Two figures for generative AI: the calculator and the mad scientist’s assistant

As people grapple with ChatGPT 3 and other instances of generative artificial intelligence, we sometimes turn to imagination in order to describe and understand the technology.

I’ve seen folks raise the Terminator movies, HAL-9000, and generic scary robots to express their fears, for example. Others use history, bring up comparisons from prior technological revolutions, to think through possibilities: AI like the European printing press. One of my young students told me AI feels to him like the appearance of the world wide web must have felt to me in the 1990s. (And sometimes it does.)

In this post I’d like to offer two historical analogies or imaginative figures for how we might experience generative AI.

I: The Calculator

When I started playing with generative AI and thinking about its educational implications I thought back to the rise of the commodity digital calculator, back in the 1970s. I remembered debates over its potential impact which occurred around me. Students might not learn basic math, went one claim, and would instead outsource those crucial skills to handhelds. Numerical literacy would dwindle, just when it was needed as society became every more closely tied to rapidly advancing science and technology.