Can You Hear Me Now

I often tell my students not to be misled by the name ‘artificial intelligence’ – there is nothing artificial about it. AI is made by humans, intended to behave by humans, and, ultimately, to impact humans’ lives and human society.

Fei-Fei Li

I recently came upon an article that stated that AI is creating a generation of developers who cannot debug their own code. As a long time software developer, this struck close to home. While I certainly took great joy in writing new software, I found nearly as much (and sometimes more) joy in finding and fixing those elusive bugs. In fact, my first job at Northern Telecom was primarily fixing bugs in software written by people I never met. Thinking back, I realize that those were some of the most rewarding years of my decade’s long career. I still take great pride from the time I found and fixed a bug deep in the Motorola Unix kernel. A race condition that sat undiscovered for years — undiscovered and unfixed by minds far greater than mine.

Reading that modern, AI-reliant developers (the so-called vibe coders) are unable to understand “their” code is greatly disturbing. Not only are they losing out on the joy of debugging, they lack the necessary skills to do it.

While it’s true that I may be holding onto software debugging for sentimental and outdated reasons, I believe it points to a larger issue. What are the additional skills AI might be robbing from us? Will AI eventually deprive us the ability to write, research, and create? Even worse, will it take away our common sense and humanity?

Fun fact. This is the second in my Get Off My Lawn series of articles. Click here for Part One.

Hey Hey, My My

I have an old high school and college friend who in the past was a pretty decent musician. For the sake of his privacy, I will call my friend R2D2. He played guitar, piano, percussion, and created interesting music in his homemade studio. Recently, the only things I see coming from him are AI generated songs and their accompanying videos. At best they are boring. At worst they are garbage. It’s unclear why he chose to forsake handmade music for computer generated slop, but in my mind it was a terrible trade.

For grins, here are two videos of a cassette tape R2D2 and I made several decades ago. That’s me on harmonica, lousy guitar, and so-so keyboards. Be sure to check out those arpeggios on the last track of Part Two. R2D2 is the much better guitar and bass player. He also did all the synthesizer and drum machine programming.

While this is little more than an off-the-cuff-never-to-be-repeated jam session, you get an idea of what R2D2 was once capable of. Compared to what he is doing today, this stuff is classic rock.

Fun fact. I call these recordings Phase Two because R2D2 and I were previously in a high school band we called The Good Ol’ Boys. I use the term “band” loosely. We were a god-awful acoustic blues band that consisted of three core members and a few other guys who floated in and out. As far as I am aware, only one single cassette tape remains of our playing. Phase Two was a one-day-only evolution of the band.

A Worthwhile Pursuit

I shared the debugging article with my friend, Christoph, and he responded with a Substack article by a gentleman named Noah Brier. In the article, Noah wrote something that strongly resonates with me:

I don’t believe the job of a high school English teacher is to develop great writers, but rather to convince teenagers that devoting time and energy to writing is a worthwhile pursuit.

Thinking back on my favorite teachers from elementary, high school, and university I realize that they all had one thing in common. They taught me to love what I was learning. I have long since forgotten what grades I received from their classes, but remember how they made me feel about the subjects they taught. They instilled a desire to dig deep into my studies simply because the learning was a worthwhile pursuit.

At best, you might call it an unlikely gift
a dubious and suspect present
but more accurately
it’s a teachable moment
the kind that never needs repeating

Like putting your hands to the fire
to learn what it means to burn

AI is not a Calculator

All too often, I hear AI in classrooms justified by the story of the calculator. AI proponents recall that it was once said that calculators would prevent children from learning math. Clearly, it did not and they claim the same is true about AI in education.

Personally, I don’t buy it. A calculator is a wonderful tool that helps people with math, but it doesn’t replace their understanding of math. Doing multiplication on a calculator doesn’t take away someone’s comprehension of what multiplication is and how it functions. It simply removes some of the tedious aspects of equation solving.

The same cannot be said for AI. Artificial Intelligence is not augmenting a student’s learning. It is replacing the fundamental aspects of thinking, rethinking, and doing. AI does the research, discernment, creation, and implementation. Other than coming up with an adequate prompt (“Write a research paper on the War of 1812.”), the student has little role in the process of learning. He or she is a passive participant that reaps the benefit of the solution, but not the more important process of learning how to get to the solution. It’s why in the old days we had to “show your work” on math tests. That was long after the invention of the calculator, so the work was truly ours.

There is a lot of work out there to take people out of the loop in things like medical diagnosis. But if you are taking humans out of the loop, you are in danger of ending up with a very cold form of AI that really has no sense of human interest, human emotions, or human values. Louis B. Rosenberg

I firmly believe that a tool is only useful if it allows us to preserve our humanity, values, dignity, and compassion. Anything that takes away from the above is suspect and should be questioned.

The question of our time is where does AI fit into that equation. Does it ultimately lift us up as a species, or does it tear us down? Does it make us more or less human? The more I learn about how and where it’s being applied, the more I lean towards the latter.

A Healthy Wariness

Anyone who knows me, knows that I am not a Luddite. I am neither afraid nor incompetent when it comes to technology. I will admit that I am no longer the first-call technical guru when it comes to extended family tech support (my sons have taken over much of that), but I can still hold my own when it comes to setting up a printer (the bane of every tech support guy or gal) or wi-fi modem/router.

I have also spent a number of years poking around the innards of AI and continue to integrate AI into my personal programming projects. For a good example of that, take a look at my Her project. I know my way around the open source AI platform Ollama and am well versed in the APIs it exposes.

Despite all that (or perhaps because of all that), I maintain a healthy wariness of where AI is taking us as a species. Yes, AI can do amazing things for us, but it can also do devastating things to us. Not knowing how to debug code may not be the worst thing in the world, but it’s the harbinger for changes that will not be healthy for our survival.

Personally, I do not want to live in a world where thinking has been outsourced to machines. I’ve read enough science fiction to know that putting computers in charge never works out as expected. What might seem ideal at first, quickly turns sour and sinister. If you need a refresher, rewatch Wall-E.

Do you want to wind up like the lazy, bloated passengers on the Axiom? Not me. I choose humanity in all its messiness over the false perfection of machines. Give me noisy, distorted guitars over AI slop any day of the week.

And because I still know how to do it, I will continue to debug my own code. Take that, vibe coders.

Thank you for reading.

There are those who are driven by change
answering only to the call of the next shiny thing
in with the new and out with the old
searching for that which does not lie before them

But in my quest for standing still and holding tight
I carve my passion in blocks of stone
deep cuts that reject the planned obsolescence
of false needs and artificial desires
I fashion a monument to the simple act of being
and the singular undertaking of an honest, lasting, and real love