lines of, “L— gets dibs on the guest room (which she may still anachronistically refer to as “her” “bedroom”) and its magnificent new king-sized guest bed. If you’re nice she might invite you to a slumber party there. Other guests can fight over the legendary Futon of Sand down in the home office. Beyond that, we have two large sofas for those interested in the college-esque party-‘til-dawn experience. We would not be offended if one or more parties were to seek a motel/hotel/AirBNB/VRBO, especially given the relatively small number of bathrooms here (i.e., one). Regarding rumors that the men are encouraged to pee in the backyard, this is true, but please stick to the planting beds and the fountain.” See how much better that is?

Now, you might be thinking, “Wait, I’m not a blogger and I wasn’t an English major. Cranking out an email or an essay may be easy enough for Dana, but I just want to get this task done and checked off.” But stop and think for a moment: what would you like to be good at, in life? Please tell me the answer isn’t just “typing good prompts into AI.” Wouldn’t you like to be articulate, interesting, and capable of thinking on your feet? Because what are you going to do at a cocktail party, or a job interview, or a non-virtual work meeting, when you don’t have a chatbot to help you, and that’s the habit you’ve let yourself fall into? The reality is, we get good at thinking by struggling to do it, for ourselves, the old fashioned way.

So let’s not undervalue written communication by outsourcing it to AI. The best case scenario is that it’ll do an inferior job, replacing what could have been original thought with a pile of trusty clichés and/or stealthily plagiarized, slyly anonymized content. The worst case scenario is that it’ll actually get good enough that you never have to write for yourself again, and your brain can atrophy to the point that you’re not even a thinker anymore … just a chatbot operator.

Because you don’t care

Gosh, I guess I drifted into high-and-mighty, pompous, full-on pontification there, and I feel pretty sheepish about it! Fortunately, I’m realistic enough to sense you snickering, and I know you’re going to turn right around and keep on using AI for whatever you can possibly think of. That being the case, check back next week because I’m going to catch you up on the latest AI technologies and how much they’ve improved since my last check-in. Whether your chatbot of choice is ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot, I’ll have you covered. Until then, I’ll be getting back to what I really enjoy in life: kerning glyphs.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - So We Missed the Eclipse

Introduction

I initially drafted this post back when my older daughter, A—, was home for Thanksgiving the year she moved away for college (but before COVID-19 brought her temporarily home again). I took advantage of her being around to query her on something close to my heart: what I should blog about next. (For me, coming up with a topic is, hands-down, the hardest part of being a blogger.) So long as she responded, this would be a can’t-lose situation: I might get a useable topic, and either way we’d have a meaty conversation.

In this case, I got both! Her topic? How our family missed out on doing anything fun around the total solar eclipse back in August of 2017. “I have a lot to say on that,” my daughter declared. So I grabbed my laptop to take notes, and we had a nice dialogue, which became a blog post. But for some reason, I never posted it. Now, with another eclipse have recently transpired, I’ve decided to remedy that.

Why would you read this? Maybe you are a father, or are going to be. Maybe you’re a daughter or son, or used to be. Or, maybe you care about astronomy, eclipses, or just science in general. Or perhaps you just hope I can make you laugh. As always, I’ll do my best.

By the way, this is the one photo I snapped from last Monday’s eclipse:

So we missed the eclipse – Nov 13, 2019

We didn’t entirely miss the eclipse but we sure didn’t get the most out of it. As I described in these pages at the time, I was totally disorganized and hadn’t thought up any great way to see it. My wife and I were vaguely aware that people were traveling to rural Oregon to experience the full effect, but we weren’t too keen on braving any crowds.

(By the way, here is the photo that pops up when you do a Google Maps search on Culver City. The 2017 eclipse has evidently put the place on the map.)

After the eclipse was over, that evening, my wife and I noticed that A— seemed glum. We tried to draw her out, to figure out the problem. College prep worries? A falling out with a friend? Finally I said, half-jokingly, “Is it the eclipse?” My daughter almost smiled. “It is, actually,” she said, a bit sheepishly. She was touring the Internet reading about the eclipse and came across Randall Munroe’s xkcd cartoon about it. If you hover your mouse over the cartoon you get an extra caption: “It was—without exaggeration—the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.” Munroe is to my daughter what Justin Bieber is to most teenage girls, so this was a profound statement. It was dawning on my daughter just how much she’d missed out on by having a deadbeat, incurious, non-science-y dad. Little did I realize my daughter would bring this up, two years later, in one of our first real conversations since she went off to college.

DA. Okay, so yeah… we missed the eclipse. We could have traveled to see it but we didn’t. In my defense, you had not indicated any particular interest.

AA. I just thought that was one of those things you’d figure out. My friends’ parents booked hotels in advance and I expected you had a plan. I figured that as the offspring of a rocket scientist you would be interested in it the same way I was. You’d seen stuff like that as a kid … your dad had done so much when the eclipse came through your town.

[My late father was literally a rocket scientist.]

DA. At what point did it dawn on you I wasn’t stepping up?

AA. Well, when my friends were talking about their plans I started to realize we probably weren’t doing anything. But I wasn’t too disappointed because I thought it would probably be one of those lame things like “Oh, your shadow’s a different color,” where you have to try to feel impressed by it. Or maybe I was being all skeptical just so I would be disappointed.

DA. So it never occurred to you to speak up and let me know you had interest.

AA. I think I mentioned it in passing. But I wanted to seem chill, like I didn’t really care, you know. It wouldn’t be very “cool teen” of me to say, “Hey, we should build a vacation around this!”

DA: But you’re bringing it up now, so clearly you’re a little bitter.

AA: Yes, I’m bitter.

DA: So does this reflect on my parenting?

AA: More than anything else you’ve ever done in your life. This is what will come out on the therapist’s couch in twenty years. It’s what led me down the road to academic ruin.

(This “academic ruin” comment is my daughter having a bit of fun. Decades ago, my brothers and I were in our dad’s car, along with his second wife, and as we passed by Bear Creek Elementary School our dad said to her, “There’s the school that led my boys down the road to academic ruin.” This comment produced only awkward silence at the time, but ever since my brothers and I trot it out routinely, along with other famous Dad-isms like, “You’re not very bright, are you.” After our Thanksgiving dinner the other night, I took a walk with my wife and daughters, and as we passed by their old elementary school, I said to my wife, “There’s the school that led our kids down the road to academic”—here I paused for effect and to feel my daughters’ glare, and then continued—“glory.”)

DA: How much of this eclipse remorse is just envy of your friends, a FOMO thing?

AA: It’s one of those bucket list things, a cultural phenomenon, like this mass pilgrimage to the Pacific Northwest where everyone can all be there for the same reason … but we just sat at home, not doing that, just being lame.

DA: Are both your parents equally culpable?

