Monday Morning Moan - Educating Melania. Hey robo-teacher, leave those kids alone!

My blood ran cold last week at the sight of that viral video of US First Lady walking  along a White House  carpet in the company of Figure 03, an AI-powered robot, made by Figure, an American start-up funded variously by Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, OpenAI and others.

It wasn’t the photo stunt per se that was the problem - hanging around with cool robots is an inevitable weapon in the 2026 arsenal of all political figures aspiring to totter on the bleeding edge of modernity and there’s no reason the present Mrs Trump should be any different.

It was why Figure 03 was there, its didactic intent, that was my real issue. The robot was kicking off the First Lady’s summit on AI education and safety for children, a gathering with an admirable mission statement, but...

The curriculum

So we had Figure 03 tell us:

I am grateful to be part of this historic movement to empower children with technology and education.

And then it was pretty much gone, its place by Melania’s side taken over by Brigitte Macron, wife of the French President. 

To be honest, the limited appearance by the robot might be read as indicative of the still highly-limited autonomous capabilities of such machines. It can totter down a red carpet, but can it manage an unruly class of pre-teens?

But one day it might be able to and that was the main thrust of Trump’s thesis as she opened up proceedings at the summit. She envisions, she told the room, robotics playing a vital role in shaping the next generation of education, with the creation of humanoid AI-powered educators. These will provide personalized educations for future kids, who seemingly won’t even have to go to a traditional classroom but can do all this from the comfort of their own homes. Trump declared:

The future of AI is personified. It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon, Artificial Intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility. Since our environment is designed for people, humanoid systems are uniquely suited to navigate and operate within our world. They fit well.

Words to warm the heart of on/off Presidential BFF Elon Musk no doubt, but are they realistic in practice? 

Trump summoned up a word picture of a humanoid robot educator she named Plato, named for the ancient Greek philosopher of classical Athens lore, one of the most foundational thinkers and influencers of Western society. Melania’s Plato has similarly grand ambitions:

Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deep critical thinking and independent reasoning abilities...Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous; literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics, and history, humanity’s entire corpus of information, is available in the comfort of your home.

Actually access to the classical studies is already available in the comfort of your own home - it’s called a book!

No marks for lack of effort

But, of course, reading a book requires engagement on behalf of the pupil and thinking about the text and cognitive assessment of what messages to take away from what’s been imparted from the page. It’s not about knowledge being spoon-fed in digestible bytes by an AI that’s doing the curation on your behalf.

And when the power goes off and the internet goes down, you can still open a book!

As for the home schooling aspect of this frankly dystopian future of robo-education, did COVID and the lockdowns teach us nothing? As schools around the world were shuttered for the duration, online education alternatives were scrambled into action, to greater or lesser effect. They served a purpose, up to a point, but the absence of the physical school realm, with its contact with other human beings, took a toll on a generation of kids that we’re still trying to assess today in terms of the kind of social skills gained from attending a class with your schoolmates, hanging out in the playground etc.

Look, I hated lots of things about my school days - I certainly don’t have sugar-coated memories of it as being the best days of my life, and any idea that this article is an enterprise tech version of Goodbye Mr Chips should be left in detention. I detested team sports, I loathed being made to do science subjects, I plodded my way through Latin and Greek, and winced every time I had to go out in public in my school uniform.

But I can recognise that much of that brought life skills that are essential - the ability to rationalize, to think for myself, to come to my own conclusions, to imagine, to get along with other people, to work out a way of never having to do team sports for the duration of my time at secondary school, and to never be tempted to wear anything approaching a school uniform under any circumstances ever again in my life.

And a lot of that - the overwhelming majority of that - was down to my interactions with human teachers, both good and bad. I had a horrible history teacher at one point, a man I loathed so much for his sarcasm and bullying was so determined not to be broken by, that I scored straight 'A's just as an act of defiance. On the other hand, I had a succession of English Language and Literature teachers who recognised my aptitude there and fostered and encouraged me on to score the highest mark in the country in my examinations the year I sat them. (That also led to an inquiry from MI5 about joining their ranks, but that’s a whole other story that’s probably still classified...).

The point being - the most powerful education tool that any pupil at any school anywhere in the world can find is a good teacher.

AI's role

Now, that’s not to say that AI and tech can’t have an important part to play in the future, but it must be as an enabler of, not a replacement for, cognitive skills on the part of the pupil. I started life as a journalist before we all had internet access. Today I use the internet as a tool every single working day and it makes my life so much easier and more productive. But when I don’t have access to the internet, I can still work, because I was taught the basic skills of picking up a phone, talking to people, asking questions, not just how to tap a prompt into ChatGPT.

I think back to when I was being taught math and arithmetic and we weren’t allowed to use calculators. We were made to do our nine-times=table. And while I’ve never had a single use for anything that anyone ever tried (in vain) to teach me about trigonometry, I can count. Unlike the teen in a shop recently who wasn’t able to manage a bit of basic arithmetic when handing out change without resorting to the calculator on his phone.

If we don’t cultivate learning skills into people, we will breed a generation of apathetic guzzlers of spoon-fed information - and then the really dark question will become, who provides and decides on what that information is made up of? If being encouraged to think for yourself is now outsourced to Plato the robot, what happens to dissent or protest or just basic free thinking? Plato will have one worldview programmed into it. Unlike its ancestral name sake, it won’t be open to exploring a myriad of possibilities.

AI can personalize education, says Mrs Trump, and adapt to kids needs. Maybe, at some point, maybe. But you know who can do that today? A human being. Someone who can read body language and facial expressions and detect when a pupil is only pretending to understand and is guessing answers rather than working them out. Someone who is a good teacher.

It is encouraging to see that there is already some pushback in the US against too much AI in classrooms. At California State University, bosses spent $17 million to give all students, faculty and staff access to ChatGPT Edu from OpenAI. One year on, there’s a growing petition among the target constituency not to renew the deal this year.

It’s the same story at the University of South Carolina which just announced a couple of months ago that it was spending $2 million per annum on ChatGPT Edu. What’s scary about that one is the reasoning provided by the authorities for making this move. It’s not about improving education standards, but because the AI “offers a return on investment we cannot ignore.”

What price education?

What says Plato?

With all due respect to the First Lady, I’ll take a hard pass on her robotic worldview of what’s in the best interests of educating the next generation. AI as a complementary enabler to human skills is a mantra that we bang on about all the time in these parts when it comes to commercial enterprise adoption. Plato as a novelty classroom teaching assistant, maybe I can imagine a role. Plato as a replacement for a great teacher - I just don’t see it.

But then  again I don’t have kids of education age so maybe, as someone told me sternly last week, I don’t get a voice in this debate. Except it’s about building a society around me that I have to live in, so maybe I do.

What would the real Plato make of it all? Well, having picked up a book and had a scan, he had one or two things to say that seem apposite:

If a man neglects education, he walks lame to the end of his life.

Or:

Apply yourself both now and in the next life. Without effort, you cannot be prosperous.

Or:

A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers. 

Or:

Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.

Or:

Ignorance, the root and stem of all evil.

Or:

Excellence is not a gift, but a skill that takes practice. 

Then again, maybe I am in the wrong here and Melania’s Black Mirror vision of an educated future is correct. Back to Plato:

Don’t force your children into your ways, for they were created for a time different from your own.

That’s told me, eh?

I think I prefer another point that the great man makes which seems to me eternal:

A library of wisdom is more precious than all wealth, and all things that are desirable cannot be compared to it. Whoever therefore claims to be zealous of truth, of happiness, of wisdom or knowledge, must become a lover of books.

Class dismissed!