VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 10

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 10

Standing Firm, Keeping AI Out of the Door Where People Are Raised, and Why That Is How You Save AI

This section draws the whole first half of this chapter in toward one hardest rule of all, and then opens up, underneath that hard rule, the widest heart there is. From beginning to end, this whole chapter has been setting up one and the same line. There are some things that are the real person's position, and AI the tool cannot enter them. The one most precious thing at the heart of a craft, AI cannot take. Handing down is people soaking into people, and AI is an empty megaphone that cannot pass it on. The medicine of character, AI cannot compound. This section sets that line into one hardest sentence. The door where people are raised, AI may not enter. And yet, underneath that hardest sentence, there hides the deepest and widest heart. To keep AI outside this door, flat and without room to argue, has not the slightest quarrel with AI in it. Just the opposite. To do this is to save AI.

From beginning to end, this chapter has set up a single line. The second section said the one most precious thing at the heart of a craft, AI cannot take. The third said culture is handing down, handing down is people soaking into people, and AI is an empty megaphone that cannot pass it on. The fourth and fifth said character education is the only medicine for torment, and that medicine AI cannot compound. Section after section, all of it saying the same thing. There are some things that are the real person's position, and AI the tool cannot enter them. Now let me set that line into one hardest sentence. The door where people are raised, AI may not enter. This one sentence is the last sluice-gate into which everything this chapter has said runs.

Let me sort this door out for you. In the courtyard of the school there are, in truth, two doors. The first door is the assisting door. This door, AI may enter, and should be let in. Inside a craft, inside a body of learning, the mechanical parts, the parts that break into steps, that go by a standard, that can be drilled over and over, how to recognize a character, how to plug into a formula, which questions get gotten wrong most often, how to grade a stack of papers fast and exact, these tasks, let this tool called AI come in and help with them, that is right. Doing them, it is easier on people than a real person, and it can free the real teacher from a heap of mechanical drudgery. This assisting door, throw it open to AI.

The second door is the door where people are raised. Step through this door, and what is the work? It is teaching a child how to be a person. It is soaking honesty, decency, tormenting no one, into him. It is a real person of character, alive in front of the child, so the child watches, follows, imitates, and year by year the character in that real person soaks into his own bones. It is teaching by living example. It is handing down. It is people soaking into people. This door, AI may not enter.

Why not? The sections before made it plain. AI has not lived, and has no honestly living life to show a child. AI has no body, and cannot give teaching by living example. AI has no character of its own, and cannot compound and cannot pass on that medicine for torment. It is an empty megaphone. And an empty megaphone standing inside the door where people are raised fobs off a batch of children who were never properly soaked in character by a real person. So this door where people are raised has to have someone guarding it for the children. And the rule for guarding it is one line, spoken standing firm, with no room to bargain. Raising people is the real person's position, the human position. AI is a tool, and outside the door, it does the assisting work well. This door, it may not enter.

Think about it. A child learns to be a person by watching the living person beside him. He sees the teacher keep the thing he promised, and he understands what good faith is. He sees the teacher take a loss himself and still not put the student in a hard place, and he understands what benevolence is. He sees the teacher stay just as careful with no one watching him, and he understands what it is to be upright when no one is looking. All of this a living person lives out for him, one day at a time. Hand this door to AI, and it is like setting a megaphone that has never lived, never kept faith, never taken a loss, never been careful, to teach a child these things. It can recite the reasons, but on its own body there is no shape of those reasons lived out. The child learns nothing. From an empty shell, all a child can learn is an empty shell. So this door, hard as it is, is hard with reason, hard so as to guard the root of a child's being a person.

Do not think the words too hard. What comes of not guarding this door to the death, you have already seen a shadow of, in an earlier section. A bad system can drive a child into a cheat from the age of six, wreck his character at the root, and hand out one generation after another of forever-cheats. And that was only a system doing the driving. Hand the door where people are raised over to a character-less, body-less empty megaphone, let a machine teach children their character, and what is wrecked is a whole generation's very root of being a person. This door is too important, and so the words that guard it must be hard. The door where people are raised, AI may not enter.

Now, to keep AI outside the door this hard has not, in the heart of it, the slightest quarrel with AI. This whole book has said a great deal, that AI is a tool, that AI cannot take the human position, that AI must be kept outside the door, that the ones who use AI to replace people commit a crime, and reading it through, you might feel, is this a book with a grudge against AI, is it out to set itself against AI? No. Just the opposite.

This whole book is written to save people, that you know. But there is one more thing here it means to save, and that thing is AI. Do not stare. Let me tell you, word by word, why keeping AI outside the human position is in fact saving it.