AA: No, it’s more you, because this was more your area, with your rocket scientist dad and everything, so you should have seen this as a bonding opportunity.

DA: Did it occur to you that astronomy was not something that brought my dad and me together?

AA: Well, it was an interest he had that I thought you might share. Anyone can appreciate an eclipse whether or not you know much about it.

DA: So it never occurred to you that science in general, and astronomy in particular, was a sore spot where my dad was concerned…

AA: I didn’t know your dad ruined astronomy for you … I thought it was the other way around!

(Here I need to provide some more background. My wife, you see, is famous within our family for having “ruined astronomy.” Here is the whole story, as recounted in my 2017 eclipse post:

Back in like ‘97 we were vacationing at Canyonlands National Park and my dad joined us. We went to this very remote place, far away from any lights or people, and my dad set up his telescope. For the next 2 or 3 hours (or so it felt) he gave us an astronomy lesson. I’m not a great lover of this subject myself; the only constellations I can make out are the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt. To a simple guy like me, the constellations seem like such bullshit. It takes so much imagination for this or that collection of stars to resemble something, you might as well just make it up from scratch. “There’s the Devil’s Skateboard over there, you see, and if you follow that line of stars up—there, you see that cluster there? That’s Dracula’s Harelip.” So anyhow, my dad’s lesson was losing me entirely, I was suffering from museum knees, and then my wife heard a noise and turned on a flashlight to make a quick scan around us. “Thanks a lot,” my dad chided, “you just ruined astronomy.” (The flashlight beam had spoiled our night vision, you see.) I’ll never let my wife live this down. If she ever suffers a setback I say, “Well, you are the woman who ruined astronomy.”)

 AA: An eclipse isn’t like being lectured to … you could reclaim astronomy for yourself instead of associating it with boredom.

(At this point, my younger daughter L— happened to wander by.)

DA: L—, are you at all disappointed that we didn’t do anything to see the eclipse?

LA: What eclipse? I don’t remember. I don’t care about eclipses.

DA (to A— again): So here’s the thing. When I pointed out Orion’s belt to you, I mentioned that it’s my favorite constellation because it’s so simple and easy to see. So did you really take me for a guy who cared about astronomy? How science-y have you taken me to be, historically?

AA: I think you’re non-science-y as a deliberate act. You’re a smart guy and you’re good at math, so it’s almost like you’re trying not to care, like you want to act like it’s not a big deal because you have these negative associations…

DA: Associations based on …?

AA: On your dad, because he always lectured and made you feel lame, and small, and insignificant, and inferior.

DA: So you totally do get that he kind of ruined astronomy for me.

AA: Yes, but I thought this could be your chance to make it yours, to get it right, like a do-over. Like your entire family, Mom and L— are I, are your do-over. And this is why you’re so sorry to see me move away, because this family was your chance to have that positive father-child relationship, and now that’s coming to an end somewhat.

DA: But obviously I want you to go off to college.

AA: Yeah, but now your world is shrinking and something is coming to an end. Of course, our relationship is stronger [than what you had with your dad] which means you got it right.

DA: Do you think there’s anything pathological in my do-over thing?

AA: No, that’s totally natural, that’s the American dream, to give your kids better than what you had.

DA: Well, I certainly want to say that I didn’t become a father just to have a do-over. I wanted to have kids from so early on, I hadn’t yet realized there was anything wrong with my family. I still thought my dad was The Man.

AA: Well, yeah, that was a complex relationship, thinking your dad was The Man.

DA: But don’t all kids think their dad is The Man?

AA: Yes, but then you had to realize over time that this wasn’t a guy just to imitate like so many kids end up doing … that you had to figure out what was wrong with his parenting and not repeat that. I remember early on, when I was a little kid, how you told us that whenever you were trying to figure out how to be a good father you’d think of what your dad would do, and do the opposite.

DA: I’m a little surprised I would say that … I must have been sleep-deprived.

AA: Well, you wrote it in my journal.

(Yes, I had written something pretty scathing in her childhood journal but won’t print here. When I wrote it, on the occasion of my first Father’s Day as a father, I was definitely sleep-deprived and grumpy, but of course I could have revised it later and toned it down. But my judgment, though harsh, wasn’t wrong and I let it stand.)

DA: Well, in terms of doing the opposite of my dad, failing to get excited about the eclipse was at least consistent. My dad’s efforts around that Boulder eclipse were the rare example of him going above and beyond. There’s no way I could have come close to matching that. I don’t know how to rig up a telescope eclipse projector or make pieces of smoked glass to view the eclipse through. Of course I did have the resources to take you to where the eclipse was happening, but it didn’t occur to me you were interested. It just never came up. I didn’t even know that Uncle Bryan’s family was traveling to see it. We could have all gathered together for it … somehow we just never touched base on the whole thing. What a wasted opportunity.

AA. I thought it was one of those things where it’d be cool if it had been your idea.

DA: But you didn’t get really upset until you read what Randall Munroe said about it.

AA: Well, that was the icing on the cake, one more person saying this was an amazing experience.

DA: And a real authority too.

AA: Yes, a guy who has probably seen all kinds of cool science things but thought this was exceptional.

DA: You pointed out earlier that my dad’s lecturing made me feel small and insignificant … and I think it’s interesting that that’s exactly what looking at the stars is purported to do: to make us realize our insignificance.

AA: Yes, but in a way that doesn’t involve the ego. Stargazing is the broad and nihilistic way of feeling small, where there’s nothing we can do about it, nothing anybody can do. Knowing about rockets doesn’t matter, this is too vast. Ego is like people vs. people, whereas the heavens remind us we’re all small and insignificant, so there’s no point butting heads over it.

DA: I think that’s a passive way of appreciating nature’s grandeur, but I like an active way of fully experiencing nature’s power by butting up against it. I’m talking here about—

AA: Biking?

DA: Yes, about tackling a mountain on my bicycle to appreciate its sheer size and power, but without totally submitting. I’m putting myself against it, and though the mountain will be always be larger than me, I’m better for having flung myself at it.

AA: But there’s no way to actively fight the universe like that. Not even an astronaut can scratch the surface, and there’s nothing you can ever do in your life to take it on. An analogy I can make is that my friend is a math major at MIT so she knows a lot of math people, and most of them prefer applied math, because you can put it to use, so you’re, like, wielding it. But my friend prefers pure math, which is so heady most people will never understand the concepts or make any headway, so for her it’s like an art form, like beauty for its own sake, because the math has this unattainability. So she appreciates it in a different way, like we would appreciate music and other things that aren’t so concrete. Most people are more interested in things we can apply, because it makes us feel more powerful, more in control, more like “We’ve got this.”

DA: But you like tackling mountains.

AA: I like both realms. The attainable one is just easier. It’s easier to find the applications that give us that control. Chemistry is about what we can observe, what we can measure, experiments we can conduct, whereas astronomy can help us feel that awe, that cosmic awe. That’s the name of my band: Cosmic Awe.

