In the 2006 movie “Click,” Adam Sandler’s character is able to use a magic remote control to fast-forward those aspects of life that he finds boring or distasteful. Of course, at the end of the film, he realizes that the things he thought he wanted to skip in order to get on with life actually were his life. The point is a good one. I might not relish changing diapers but when I change diapers I am building a relationship with my child.
I was recently at a presentation on AI and the future of Catholic education. One claim the presenter made struck me as particularly worthy of critical investigation: AI is likely to be so good (in fact, already is pretty good) at tailored tutoring that teachers will be freed up from laboriously working with individual students on things like math skills and will be able to focus on bigger-picture questions and relationships.
The idea that technology will free us to do other, more important things is a cultural commonplace. We hear it almost every time a new technology is rolled out. Sometimes it is true, but not as straightforwardly so as imagined. Sometimes it ends up being completely false.
Take email, as one questioner in the session did. Yes, email dramatically cuts down on the time it takes to engage in written communication. No dictating to a secretary, no whiting out typos, no waiting for the postman. All of that, surely, should add up to more time in our day. But, of course, you don’t know a single person who has more time in his or her day because of email. Why not?
Because technology does not simply work within the pre-existing conditions; it changes the conditions themselves.
The quest for ‘inbox zero’
Email did not just take the act of letter writing and make it faster and more efficient. It changed our culture and our expectations around written communication. We all know that the one thing that necessarily follows from a bout of inbox cleaning is a flood of new emails. You cannot empty your inbox by replying to email, but only by not replying!
My wife has been my editor for years. Whether it is a book chapter, or a Two Wings column or even just a sensitive email, I will usually run it by her before sending it off. And her insights have dramatically improved much of my work. Of course, one thing that AI is pretty good at is editing. You can give it a draft of a column or an email and ask for feedback on it, and it is usually pretty helpful.
Now, one way to think about this is to imagine that it will free up Flannery from having to edit my work. That might get her a few hours each month that she could use to do other things. According to this theory, our relationship should even improve, because, having less work to do, we could spend more time together.
What this misses, of course, is that her editing my writing was already something we did together. It was not just drudgery. It was a place where we contributed together to a common project and where we each appreciated one another’s gifts. In fact, it reminded us of things we appreciate and enjoy about each other.
Now, maybe we are very diligent and we ensure that every hour we save by using AI is an hour we dedicate to family time. But I doubt it. If AI makes me twice as efficient at work, I am far more likely to do twice as much work than to work half as much.
The need for virtue
Similarly, we might imagine that a teacher who does not need to give students individualized attention in math could spend more time on relationships. But relationships don’t happen in a vacuum. They happen when we do things like give students individualized attention in math.
I am not arguing that there is no role for AI in education or in our lives more generally. It is an impressive tool and can be used very well for many things. But I am arguing against a naïve approach that only thinks about the time that various technologies might free up and never thinks about how the technologies themselves shape our environment.
Email did not give us more time in our day, and it is highly probable that AI won’t either. At least, it won’t on its own. Each of us will be responsible for integrating AI into our lives in a way that makes those lives more livable, not less. That is a task for virtue, not technology. This also means we need to have bigger conversations as communities about how we want to use these tools and how we want them to shape our life together.
And here, I propose, is at least one place where AI fits in a Catholic education. A Catholic education needs to both cultivate the virtues needed to live well with AI and equip students for public discourse concerning our common life and the role of technology in that life.
