VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 2

VOLUME VI, CHAPTER 2, SECTION 2

Your Position Is One AI Cannot Take

The last section walked you into the courtyard of the school and made it plain that you, high in character and clear of sight, are exactly the kind of person who should be running education. This section saves a batch of people first, a batch who have not been sleeping well lately. If you are one of them, this section is for you. If you are not, watch anyway, because the next trade in line could be yours. This section means to nail one sentence down dead. AI is not the expert. AI is a tool. And the one thing at the heart of a craft, it cannot take.

Let me name, first, who is not sleeping these days. Elementary teachers. High school teachers. Professors. The people at the tutoring centers, the private tutors, the trainers, the counselors. They open their phones and see the same kind of news over and over. The AI tutor has arrived, one on one, more patient than a real teacher, ask it a question at two in the morning and it never gets annoyed. AI grades a stack of papers in seconds, more careful than a real teacher, and it will not let a single misplaced comma slip past. AI writes the questions, gives the lecture, answers the doubts, twenty-four hours a day, no fee, no temper, no fatigue. One AI setup, they say, can stand in for a whole tutoring school.

Their hearts go cold. The fourth section of the first volume showed you this fire already. The trade of education is being eaten, one bite at a time, by AI. The tutoring business caves in, the private teachers lose their rice bowls, and even the teachers in the public schools are quietly asking around about how many more years their own position can hold.

But it is not only the people who teach who cannot sleep. As the last section said, the courtyard you were invited into holds, in the larger sense, more than just schools. A city never runs on a single school. Think about it. A city has one big company in it, and that one company alone feeds a whole crowd of people. But what it keeps alive reaches far past that crowd. It carries a whole ring around it. The workers have to eat, so there are restaurants. The workers need haircuts, so there are barbers. They fall ill, so there are hospitals, clinics, pharmacies. They save and borrow, so there are banks. They build and remodel, so there are construction crews and fitters. They get tired and worn, so there is massage, there is the foot-washing parlor. They want a song, a show, a movie, so there is the whole performing trade. And there are tailors, cobblers, cab drivers, shopkeepers, delivery riders, people who mind the children, ring upon ring, all of them living off the foot traffic that one company brought to life.

This whole ring of people does every kind of work under the sun, but one thing about them is the same. Every one of them holds, in their hands, a single skill they eat by. The cook holds a hand for good food. The barber holds a good pair of scissors. The masseur holds a good pair of hands. The opera singer holds a good voice. The old tailor holds a hand for good needlework. And this skill was practiced out over ten years, twenty years, one day at a time.

Now AI has come. And this whole ring of people, just like the teachers, feels the chill. AI can write a recipe now, can design a hairstyle, can compose and sing, can draw up a blueprint, and even the massage chairs are said to be learning the touch of a human hand. So they start losing sleep too. Is this skill of mine about to be learned by a machine? Am I about to lose my rice bowl as well? So this section does not set out to save only the teachers. It sets out to save this whole ring of people who eat by a skill.

Let me set one sentence down in front of you, heavily. Hear this one clearly, and you can all sleep soundly tonight. AI is not the expert. AI is a tool.

AI is not the teacher, not the cook, not the barber, not the opera singer, not the doctor. AI is a tool, a tool that these real, flesh-and-blood experts hold in their hands and use.

Do not let the news spook you. You see that AI can write questions, write recipes, compose, draw blueprints, and you assume it is coming to be the teacher, be the cook, be the composer. Wrong. Those are things a tool does. A blackboard lets the teacher put his words up. A good wok lets the cook get the dish out. A pair of scissors lets the barber cut the hair even. They all help a person do the work, but no one ever said the blackboard is the teacher, the wok is the cook, the scissors are the barber. AI is the same. It is ten thousand times more capable than a blackboard, ten thousand times more nimble than a wok, but its position has not changed. It is still a tool, a tool that sits well in the expert's hand.

So let me say one thing to this whole ring of people. Do not take AI too seriously. Do not, the moment you see how capable it is, lose your nerve and meekly hand your position over. See one thing clearly. However capable a tool is, it is still a tool. A sharp cleaver, however fast it cuts, does not cook the meal. The cook cooks the meal. This sharp tool called AI, however fast and however keen, does not truly run the house. The one who runs the house is you, the real person who holds the skill.

So what can this tool, AI, actually do, and what can it not do? Let me draw the line clear for you. This line is one the whole book sets and resets, over and over.

What it can do is the part of a skill that can be broken into steps, held to a standard, drilled over and over. How to recognize a character, how to plug into a formula, how many minutes on the heat and how many grams of salt in a dish, how to figure the dimensions of a blueprint, how to lay the chords under a tune. On these, AI as an assistant is far easier on you than a real person. Which child keeps writing that one character wrong, AI flags it in a second and has him drill it ten more times. The standard recipe for a dish, AI remembers better than anyone. The measurements on a drawing, AI works out fast and exact. These mechanical, repetitive, time-eating tasks, handed to AI, that is right. Let AI shoulder these, and the real expert's hands are freed.