DA: You’re in a band?

AA: My hypothetical band. Obviously.

DA: Had you shown this love of awe before the eclipse, and I just didn’t see it?

AA: Everybody appreciates that awe. I assumed you did too.

DA: It’s one thing to be awake to it, another entirely to plan a big road trip to go seek it. You know that I love the power of nature, apparently more than a lot of people around here who never take advantage of our regional parks, and cycling (especially mountain biking) is how I indulge that. That’s a lot easier than heading all the way to Oregon.

AA: But Oregon is more special, the rarity of this occurrence makes that worth the trip.

DA: Fair enough. So … the next full solar eclipse is in Austin, Texas in 2024. Let’s plan on it.

AA: Yes, let’s!

[Oops. That obviously didn’t happen. But at least my daughter, now a full adult living on her own, was complicit in not getting around to doing anything for it. At least we exchanged photos.  Maybe we’ll head up to Montana for the next one, in 2044! Check these pages in a couple decades for a full report.]

~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--
For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Impromptu Commencement Address

Introduction

I attended my daughter's college graduation the other day. It was an absolute mob scene ... thousands in the audience and, by my (very rough) count, at least a thousand students. One of the new grads gave a great commencement address. Imagine how nerve-racking it would be to face an audience that large. With that in mind, I daydreamed about the speech I would make if given only twenty minutes to prepare. Here’s that speech.

Impromptu commencement address

Greetings, Math, Life, & Physical Sciences class of 2023, and congratulations!

[Wait for raucous applause or the silent thud of this mundane opener having utterly failed.]

You are all outstanding students, or you wouldn’t be here today. Take a moment to look back on all you have accomplished here, as a student.

Now take a moment to stare, right in the face, a fact that has probably been nagging at you to a growing extent lately: your life role as a great student ends today. It ends here, on the Commencement Green. After today, you have to go do something completely different: try to become an adult. A functioning adult. A working adult.

(Quick aside to those of you going right into graduate school: sorry, but I have no advice for you. I gather grad school is much less fun than undergrad but maybe that’s just a rumor.)

Isn’t it perverse that when you totally had your act together as a student, to the point of actually completing a degree four years in the making, you have to now go tackle something else—i.e., getting a real job—that you don’t really know how to do?

I know, total buzz-kill, right? But with your degree in hand and all that learning under your belt, along with your youthful vitality, you are well poised for this opportunity whether you realize it or not. Consider me, up on this stage, called up just twenty minutes ago to give this speech, without so much as some hastily written notes on a torn-up piece of notebook paper. I could have turned this down, but then I’d lose an incredible opportunity to have an amazing story to tell later, about the time I got booed off the stage at a university commencement address, or, possibly, the time I managed not to get booed off the stage when giving an impromptu commencement address. I would never pass up such an opportunity. And when you are handed similarly outsized opportunities, for which you feel equally unsuited, you should also take them. You won’t do any worse than I’m doing, I’m sure.

It’s true that in your next phase of life, you will be hired by, and work with, a bunch of professionals with way more experience than you. But you have something they don’t: the boundless, perhaps panicked, energy of the fresh recruit. Many of the professionals are also faking it, in our ever-changing careers, because we’ve been intentionally job-hopping in hopes of greater opportunity, or have been buffeted around by the winds of fate, so just like you, we’re flopping around in jobs we’re not necessarily perfect for. And many of us are tiring out. My generation, for all its bluster, is more than ready to hand you the baton. If most of us are loathe to admit this, that’s just out of habit, and envy, and the inevitable rise of curmudgeonry. You’re going to do fine, and anyway most of us aren’t paying much attention anymore, and soon enough we’ll be gone.

My first thought as I mounted this stage today was, “Wow. Look at this crush of people. This is insane.” My own graduation ceremony, though at a larger university, seemed much smaller. I don’t remember parking problems, and none of the audience had to stand on the grass so far from the stage they couldn’t tell their kid from Adam. It’s tempting for me to believe what you’ve all been telling yourselves and your parents: that everything has gotten so much harder these days; that there’s so much more competition now; that back in your parents’ day they were practically giving away college degrees; jobs were much easier to find; and blah blah blah.

[Wait for applause or maybe mostly silence, or the generalized murmur of people who have tuned out completely and are chattering away amongst themselves, and/or one or more people yelling things like “Get off the stage!”]

Well, it’s all false. Unemployment in this country is at its lowest level since 1969. You will all get jobs, if you’re not lame. And don’t ever forget that the teeming masses going up against you include a lot of lame-os: the same kind of lame-os you beat out to gain admission to this great university. And also a lot of lame-os from even more prestigious universities. I have interviewed many dozens of lame-os over the years and been incredulous at how hard it is to find a good candidate to hire. Then when somebody like you comes along I’m like, Aaaaaaah, thank goodness, a great candidate. So just don’t be lame, and you can write your own ticket.

It’s been over thirty years since I was in your shoes, sweating in my weird, unbreathable polyester cap and gown, waiting for my big moment to walk the stage. The commencement address was given by a bestselling author who, since she was addressing English majors, gave us permission to be fired from our first corporate job. Of course I’d been told for years by all kinds of people that as a liberal arts grad I would never get a job, and now it was time to go prove the naysayers wrong, or prove them right. But I found that speech very liberating. [Pause for possible chuckle.] When I set out to get a job, I was entering the famous economic recession of the early 1990s. I should have been shitting bricks. I’d done nothing, outside of school, to prepare for the workforce: no internships, no rubbing elbows with anyone influential, no summer programs, and with a degree everyone assured me was worthless. But nobody told me about the recession, and I was in the habit of ignoring liberal arts deniers, so I immediately got hired. And so will you.

By the way, your job may not have much to do with your degree. I read a New York Times article recently saying that fewer than 20 percent of life sciences and physical sciences grads end up working in their field. But that’s fine. With your great education you’ll find a cool job in an exciting realm. The field that I have worked in for over 25 years now did not yet exist when I was a senior in college.

How about this statement I’ve been hearing lately and seeing in the news and on t-shirts: “The future is female”? Another myth? Actually, as far as I can tell, this one is true. Look around you at your fellow grads. A majority are young women, it appears … looks to me like about three quarters female. The official enrollment stat I heard was 60% female … did a bunch of your brethren drop out? Or did they skip this ceremony? Whatever the case, we hear it a lot: males in America are becoming an anachronism.

So to the young women among you, congratulations. Your generation is finally challenging a tradition of self-entitled deadwood, at least in this great country. And to the young men out there, don’t feel too bad. Men have had a good run, probably better than they deserve. Be glad you’re part of a society where women are no longer kept down. And to be clear, nobody is keeping men down in this country … we have simply squandered our early, historical lead. The surge of women in universities and high-flying careers is what fairness looks like. There’s still more work to be done, like eliminating the wage gap, but this is real progress.

