Lessons on Artificial Intelligence from My Father's Home Office
Plus two great opportunities to push your writing projects forward this summer.
A couple of quick announcements before this month’s essay. This summer the writers among you have two opportunities to make progress on your works-in-progress with a little bit of guidance from me.
In August, come to Notre Dame’s campus in Kylemore Abbey (Ireland) for a weeklong writing retreat based on the ideas from my latest book, Write Like You Teach: Taking Your Classroom Skills to a Bigger Audience. Visit the retreat’s home page for all of the details. Email me with questions that aren’t answered on the website. Yes, the picture below shows you the incredible setting in which we will be writing in the company of friends.
Kylemore Abbey, Ireland A summer-only special if time and budget don’t allow you to join us in Ireland—I have developed a three-hour, online writing workshop, also based on the book, which I can host for your writing group, teaching center, or writing center for $1750 (plus a signed book for the organizer). Available from May 18th to July 31st. Spend the last of your grant money or remaining center or research budget for an easy but effective faculty development experience. Reach out via email.
Now to the main business. A few months ago, I received a request from the editor of a new journal published by the Honors College at the University of Alabama. He said he knew I was busy, that it was a long shot, etc. , but he wanted to know if I would contribute a short essay to their inaugural issue. It just happened that when I received the email, I was in the mood to write and had something pressing on my mind to say, but no particular venue in which to say it. So I agreed to send him something. (Life Lesson: Always take the long shot.)
You can find the formally published version of this essay at the website of the Sixth Avenue Journal, but the editor, John Latta, gave me permission to reproduce it here. This is a lightly edited version of it, largely to tone down some stronger language from the original. When I wrote the published version, I was in—let’s say— a mood about artificial intelligence, and so I came out pretty hot. Like most people, my attitude on AI can vary from day to day, and the slightly moderated version you see here better represents my sometimes conflicted feelings about this technology.
Without further ado . . .
Lessons about Artificial Intelligence from My Father’s Home Office
At some point in the 1980s, my father bought our family’s first personal computer and installed it in his home office. He was an accountant, and people like him didn’t work from home in the 1980s, so he mostly plied his trade in his company’s corporate office in Cleveland’s Terminal Tower. His home office thus was an occasionally-used one where he would do overtime work during tax season, filling out people’s tax returns in the evening with the help of his secret stash of M&M’s, or where he planned our family’s finances with a pile of bills, a checkbook, and a calculator.
When the computer arrived, it was not placed on his desk, but set up on a little stand in the corner of the room, which reflected—I’m guessing—his view of it as a toy rather than a tool. And, to be sure, the major users of it were his children, the most initially ardent of which was me. The computer did come with some pre-installed games, but I wasn’t much of a gamer. Instead, I was drawn to the computer’s user manual, a spiral book that walked you through the steps of programming the computer to do things like solve equations or follow instructions to create some pre-determined output.
I don’t have super detailed memories of my childhood, perhaps because it was largely uneventful and contented, so I can’t be precise about this, but I would estimate that the era of being fascinated by the computer lasted a few months at the very most. I think it fascinated me initially because learning the coding strategies was like learning a language—this seemingly random string of characters was somehow translated by the machine into a command that it could obey. My enchantment with this part of the experience was a foretaste of my lifelong interest in understanding and learning languages.
But everything else about the computer eventually started to bore me. I had no real passion for math or science, so while I could see how people might use it for interesting purposes in those realms, it had limited appeal for me. At some point in working my way through the user’s manual, when I had mastered the basics of coding and the formulae were becoming more complicated, I realized that I could keep learning new ways to make this thing do my bidding, but I didn’t see much point to it anymore. I spent less and less time holed up in that office and went back outside and did what tweens and early teens did in the 1980s—get on our bikes and ride them the two and a half miles to the town center, where you could buy candy at 7-11 or get a slushy at the Dairy Queen.
A half-dozen years later, when I had made a firm mental commitment to becoming a writer for both my profession and vocation, I came home from my sophomore year of college and sat down at that same computer and wrote my first novel. When it was done, just before I had to go back to school in late August, I printed it out on dot-matrix paper and felt immensely proud of the heft of its pages. Naturally I assumed that it would give me entrée to the budding community of bratpack novelists at that time, and soon enough I would move to Los Angeles and attend literary soirees with Bret Easton Ellis.
Of course the novel was a terrible piece of shit, as all first books should be. But it was mine, I had created it, I had felt energized and inspired as it was pouring out of me, and I knew that nothing else would ever feel as good as that process. Thirty-five additional years of writing have proven me right about that. The magical process of transforming an idea or story or vision from the neurons firing in my brain to a novel arrangement of words on the page never fails to give me pleasure. It also never fails to remind me that while our initial ideas can be good ones, they become great only after they have been through the wringer of writing them down, at which point the words themselves point you in certain directions that you can choose to follow, reject, build upon, or veer away from into an unanticipated direction.
Like the direction this essay took. When I sat down to write it, I had just been reviewing my LinkedIn feed, which has become clogged with academics and technophiles who tell me that we have to integrate AI into our courses in writing and the humanities because students will need AI skills to find jobs, or because that’s the direction of the future, or because AI reveals the many ways in which we have been mis-educating students since the dawn of time, and NOW we finally are going to give them what they really need, which is to integrate their brains with token-predicting machines for a post-human future.
I started with the story of the computer in my father’s office just as a way to ensure that I wouldn’t just come out and say what I really wanted to say, which was “I am just not that interested in anything you have written with the help of AI, no matter how beautiful it might seem, because it’s been produced or co-produced by a machine and I don’t care what machines have to say.” And also: “Please stop suggesting to students that they should use AI to help them brainstorm, write, or revise their essays about history, philosophy, literature, etc., because that it robs them of the pleasure, accomplishment, and transformative power of writing, which can create meaning in a world dominated by technology, commerce, and political madness.”
Neither of which messages are meant to say that machines—including AI—are not useful and important and even fascinating. Growing up, I had friends who never lost their fascination with their computers, and did great things with them, and I see now how people are doing great things with artificial intelligence in medicine and science and data analysis and so on. I’m glad for the folks who are using it for good purposes.
But what I discovered in my father’s home office in the 1980s remains true for me today—that old computer only became interesting when I stopped expecting it to create anything interesting and meaningful with words, and instead demoted it to the role of a mute amanuensis for its human companion, which is exactly where I think it belongs, both for us and our students.