What it cannot do is the one most precious thing at the living heart of a craft.

Think back. The teacher you truly remember your whole life, do you remember him because he taught you some formula? Mostly not. You remember him because when you flunked and were sunk in despair, he laid a hand on your shoulder. Because he himself lived square and upright, and you admired him from the bottom of your heart and wanted to grow up to be like him. Because at the crossroad where you were about to go wrong, he sat you down and said a few plain words that pulled you back. What you remember is this real person, and something in him that soaked into you.

Think of the little restaurant you love best. Why do you swear by it? Is it really the recipe of that one dish? The recipe is all over the internet. You swear by it because of that old cook's hands, decades of feel, the salt stopping at exactly the right shake, the heat cut at exactly the right second, that one taste of home, fed out by a lifetime of his hands.

Think of the performer who has sung a whole life on the stage. Why do you go into the theater? AI could long ago synthesize a voice you could not tell from the real thing. But it is not that voice you want. You want the living person, standing on the stage, trading a breath of real, living spirit back and forth with a whole room of living people. His voice is a little hoarse tonight, there are tears in his eyes tonight, and the tremble in his voice at the line that moves him, that is a living person, alive on the stage, meeting you, another living person, face to face. This, AI cannot do.

And AI cannot do it, not because it is not yet clever enough. It cannot do it because at the root it is missing two things.

The first, it has no life that it has lived. The most precious thing at the heart of a craft, the something in a teacher that makes you want to live as he lives, the judgment fed into an old cook's hands over decades, the breath of real spirit a performer carries on the stage, all of it is a lived life, boiled and fed and ground out one day at a time. AI has not lived. It has not boiled, not fed, not ground. It can recite for you every recipe in the world, every vocal style, every saying about how to be a person, but behind what it recites there is no lived life. It is an empty megaphone. And an empty megaphone cannot pass on the thing that only a lived life holds.

The second, it has no body. A real skill, and above all the raising of a person, rests not only on reasons spoken aloud but on a living person, alive in front of you, seen with your own eyes. Seeing how a person of character deals with people. Seeing how an old cook is exacting with a lump of dough, with a pot of soup, with a customer. Seeing how a performer will not slack a single move even on a night when no one calls out for more. This is teaching by living example. And teaching by living example needs a body. A real person has a body. He stands there, and how he does the work and how he treats people is all taken in by your eyes and kept in your heart. AI has no body. It can say be honest, be diligent, ten thousand times over, but it has no honestly, diligently living body to show you.

So the line is clear. In a craft, the mechanical work that breaks into steps, AI the tool helps with, that is fine, that is right. But the one most precious thing, the lived life, the body alive in front of people, that is the real expert's position. That is the human position. And this position, AI cannot take. It cannot take it today, and however ten thousand times cleverer it grows later, it still cannot take it. Because this is not a matter of clever or not. It is that AI, at the root, has never lived, and has no body.

Now let me say it harder. That AI cannot take this position is one thing. That some people insist on shoving AI into it is another.

Some are calculating that they can replace every real teacher with an AI teacher and save a great heap of wages. Some are figuring that they can replace the master craftsmen, the experts, with AI, since AI knows the recipe, the blueprint, the vocal style anyway. They want to hoist this tool called AI up into the expert's position, and shove the real person out.

Let me set the positions straight for you. AI is a tool, and the tool is innocent. It was made to assist people, and there is no fault in that. The fault lies with the person who insists on shoving AI into the human position and pushing the real person out. That person is doing something wrong at the very root. To save himself a sum of money, he swaps out the one most precious thing at the heart of a craft, the lived life, the human body, for an empty megaphone. The customer gets a standard part with no hand-feel in it. The child meets a megaphone with no living example behind it. The opera fan sees a fake voice. The most precious thing is gone. What he saved is money. What he destroyed is the living heart of the craft.

And it is deadliest in the raising of people, which the later sections take up on their own. To hand a child's character over to a tool that has no character and no body, to be fobbed off, that is not saving money. That is doing harm at the level of a sin. The crime is not AI's. It is the crime of the person who forced the tool into the human seat and pushed the real person out.

So this is the boundary. The assisting work, AI may come in. The one most precious thing, the human position, AI may not come in. Who can hold this line? The one who has seen it clearly. You.

So to this whole ring of sleepless people, hear one thing. Your position, AI cannot take. What will be replaced is the part of your skill that was always mechanical, that was always meant to be handed to a tool. Handing that part off is no loss. Take your freed hands and your freed heart and draw them back to the place AI can never reach, that lived life, that body alive in front of people, that one most precious thing.

You will not only fail to be discarded. You will become more precious than you were before. Because once AI has carried off all the mechanical work, the one most valuable thing left in a craft rests entirely on you, the real people.

The next section takes this one most precious thing and, at the large scale, tells you what it truly is. It has a plainest of names. It is called culture. And culture, laid all the way bare, comes down to two words. Handing down.

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