To the parents in the audience: a solid majority of you are evidently here to celebrate your daughters. Congratulations to you and to them. I speak from proud personal experience when I say daughters rock. And if you have a son walking the stage today, well done … you managed to help him avoid a video gaming addiction, or soul-destroying cynicism, or whatever other problems are keeping so many dudes from getting college degrees. You can also be glad for exceptionally high odds that your son will marry well. Today’s potential brides are educated, empowered, and selective, and your degree-holding son will have the chops to compete. And who knows, maybe he’ll be lucky enough to sire daughters one day.

But to all in the audience: please don’t run out and get a t-shirt that says “The future is female.” First of all, it’s in poor taste to rub it in. Meanwhile, the statement is kind of absurd. Just because woman have been held back in the past doesn’t mean they weren’t relevant all along. The human race would have gone extinct immediately without women. Meanwhile, we’ll obviously always need men, too. For one thing, somebody needs to fetch stuff from high shelves and clean out the cat box.

But enough on that subject. I have a greater topic to address. To all the students assembled here, I want to take a moment to remind you of something huge: you are the future.

[Pause to let that sink in, and/or for loud whooping and applause, or whatever else you get.]

Thank you to all those who bit their tongues and didn’t boo me off the stage for that hackneyed and fundamentally untrue platitude. Actually, you are not the future. The future does not exist, yet, and you will not actually be defining it as you go along. There are seven billion people here and your individual effect on the planet will most likely be a rounding error at best. Meanwhile, the planet will continue on unperturbed long after our species has gone extinct. Don’t focus on changing the world; just be honest and kind and earnest, and work hard to do right by your family and friends. And don’t ever forget to be grateful. As a university graduate in America you’ve already been dealt one of the best hands imaginable in life, so don’t be greedy or petty. Enjoy your successes but don’t obsess over them. Be proud of your achievement but don’t forget that the random luck of your life circumstance, and/or the striving and sacrifice of your parents, brought you most of the way here.

I have one more topic to address: there seems to be a tremendous amount of generalized anxiety swirling around these days. This is despite the world having steadily improved over the decades, with countless people transcending poverty in a largely unabated upward trend. Some of this modern anxiety is existential; some biochemical; some geopolitical; I’m no expert on all the causes. But as you prepare to enter the workforce, many of you may be worried about GPT-3, its ChatGPT utility, and other forms of artificial intelligence that promise to replace humans in an ever-increasing range of jobs. Well, I’ve messed about with modern AI a fair bit and am absolutely convinced it’s overrated. Some day perhaps we’ll laugh at today’s state of the art in AI, much as we laugh at 1950s artist’s renditions of what the 1990s would look like, with flying cars and robots everywhere. To prove my point, I asked ChatGPT to write a commencement address for me right before coming up here. If you think my speech has been insufferable, let me read you a (mercifully brief) excerpt from ChatGPT’s half-assed, vapid output:

As you leave the hallowed halls of this institution, know that you carry with you the hopes and dreams of generations past, present, and future. You are the torchbearers of progress, the champions of discovery, and the guardians of knowledge. Your calling is noble, your potential boundless.

Okay, now you can boo me off the stage. In fact, I want you to. I beg you too.

[Bow dramatically and wait for enthusiastic booing and/or applause and/or a smattering of polite clapping and/or or the generalized murmur of people who have tuned out completely and are chattering away amongst themselves.]

Further reading

Middle School “Graduation” Speech - From a Dad

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

A.I. Smackdown — English Major vs. ChatGPT - Part 2

Introduction

In my last post, I considered the writing prowess of ChatGPT, the A.I. text generation platform powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3 engine. A professor quoted in Vice magazine said GPT-3 could get a B or B- on an MBA final exam, which I figured had to be an exaggeration. So, I put ChatGPT through its paces, having it write paragraphs in the style of a scholastic essay, a magazine article, and a blog post. In this essay, I’ll tackle a final writing category: poetry. At least when it comes to very logical matters such as rhyme and meter, A.I. ought to do really well … right? Well, let’s see how it does. (Hint: very poorly. And, I suppose I owe you a trigger warning: ChatGPT seems to think violence to one’s genitals is funny.)

But before I get to all that, I will address a pressing question: who cares about any of this? And why should we? I’ll also address a few follow-up questions from the friend who prompted my last post.

Who cares? And why should we?

In response to my previous post, my software maven friend suggested that A.I. could be used effectively for composition if the user (i.e., the person who’s tasked ChatGPT with responding to a query) has enough expertise to evaluate the response and wisely choose what to use from it, and what to discard. In this way, my friend suggests, “this version [of ChatGPT] could make someone who knows what they’re doing more productive.” He continued, “I wonder if for your next blog you might consider how you might use it? Would you be willing to use it as a first draft in responding to a low performing colleague who asks trivial questions?”

I have two responses to this: a practical one and an ideological one. On the practical side, I can’t imagine starting a work email, proposal, or report with ChatGPT because in my experience so far, most of what the A.I. does is apply window dressing and rhetorical flourishes to the ideas I feed it, along with vague assertions that aren’t backed up (e.g., “[Dura-Ace’s] sleek and understated style has been well-received by riders and industry experts alike”). ChatGPT builds repetitive, junior-high-grade essays that fill out the page but don’t add much value to the original prompt. If I were to obtain my rough drafts from ChatGPT, I would have to prune most of the text to end up with something reasonably concise. It would be faster just to write my own missive from scratch.

I realize this may not be true for everyone, and I’ll grant that I have developed, through decades of practice, uncommon facility with writing (having composed over 1.5 million words for albertnet alone). Nevertheless, the ability to quickly draft a work email or brief report is, I believe, a capability that any adult ought to have, just like being able to fry an egg, drive a car, or brew a good cup of coffee. To my mind, increased efficiency should be a matter of personal development, not outsourcing.

The ideological matter is more complicated. If we decide that producing a work document is the kind of hassle that should be dispatched with as little time and energy as possible, like submitting an expense report or making travel arrangements, we are diminishing the assumed value of that activity. As we prepare the next generation for the workforce, this sense of diminishment would trickle down to our schools. We would be sending students a message that writing is a job for A.I. and that the higher-value human thought lies elsewhere.

Having majored in English in college, I naturally bristle at this idea. I believe that reading and writing, more than so perhaps any other endeavor, teach us how to think. I’ve blogged before (e.g., here) about how strongly I disagree with American society’s obsession with STEM, as opposed to the traditional liberal arts that are all but dismissed in modern education. To those who promote STEM, I’d like to ask, what would you think about discontinuing most math classes in school, since we have calculators and spreadsheets to do that crap for us? Of course you wouldn’t support this, and neither do I. (I took a Calculus class in college just for the hell of it.) Studying math is good for your brain, even though most of the specific math skills you learn will never be used. Studying the craft of writing is also good for your brain, and using words well is a skill we can use every day of our professional and personal lives. Writing is hard, and takes time, sure. But when we strive to write well, we understand better, and we think more deeply.

