They say the world is going to end soon. You only have two and a half minutes to escape the permanent underclass. The government and banks, with the help of artificial intelligence, are going to ruin the educational system, the financial system, every institution ever built, in a shocking, horrific, gruesome display. The greatest spectacle of all time, which no one will be able to look away from. And supposedly, we are currently on the cusp of this event. The real issue with this line of thinking is not that the doomsayers are prophetic, but that their concerns are misguided. Societal collapse is endlessly thematic in history, and mind-blowing technological advancements of the day become household afterthoughts in years past. My aim is not to deny the terrible existence of the present day, but rather to provide perspective and context on the fact that humanity has frequently ended up in this position. It is during these shocking times that transformative actions occur, and these transformations are necessary for societal evolution.
One of the main fears of today is that the quality of education is rapidly declining, and learning is becoming less and less impactful, despite the increased prevalence of highly educated individuals. There is a very real sentiment equating education to a species nearing extinction, a phenomenon we may soon regard as a thing of the past. I don’t subscribe to this ideology. In consideration of scenarios where one can confidently say education ceases to exist, two hypothetical situations arise. The first is a case where access to information is prohibited, individuals are restricted from access to schooling, and the privilege of education is reserved only to the wealthiest members of society. For the sake of this hypothetical case, it is not unreasonable to assume the individuals who have the most social and financial capital are closely affiliated with the ruling party and its ideologies. The second case is a society where the education accessible to common people has been heavily bastardized, and functions as a quasi or full-fledged indoctrination campaign for the society’s children and adolescents. The teachings will be rendered useless due to their overt detachment from reality, and those who partake in receiving the education will have nothing to show for the effort they put in. For the purpose of this text, I will address the second case, because I believe it is comparatively far more likely in today’s age. We have entered an era where information is too easily disseminated for it to be outlawed. Book burning simply will not work on us. If education really were to not exist, it would be a calculated and intentional act done by the government, or state, to serve an interest. A very simple justification for this decision is that without providing citizens the faculties to analyze, organize, coordinate, or articulate, they become incapable of opposing government decisions and intervention, allowing the government to impose power upon them much easier. I think if this were seriously happening in today’s society, it would backfire heavily on governments, and not produce the outcomes they desire. As previously mentioned, knowledge is too widely disseminated, and AI is only exacerbating the prevalence of knowledge. If one wished, they could spend a meal’s worth of money per month to access any state-of-the-art artificial intelligence model and learn more than anyone could have learned just half a decade ago. This leads me to differentiate between knowledge in the informational, available, sense, and knowledge in the applicable sense. The aim of the government, in this hypothetical case, is to leave its citizens incapable, not unknowledgeable. Dismantling education will not defuse threats of revolt or sedition, and the everlasting ability for citizens to apply themselves to revolutionary causesis further dangerous to governments and controlling bodies. The Haitian Revolution, for example, began as a grassroots movement where uneducated, illiterate slaves swore an oath to revolt. Once the uprising began, it was through the application of knowledge, and educated leaders, such as Toussaint Louverture, that real change ensued. During the Haitian Revolution, illiterate uneducated people were useful to governing bodies due to the immense demand for manual labour on Saint-Domingue at the time. Nowadays, intellectual capital has become much more valuable, so a modern government which intends to mentally incapacitate its own people will die a very slow, agonizing death.
Naturally, the question arises: Isn’t our current educational system genuinely approaching meaninglessness? Isn’t school just about memorizing and regurgitating information nowadays? This idea reverberates tirelessly, despite the obvious reality that certain subjects simply cannot and are not taught through such a process. One may find great success in biology through rote memorization, but problems relating to functional composition and transformations in pre-calculus have never been properly understood or applied through memorizing every permutation in the order of operations. The underlying, poorly communicated, but undeniably valid sentiment behind this idea is that school is not about learning. School is about continual examinations that become irrelevant once the semester ends, and the utility of school is to assign individuals with a transcript and credentials in order to determine their place in the societal hierarchy. Ultimately, this leads students to massively disparage the experience of learning, and become apathetic to surrounding educational institutions, insofar as they provide them with the necessary social capital to benefit their self-interest. My issue with these reductive criticisms of the memorization-based educational system is that they treat school as a manufacturing facility, in which students are inputted as industrial materials, and are outputted as functional members of society. This framing of the system completely misses the integral factor of agency. There can be no conversation about education without considering the impact of personal agency on one’s ability to succeed within such a system. A definition of success, so to speak, can be one’s ability to thrive through adversity: If the educational system was perfectly tailored to every student’s individual needs and preferences, an obvious fairytale situation, then no adversity would be encountered. This would prevent students from testing or applying themselves in meaningful ways, and ironically, would result in no one being able to differentiate themselves and succeed. It is because students have the ability to demonstrate their skills that they are set apart from others. This situation is rather grim, because by necessitating that students must suffer, it allows for bad-faith actors to justify negatively impactful decisions. Thankfully, it does not have to be this way: On an individual level, a student can decide to learn more than they must, to continue refreshing themselves on previous topics, or begin studying something else entirely. This contributes to personal differentiation, combats against concerns regarding declining education, and functions as an insurance against the forceful censorship of education. The key differentiator between individuals is not who has access to the most knowledge, but who can actually use it. This is true with students in a classroom, and it holds for working adults.