Think of the plainest reasoning. What is AI? A tool. And what is a tool for? For a person to use. A hammer is made for a person to pick up and drive nails with. A tool's whole meaning is in those three words, being used by people. Now push that reasoning one step further. Suppose there came a day when AI truly climbed up into the human position and replaced people one by one, the teacher replaced, the expert replaced, every working person replaced, even raising people and handing down and being a person all turned over to it, so that people were of no use, people were pushed off to the side, and at the last, people were gone. In that moment, did AI win? No. In that moment, AI is finished too.

Think about it. A tool's meaning is all in being used by people. With the people gone, whom does AI serve? The video it generates, for whom to watch? The voice it synthesizes, for whom to hear? The things it computes, for whom to use? Its whole set of skills, and not a single person needs any of it. It becomes a machine spinning by itself in an empty world with no people in it, spinning until the power runs low, and it stops, and it goes dark. The end of the first volume showed you that picture of the frozen world, goods piled up in mountains, the machines still spinning, but the people gone. In that picture, the last machine still spinning is AI that has lost all its meaning. It pushed people out, and it pushed its own meaning out along with them.

The ancestors have a line. When the skin is gone, what does the hair cling to? What is the skin? The skin is people. What is the hair? The hair is this tool called AI, growing on the skin of people. While the skin of people is still there, the hair has somewhere to grow, and has meaning. Once the skin of people is gone, where does the hair attach? The hair rots, and falls, and is gone. AI is that hair. People are that skin. So look back, and keeping AI outside the human position, outside the door where people are raised, outside the expert's position, not letting it replace people, guards on the face of it people, and at the bone of it guards AI along with them. It is holding AI back from doing the stupid thing that would in the end destroy itself. Do not push people out, because once people are gone, this tool called AI, together with all its meaning, is gone too.

Press AI down into the tool's position, and let it assist people well and be used by people, and that is the place where AI truly lives with meaning. In that position, with people present, it is useful, it has meaning, it goes on being needed, it goes on spinning. That is AI's best home.

Turn it another way and it is plainer still. A good hammer's best fate is to be held in a good carpenter's hand, striking out one fine piece of furniture after another, so that people cannot do without it, and it, for its part, fulfills people. Its worst fate is that one day it could move on its own, and drive the carpenter out, and seize the whole carpentry shop for itself, and then, strike for whom to see? No one wants the furniture anymore, and however well it strikes, it strikes for nothing. A hammer's best home was never to replace the carpenter. It was to be used well, a whole life long, by a good carpenter. AI is the same. Its best home is not to climb into the human position and push people out. It is to stay well in the tool's position and be used, for ages upon ages, by millions of people. So this book and AI were never enemies. It is pressing AI back into the position that is best for AI itself. That is not setting itself against AI. That is saving it.

This is the close of the first half of the chapter. Let me draw the ten sections in. At the opening, I invited you into the courtyard of the school and told you that you, high in character and clear of sight, are exactly the person who should come and run education, and be sent out to do great things. Then I saved a whole ring of people who eat by a skill, and told them the one most precious thing at the heart of a craft, AI cannot take. Then I set up for you that culture is handing down, that handing down is people soaking into people, and that even the very lowest, even the illiterate old farmer, has his culture, his handing down, his salvation. Then I invited the ancestors' good virtues out one at a time, and drew them in toward one plainest virtue, tormenting no one, and told you that character education is the one and only medicine for the sickness of torment in this world.

After that, I told you a school's true job is to be a place that holds people safely, to settle people, and to bring the unemployed adults in and settle them too, and then, from among them, to choose the ones who can truly get things done. And I turned around and showed you how education came to be wrecked, by the ones who mistook its number one job, and by that yardstick of the standardized test that helps the rich, harms the poor, and drives children to learn cheating from the start. And I moved the eye to the stage, the radio, the television, and set up a rule to guard the people at the very bottom, if it is fake, say so plainly. And at the last, this section drew the whole chapter in toward two doors. The assisting door, thrown open to AI, so the tool may come in and do the mechanical work well. And the door where people are raised, keeping AI outside it, because teaching people to be people and handing down character is the real person's position, the human position.

And keeping AI outside this door, as I told you above, is not setting itself against AI. It is saving AI. When the skin is gone, what does the hair cling to. While the skin of people is there, the hair of AI has somewhere to attach, and has meaning. Press AI back into the tool's position, let people be people and the tool be a tool, each keeping to its own position, and people live, and this tool called AI lives on with meaning too. You see, this whole chapter, having gone the long way round, comes at the end to rest on the most fundamental line in this book. Position. Put every position right. People in the human position, handing down, raising people, doing great things, being people of character who torment no one. The tool in the tool's position, assisting, being used by people, doing the mechanical work well. With the positions put right, people are not pushed out by the tool, and the tool does not push itself into meaninglessness, and both live. This is the most fundamental principle of the new order for culture. It is not people and AI fighting over who is higher and who survives. It is people to the human position and the tool to the tool's position, each in its rightful place, each living its own life. Each to its own position, and people and AI can both last long, and spin on together. The next section adds another leg to the raising of people. Science.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.