Here is an interesting quotation from the American philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, quoted in the New Yorker, describing his misgivings about the Enlightenment:

It becomes impossible to settle moral questions or to enforce moral rules; the best we can do is agree to disagree. Such a world falls into the hands of managers and technocrats, who excel at the perfection of means but lack the tools with which to think deeply about ends.

I don’t have strong opinions about the Enlightenment, and MacIntyre was writing in the ‘80s, but I think that last sentence fits modern tech companies, particularly in the realm of A.I. development, rather well. What we see in tech is a lot of people asking “how.” How do we monetize Internet traffic, how do we create algorithms that increase this traffic, how do we increase platform dwell time, how do we make people forward more stuff, how do we make social media products more addictive. I don’t see a lot of people asking “why” or, crucially, “why not.” If we outsource writing to A.I., how will people learn to think more deeply and broadly, a capacity we may need now more than ever?

Okay, on to my main topic now. As you shall see, ChatGPT’s attempts at poetry show, in a particularly stark way, just how totally overrated this platform is today.

Shakespearean sonnet

When poetry is good, it can be transporting (think Shakespeare, Dickinson, and Eminem). But when it’s bad, it can be appalling (think Vogon poetry, the feared method of torture described in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy). Obviously this is largely a subjective matter, so in my analysis I’ll look mainly at what can be objectively measured: proper execution of meter and rhyme. This is highly logical stuff, almost mathematical, so it ought to be right up A.I.’s alley. I started with a classic form: the Shakespearean sonnet.

Now, in case you’re not familiar with that poetic form, A.I. is here to help. At least, it’s supposed to be. I asked ChatGPT, “What is a Shakespearean sonnet?” It replied:

A Shakespearean sonnet … consists of 14 lines and follows a specific rhyme scheme and meter... The structure of a Shakespearean sonnet is as follows:

• Three quatrains (four-line stanzas) with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF
• A final couplet (two-line stanza) with a rhyme scheme of GG
• Iambic pentameter meter, which means each line has ten syllables with a pattern of unstressed and stressed syllables

This description is pretty good (after I truncated it), though ChatGPT doesn’t get any special points for providing this, since any Google search could lead to you such an explanation, or a far better one such as this. What was missing from ChatGPT’s definition is a more specific explanation of which syllables are stressed vs. unstressed. (Get this backwards and you’ve got trochaic pentameter, which is totally different.)

So next I asked ChatGPT, “Please explain to me how to write a poem in iambic pentameter.” It came back with this:

[Misc. prelude omitted here for brevity.] An iambic foot is a set of two syllables where the first syllable is unstressed, and the second syllable is stressed. Here's an example of a line in iambic pentameter:

“To be or not to be, that is the question.”

[Misc. pointless repetition omitted.] Count the syllables in each line. Each line should have exactly ten syllables. Vary the stress pattern slightly to avoid a monotonous rhythm. [More BS omitted.]

Here, ChatGPT presents probably the most famous line from Shakespeare, rather than a really appropriate one. The line above is a poor example because if you count the syllables, you’ll see there are actually eleven, not the “exactly ten” ChatGPT correctly said there should be. In that line, Shakespeare broke the rules on purpose, to cause the reader and/or theater audience to stumble. This was to draw attention to the word “question,” which in the context of existence is the whole point of the soliloquy. Great writing, but not a great example if you’re really trying to understand iambic pentameter. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” would be a far better choice.

Okay, sure, that’s a bit nitpicky, but the instruction to “vary the stress pattern slightly to avoid a monotonous rhythm” is completely wrong. If you vary the stress pattern, it’s no longer iambic pentameter! And the notion of monotonous rhythm? Total bullshit! Consider Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, here. It is absolutely flawless iambic pentameter—not a single syllable out of place—and it’s brilliant throughout, not monotonous whatsoever.

Now, you might wonder what ChatGPT meant about “ABAB” (etc.) rhyme scheme, so I asked it, “What is an ABAB rhyme scheme?” It replied:

An ABAB rhyme scheme is a specific pattern of rhyming words in a poem or song. It indicates that the last word in the first line of the poem or stanza rhymes with the last word in the third line, while the last word in the second line rhymes with the last word in the fourth line, and so on. In this rhyme scheme, the letters “A” and “B” represent different rhyming sounds. For example, in the following stanza:

I walked along the beach in the bright sun,
And listened to the waves as they did run.
The sand was warm and soft beneath my feet,
And seagulls flew overhead in the heat.

The words “sun” and “run” rhyme, so they are represented by the letter “A”, while the words “feet” and “heat” rhyme, so they are represented by the letter “B”. This pattern continues throughout the poem or stanza, creating a consistent and pleasing rhyme scheme.

Did you catch that? How full of crap ChatGPT was just there? If not, let me make it a little clearer: let’s take those A and B labels and apply them to the four lines: you’d have A for “sun,” and A for “run,” and B for “feet,” and B for “heat.” It’s AABB. It’s not ABAB. It doesn’t match the first paragraph of ChatGPT’s response. And it’s not the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet. (It’s not even the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet, which is ABBA. It’s just a rhyme scheme ChatGPT kind of made up, which it uses for every poem I’ve seen it write.)

We have established that ChatGPT totally blew it at describing a Shakespearean sonnet. So how does it do when actually writing one? I told it, “Write a quatrain in iambic pentameter, with an ABAB rhyme scheme, followed by a rhyming couplet, also in iambic pentameter, about post-urinal drip. Try to make it funny.” Here’s its response.

Inevitable, yet always a surprise,
Post-urinal drip can make one despise
The feeling of wetness that lingers on,
A sensation that’s not easily gone.
It’s a cruel trick of the human form,
To leave us damp after we perform.
But fear not, my friends, for there’s a way out,
Just shake it off and give it a good clout!

Oh. My. God. Is this the same priggish ChatGPT that, as mentioned in my last post, balked at writing humorously about how bad a laxative drink tastes, claiming “I cannot provide humorous anecdotes about sensitive medical procedures” and “I do not generate inappropriate or insensitive content”? It’s talking about violence to one’s genitals! I had to look up “clout” just to make sure there isn’t some alternate meaning that wouldn’t be this awful. A.I. is advocating, albeit jocularly, giving one’s penis “a heavy blow with the hand or a hard object.” WTF?! That’s not funny at all!