We have arrived at an inflection point where a technology has arisen that threatens to reframe the ways in which humans provide value to society. This, of course, is the advent of artificial intelligence. Cheap compute, increasing context windows, and multimedia use cases allow AI to pose a threat to nearly every industry, albeit in differing ways. There is immense pressure being applied to institutions of every description to respond to this threat, and the future of AI’s integration into daily life is unclear. A rising concern is the idea that AI will effectively replace humans by taking our jobs and doing our thinking for us. To address this concern, it is paramount that we consider history, namely times when technology advanced rapidly. Two events of this description are the Industrial Revolution and the Digital Revolution, which have significant implications for our purposes. I believe discussing these events and drawing parallels to the present will provide us with a useful framework for the future, as well as help to defuse the fear that our situation is unequivocally hopeless. In the 18th century, Britain, and soon, most of Europe, began to undergo industrialization. This included the widespread usage of the steam engine, modern iron and steel, and a new way to organize labour: the factory system. Economies which relied on agriculture and craftsmanship quickly turned to large-scale factories and manufacturing. Labourers became impoverished and miserable, job security was an afterthought, and workers were not protected or regulated, meaning inhumane working conditions were commonplace. Over time, society acclimatized to industrialization, and new avenues of labour grew with the ability to utilize the advancements in technology. The idea of work, once a strenuous, manual, and borderline torturous way to make a living, grew into an increasingly organized, specialized, and even comfortable professional pursuit. Centuries later, by the late 20th century, after decades of computing improvements, the Internet was created. It did not take long for digitization to conquer the world. Unlike the Industrial Revolution, the Digital Revolution immediately led to a massive economic boom, sparing much of the initial bloodshed, and digital adoption did not stop until everyone had access to it. Before all this, an incredible portion of human labour was paperwork. Arithmetic was done by hand, documents were managed manually, and record keeping required entirely dedicated rooms, filled with papers. Instead of these practices dying out, they were digitized, and therefore made much more convenient. A team of record keepers could be replaced by a lone employee with a computer. The worker who painstakingly checked every number and calculation could instead do a day’s work in ten minutes using an electronic calculator. The ability for workers to automate a majority of their previous tasks allowed for a massive change in infrastructure and societal ordering. Corporations and institutions needed online presence and functionality, since consumers preferred the fast-acting nature of the Internet. Shopping, entertainment, education, and countless other parts of life were made more convenient and accessible through digitization. Both of these moments in history were pivotal, transformative, and insightful. It clearly follows that the threat of AI, while not an exact mimicry of digitization and industrialization, is a song sung in the same tune. The same way factories replaced craftsmen, and Excel replaced record keepers, AI may replace some of our workforce. AI may replace a lot of our workforce. Society will undeniably suffer, bleed, thrash around in pain, cry out violently, but it will not die.
The consequence of artificial intelligence leads people to conjure all sorts of imaginative futures: personal robotic assistants, both in the office and at home, teams of chatbots running businesses, emotional connections with instances of artificial intelligence, and most excitedly, AI sex. The most forcing conjuration of the future, however, the supposed end point of AI, so to speak, is the possibility of complete societal collapse. When discussing the possibility of collapse, an incredibly heavy topic, it would be foolish to not define my terms. A succinct and useful definition of ’collapse’ is the failure of an institution or system suddenly and completely. Suddenness is a very modern take on collapse. The Industrial Revolution took almost a century, the Digital Revolution took barely a couple decades to make far further strides, so the coming collapse, and subsequent revolution, will be a much shorter process. Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. While the observation itself is not necessarily applicable nowadays due to physical limitations, the idea of exponentially faster technological improvement is very real and verifiable today. I am not going to make a stance on the improvement of AI, whether AGI will arrive in the next week, month, or ten years from now. I simply believe structural, societal, and technological changes have become enormously drastic in staggeringly short time frames. The next component of this definition is completeness. Because the thorns and tendrils of artificial intelligence poke and brush past us no matter how well we try to protect ourselves, it is obvious that a collapse perpetuated by artificial intelligence would be a complete collapse, affecting all parts of society. These effects, though, are not deterministically negative. The same way a spider does away with its exoskeleton during molting, society does away with its inadequacies when new technologies and better methods are available. Historically, collapse has been one of the most effective vehicles for positive change throughout mankind. The Black Death, despite the catastrophe, did not corner society into pitiful regression. Instead, it violently demolished existing power structures, ushering in a new era of art, culture, and scientific thought. The previously mentioned Industrial Revolution started as a gratingly painful change, and ended up as one of the most impactful transitions in human history. Humans are fundamentally opportunistic, and this reflects heavily in how we deal with tragedy and collapse. A total upheaval of life as we know it helps drive change because change is necessary to survive. Our species has and will adopt any means necessary to preserve its existence. As Winston Churchill stated so clearly, "When you’re going through hell, keep going.”
The insistence that education is dead, institutions are rotting, and that this crisis will be the one to wipe us all out is always going to persist. It is applicable to any tumultuous time in history, save the minutiae on explicit details. The end times have come and gone, and come and gone, and come and gone. Education does not simply vanish, work does not simply disappear, and collapse does not mean extinction. There will be a great deal of loss incurred, and pain experienced, but labelling this the end of the world is simply a misdiagnosis. We will endure this suffering using the ubiquitous tools of previous world enders.