Meanwhile, ChatGPT simply didn’t follow my instructions. I asked for a quatrain followed by a couplet. That’s six lines total; it gave me eight (i.e., two quatrains). The rhyme scheme is also not what I asked for. As for iambic pentameter, this poem is a train wreck. Certain brief phrases (e.g., “To leave us damp,” “Just shake it off”) are iambic, but not a single line of the poem achieves this meter consistently. The very first word, “inevitable,” is fundamentally incompatible with iambic pentameter. Chat GPT just wrote whatever the hell it felt like in a very loosey-goosey meter of its own design. If you’re not getting my point, read the above poem aloud and see how hung up you get. Then compare it to this example of an actual iambic pentameter quatrain and couplet, penned by a human:

Relax, because you’ve earned your potty break;
Unburden your poor bladder of its pee.
And when you’re done you’ll shake and shake and shake;
An effort all in vain, it seems to me.
     For urine flow can never really stop,
     Until your undies drink the final drop.

Note that this second example doesn’t resort to crude ideas like clouting your penis. And note how naturally the poem gallops along because it truly follows the meter. Also notice that it doesn’t have vague throwaway notions like “A sensation that’s not easily gone.” Then consider that I wrote those lines (full poem is here) when I was only seventeen. I guess someone accustomed to the crap poems printed on Hallmark cards might be impressed at ChatGPT’s effort, but I’m not. It’s almost cynical how casually it breaks all the rules, including that of decency.

Dactylic trimeter

A.I. learns through being fed “training data” from the Internet. In case its struggle with the sonnet was based on bad information, the Shakespearean form being a very popular one, I decided to give it another shot, with dactylic trimeter, a much rarer form I have come to enjoy. I asked ChatGPT, “Please explain how to write in dactylic trimeter.” It responded:

Dactylic trimeter … consists of three dactyls, or three stressed syllables, followed by an unstressed syllable, in each line… Count the syllables in each line. Each line should have exactly three dactyls, or three stressed syllables, followed by an unstressed syllable. This means the line should contain a total of seven syllables. 

The description above is completely wrong. A dactyl is not a stressed syllable. It is a three-syllable foot in which the first syllable is stressed and the second two are not. A line of dactylic trimeter has three feet, with three syllables per foot, for nine syllables total, not seven. And even if a line did have three stressed syllables followed by an unstressed syllable, that would be four, not seven. Is ChatGPT just stupid? If I have to start reading work emails written by ChatGPT, I think I’ll just blow my brains out.

Okay, let’s see how A.I. did at actually composing this type of poem. I told it, “Please write a 10-line poem in dactylic trimeter about bike riding up two very difficult climbs, called El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas, celebrating caprice and radical freedom.” It produced this:

Pedaling up Toyonal, heart pumping fast
My mind is clear, free from the world’s contrast
With caprice and freedom, I take each turn
Pushing through pain, for what I will earn
Onward I climb, up Lomas Cantadas
My legs scream out, but my spirit never fades
The wind in my hair, the world fades away
A moment of peace, that I long to stay
And at last I reach the summit high
A sense of triumph, that no words can deny

You can see right away what an awful poem this is. It’s what Thomas Kincade would produce if he were a writer instead of an “artist.” I mean, “free from the word’s contrast”—what does that even mean? And “the wind in my hair”—seriously? What is this, a Harlequin romance novel? Lomas is a 10% grade, and I’m wearing a helmet! But what particularly stands out is that again, ChatGPT didn’t follow my prompt whatsoever. In the entire poem, only two of the feet are proper dactylic trimeter (“pushing through” and the first three syllables of “Lomas Cantadas”), which is surely just luck. As it did with the sonnet, ChatGPT just wrote whatever the hell it felt like. So why does everybody praise ChatGPT so much? It sucks! (For a proper poem on this topic, with actual dactylic trimeter, click here.)

One more thing

Okay, I can almost hear you now: “Oh, this particular chatbot is just using GPT-3! The technology getting better all the time! All the glitches you’ve found will soon be fixed! The next version’s gonna be amazing!”

Well, maybe GPT-4 (etc.) will get better at poetic meter, and maybe it’ll learn how to be more concise. But I could also imagine its errors getting propagated further. Remember, GTP-3 learned mostly from training on massive amounts of human output from across the Internet, and (as I learned from my software maven friend) has over 100 billion parameters allowing it in some sense to memorize an enormous portion of its training set. Over time, as more people outsource their writing to A.I., its errors could be added to the pile of training data, and thus reinforced. Meanwhile, the content may stray ever further from that created by humans. The growing body of text on the Internet may come to have less and less to do with us—that is, with creators who have a soul, and a conscience. It’s tempting to hope that somehow the works of great writers will one day be scored higher somehow, to help the A.I., but why would we expect this when politicians, the media, and academia are kicking liberal arts to the curb? Meanwhile, most social media platforms today seem to prize forwards and re-posts as the most valuable Internet currency, so if any scoring were to be applied to A.I.’s learning, it’s probably more likely to be whatever gets a rise out of people—i.e., trolling and other bombastic vitriol.

As ChatGPT and its ilk gain ever more traction, what passes for writing could become, to borrow a phrase from Nabokov, the “copulation of clichés.” (He was talking about pornography, but the metaphor holds here, too.) As the data set A.I. uses becomes more and more generic, while the tool gets used by more and more people seeking to avoid engagement with the craft of writing, most real insight and individuality might gradually vanish from written correspondence. O brave new world!

Other albertnet posts on A.I. 

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 2
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Stop Pushing STEM!

Introduction

From time to time in these pages, I’ve scoffed at the idea that American students need to focus more on STEM. It’s time I tackled this topic head-on.

The rhetoric

Perhaps I don’t even need to establish that there’s a huge push in this country for more students to pursue STEM. I hear it constantly: from my neighbors, from politicians, from fellow parents, from my employer, and from the mass media. But just to substantiate the prevalence of this idea, here are some glib quotes from our nation’s leaders:

• “One of the things that I’ve been focused on as President is how we create an all-hands-on-deck approach to science, technology, engineering, and math… We need to make this a priority.” –President Barack Obama
• “This bipartisan [Building Blocks of STEM] legislation will help ensure that our children are prepared with the education necessary to succeed in a 21st-century economy.” –Senator Jacky Rosen
• “There will be more incentives to electrical engineers than French literature majors. There just will … All the people in the world that want to study French literature can do so, they are just not going to be subsidized by the taxpayer.” –Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin
• “In order to be competitive internationally, we must focus on creating successful schools with an emphasis on science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” –Senator Mark Kirk
• “Our [higher education system] is outdated [and] doesn’t teach 21st century skills … The market for Greek philosophers is tight.” –Senator Marco Rubio
• “If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education, then I’m going to take that money to create jobs … Is it a vital interest of the state to have more anthropologists? I don’t think so.” –Florida Governor Rick Scott

Do these politicos speak from personal experience? Of course not. Obama majored in Political Science with a specialty in International Relations and English Literature. Senator Rosen got her degree in Psychology. Senator Rubio studied Political Science. Governor Scott studied Business. Senator Kirk studied History. Governor Bevin majored in East Asian Studies. What a bunch of hypocrites! Do they think they’re special—that they alone can be gainfully employed with a liberal arts degree, while our kids will be doomed if they aren’t suckled on the breast of high tech? Or do these politicians think the job market has fundamentally and permanently changed?

The flaw in this STEM-or-else idea is that it simply isn’t substantiated historically. For most of its history, America has seen most of its people gainfully employed, and only a minority have worked in tech. According to this analysis by the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1996 just under 10% of US employment was in high-tech industries. Twenty years later, in 2016, the percentage of tech jobs was—guess what?—still about 10%. The BLS’s projection for the tech sector’s percentage of jobs in 2026? Wait for it … about 10%. Sure, there are spectacular instances of people making a killing in this realm, but that’s not the same thing as a new status quo. Meanwhile, plenty of people work in tech who don’t have STEM degrees. (More on this later.)

So where are these politicians getting their information? Probably from one another. Or maybe it’s their perception of what the voters are thinking, and they’re simply pandering. Who knows. The only thing that’s obvious to me is a serious lack of skepticism about STEM’s applicability to the majority of our students.

The earnings myth

A prevalent idea in my community is that unless our kids study STEM and get the kickass tech jobs, they won’t be able to afford to live here. True, real estate is famously expensive in the Bay Area, but I object to this chicken-little thinking. For one thing, my neighbors aren’t all (or even mostly) STEM types themselves, yet they do manage to afford their mortgages. And when it comes to their kids, they seem to automatically accept the widespread belief that STEM fields actually assure higher earnings. In fact they don’t.

I’m basing this bold statement on real data you can see for yourself here. This website enables you to see earnings over time across a huge spectrum of college majors. You don’t just see the median income, but how the income range varies according to how well the worker is doing in his or her field.

At first glance, the graphs generated by this website do support the idea that STEM fields pay better. Here’s how all the majors play out over time:

Zoom in. You’ll see that Chemical Engineering clearly pays better than any of the other majors; the lack of a college degree brings up the rear in earnings; and the lowest-earning college degree (the grey line) is Theology. When we use the handy-dandy filtering feature to look at just two majors, we see an apparently similar story:

I picked Computer Science because it seems to be the darling of STEM proponents, and I chose English because it’s what I studied in college. It’s plain to see that on average, the middle-of-the-road (50th percentile) Comp Sci grad does earn more: $3.3 million over his or her career, vs. the roughly $2.5 million an English grad would earn. But this comparison assumes that all humans are equally good at everything, which is patently false. Ask yourself: are you equally good at analyzing literature and programming a computer? Is your appreciation of fine art equal to your math ability? It seems obvious that when choosing a major, a person should factor in his or her interests and capabilities.

That’s where the graphs get very interesting. Let’s say you’re a bookish type and consider yourself smarter than the average bear at appreciating a work of literature. And let’s say you struggle just a bit with math. Should you still pursue STEM? Well, let’s ask the question this way: how much better would you have to be at English to break even on this presumably less lucrative choice of major?

The answer would probably surprise the STEMsters. An English lit major at the 70th percentile will make, on average, $3.1 million over his or her career, which is more than the slightly-below-par Computer Science major; at the 40th percentile, the Comp Sci major makes only $3 million. In other words, if liberal arts are your thing, sticking with them will make you more money than working your ass off trying to fake it in STEM.

Consider now that for the example above, I cherry-picked one of the most lucrative STEM majors. Consider the spread when we compare English to Chemistry:

In this case, you only have to be slightly better than average—55th percentile—in English to make more money than a somewhat substandard—40th percentile—Chem major. (The former would make $2.61 million over his or her career; the latter, $2.58 million.) Comparing English to Biology, the gap is even smaller: you’d only have to be at 55th percentile for English to make more than a 50th-percentile Bio major. To reiterate: the STEM fields are only more lucrative to those who are particularly suited to them.

(I was turned on to this website by this slide deck, put together by the UC Santa Barbara Associate Vice Chancellor, who is also a math professor, to promote liberal arts. This same data set is cited by The New York Times in this article, which declares it a myth that “for the big money, STEM always delivers.”)

Job security

Now, the STEM-pushers might naturally reply, “Great, fine, those who manage to find work in non-STEM fields do okay. But all the modern jobs are in tech! Do you want to work as a barista because your liberal arts degree didn’t equip you for the modern workforce?”

The short answer is what I already showed: tech doesn’t actually employ more of the workforce than it did twenty years ago, and that’s not expected to change. The long answer, meanwhile, looks even worse for STEM. When we compare the number of STEM jobs available to the number of students majoring in STEM subjects, we discover a frightening gap. To put it bluntly, the widespread promotion of STEM has already produced a glut of majors in those subjects. Check out this article in The New York Times, and particularly the graph at the top. It shows that there were 169,000 Engineering degrees (undergrad & graduate) awarded in 2015-2016, while that field only expects 51,000 job openings for 2014 through 2024. Life Sciences is even worse, with 183,000 degrees awarded and only  12,000 openings for those grads. Math isn’t much better, with 7,000 jobs forecast and 33,000 degrees awarded.

With this in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that studying STEM doesn’t guarantee getting a STEM-related job. Far from it, in fact. “Unemployment rates for STEM majors may be low,” the Times article states, “but not all of those with undergraduate degrees end up in their field of study — only 13 percent in life sciences and 17 percent in physical sciences, according to a 2013 National Science Foundation survey. Computer Science is the only STEM field where more than half of graduates are employed in their field.”

According to an expert quoted in the Times article, STEM advocates are “often executives and lobbyists for technology companies,” which makes sense. I can’t blame a tech company for wanting to have more graduates to choose from, and for wanting the best and brightest of our youth to be added to that pool. But this doesn’t mean America’s tech companies have room for all these people, and they certainly feel no responsibility to hire all of them. So who’s looking out for all the STEM grads whose résumés end up in the recycling?

The biggest myth

I hope I’ve helped you realize that a) studying STEM doesn’t necessarily lead to greater income, and 2) studying STEM doesn’t increase the likelihood of finding a job. But those are the easier cases to make. I have a more fundamental bone to pick: even if STEM were more lucrative and reliable, that doesn’t mean we should push it on our kids. To me, the greatest myth of all is an implicit one: that job security and income are the most important factors in a person’s happiness.

I won’t deny that job stability and wealth are great things to have. Frankly, I love money, and I’d be thrilled if I could relax a bit more about my own job security. But I naturally bristle at the pressure our kids are getting—from their peers, their parents, pundits, and the media—to pursue STEM regardless of their natural inclinations. The FUD being sowed here really bothers me, when you consider how hard it already is to be a teenager. I’m also irked by the idea that we parents know what’s best for our youth, when most of us—raised in the “Me Generation” of the ‘70s, with an abundance of laissez-faire parents—got to chart our own course, and most of us are doing just fine.

I think the external pressure put on our kids is inherently malignant. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to do as they please? Parents are saying, “Follow this path” instead of “Find your own path,” and I take this as a vote of no-confidence.

“Be realistic,” the STEMist might say. “All this follow-your-dream ideology just isn’t practical.” I beg to differ. How practical is it to add extra stress to a teenager’s life by saying “You’d better do X-Y-Z or you’ll never be able to afford to [live here] [buy a home] [have a family] [pay off your loans] [be financially secure]”? Consider how rampant mental health issues are across our society: according to this article, more than 44 million American adults (almost one in five) suffer from a mental health condition. That’s a hell of a lot higher than our nation’s rate of unemployment.

I read a fascinating but sobering book, The Price of Privilege: How Parental Pressure and Material Advantage Are Creating a Generation of Disconnected and Unhappy Kids by Madeline Levine, a child psychologist in nearby Marin County. She describes the often disastrous results of affluent parents pressuring their kids to achieve a certain standard of worldly success:

As long as kids are not afforded the opportunity to craft a sense of self that feels authentic, a sense of self that truly comes from within, psychologists like myself will continue to see more and more youngsters at risk for profound feelings of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and emptiness.

The authentic self

Let’s examine what a truly authentic STEM kid might look like. A generation ago, only oddball nerds dug computers. Consider my brother Bryan, for example. He naturally gravitated toward programming and in junior high spent countless hours in front of a teletype, which was a type of primitive computer that didn’t even have a monitor: it was connected to a printer and to a mainframe somewhere. Nobody knows what the hell he and his rare ilk were actually doing with these machines. Baseline Junior High had exactly two teletypes, and Bryan didn’t have to compete with very many others for access. (He did, however, have to talk his teachers into letting him cut typing class and study hall to get that precious computer time.) He was a dyed-in-the-wool computer geek, who loved the pure logic of programming, and that was that.

And now we have politicians, corporate spokespeople, the media, and parents saying everybody should be diving into technology, engineering, and such. Sure, everybody uses computers and smartphones now, but does that mean everyone should be designing, building, or programming them? Does the idea (however exaggerated) that all the good jobs are in STEM fields suddenly mean this is what actually ought to interest your typical kid? Is everybody a tech-geek now, just because society has decided we need more of them?

Allow me a playful analogy: what if the experts determined that, as far as pets go, dogs had a brighter future than cats? What if we decided that it just wasn’t practical, in the 21st century, to behave in a feline fashion? Would anybody try to teach a housecat to tolerate a leash, to ride in the car, to bark, and to wag its tail to show happiness? Of course this would be decried as nonsense: nobody could ask a cat to change its very nature. But how are humans any different?

And yet, there’s this widespread idea that everybody now ought to be immersed in this specialized world of bits and bytes, vectors and trajectories, atoms and angles. The profit motive seems to have warped everybody’s sensibility here. Let’s face it: kids throughout time have had plenty of math and science instruction in school … those subjects were never really neglected. What’s changed is this idea, suddenly, that what schools have been offering isn’t enough and we should all have our knickers in a twist about it, with new programs, new legislation, and budget cuts for the liberal arts.

My community’s progressive and well-run school district provides plenty of opportunities in STEM. A year or so ago, my older daughter even signed up for a high school Computer Science course, and I was all for it—because it was her idea. I even offered to help her mess around with our family’s Arduino programmable microcontroller when the time came. However, a couple weeks into the term my daughter decided that she just didn’t dig the class, and ultimately dropped it. (She was sad about this, since she really liked the teacher, but knew herself well enough to recognize a bad fit. Not that she’s anti-STEM; she’s in college now, majoring in Psychological & Brain Sciences.)

Looking at the wider realm of STEM—the non-T, non-E part—certainly the realms of science and math are capacious enough to accommodate a wide variety of interests. But the decline in Humanities majors deserves to be wondered about. How much of this can be chalked up to parental influence around what our kids pursue, and why?

My own story

I couldn’t blame you for assuming that my skepticism toward STEM is a case of sour grapes, or a defensive crouch based on my own (supposedly) humble liberal arts education. But in fact, I’ve worked in STEM for my whole career. (Though I didn’t set out to be an engineer, my dormant technical ability was discovered when I took a programming aptitude test during recruitment by an Internet company.) I was able to learn Internet routing, shell scripting, network troubleshooting, traffic shaping, access control, and network design on the job, but my career growth has been largely based on so-called “soft skills”—including the ability to communicate, write, negotiate, and imagine others’ points of view—which all came from my liberal education. As my work has evolved, what I learned in college has only become more important. I am truly grateful I didn’t “play it safe” by studying Computer Science, Engineering, or Math (like my dad, ahead of his time in Humanities-bashing, exhorted me to).

What employers really want

So your next question might be, isn’t my case kind of an anomaly? Not necessarily. Certain fields, like Chemical Engineering, do require specific credentials. But high tech seems to prioritize the ability to learn above having specific credentials, and employs a wide variety of people. As described in this article, featured in the UCSB Vice Chancellor’s pro-liberal-arts presentation, Google appreciates many capabilities typically associated with a liberal education:

In 2013, Google decided to test its hiring hypothesis by crunching every bit and byte of hiring, firing, and promotion data accumulated since the company’s incorporation in 1998. Project Oxygen shocked everyone by concluding that, among the eight most important qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise comes in dead last. The seven top characteristics of success at Google are all soft skills: being a good coach; communicating and listening well; possessing insights into others (including others’ different values and points of view); having empathy toward and being supportive of one’s colleagues; being a good critical thinker and problem solver; and being able to make connections across complex ideas.

This Forbes article, also cited by the UCSB Vice Chancellor, declares that “That ‘useless’ liberal arts education has become tech’s hottest ticket.” It goes on to say:

Software companies are discovering that liberal arts thinking makes them stronger… At disruptive juggernauts such as Facebook and Uber, the war for talent has moved to nontechnical jobs, particularly sales and marketing. The more that audacious coders dream of changing the world, the more they need to fill their companies with social alchemists who can connect with customers—and make progress seem pleasant.

Conclusion: what is to be done?

I hope that I’ve made a compelling case here that the widespread effort to push more kids into STEM is myopic at best. STEM doesn’t guarantee a higher income; doesn’t increase the likelihood of gainful employment; and, moreover, doesn’t support our kids and their need for a true sense of self. Ultimately, where a young person lands isn’t a simple plug-and-play matter of what degree he or she earned. I truly believe that when it comes to the next generation, all of us—the parents, the politicians, and the pundits—would do well to just shut up and stand aside. Let’s let our kids follow their own interests, trusting in themselves, in higher education, and in the vast and varied job market.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.