Are we letting a monster or saviour into the classroom?

Examining Sal Khan’s confidence in artificial intelligence.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

A board of experts sit at a table against a conference backdrop.

Sal Khan, left, at an AI summit.

White House via Wikimedia Commons.

I've watched enough dystopian movies to know that there are lots of reasons to be nervous about the rise of the machines. Whether it’s the Terminator universe where the internet becomes sentient and creates autonomous robots to eradicate humanity, Neo battling an artificial intelligence that enslaves humans in The Matrix, or Will Smith fending off helper robots bent on taking over the planet in I, Robot, technological advances often fuel an array of nightmare scenarios. As if to make matters worse, science fiction has an uncanny knack for becoming science fact – I think of how shows like Star Trek accurately foretold mobile phones, wearable tech and virtual assistants. The line between imagined catastrophe and reality might be thinner than we might like to admit.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised then, that our creative industries are sending out dire warnings about the impact of the latest breakthrough technology - Artificial Intelligence (AI). Like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in the middle of the industrial revolution, and Godzilla in the dawn of the nuclear era, dystopian fiction is par for the course of scientific advancement. It all stems, I believe, from our deep human response to the unknown – the fear instinct. But I have recently come across a surprising new voice of reassurance in Sal Khan’s book Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing).

Khan’s book comes recommended by Bill Gates - a reliably voracious reader and one of the founding fathers of the global information technology revolution. But Khan also has his own excellent credentials. From tutoring his niece online using a simple online drawing programme called Yahoo Doodle, he began creating YouTube videos and soon amassed over 450 million views. This led to his creation of the now world-renowned Khan Academy which has revolutionised online education. By 2023, it had more than 155 million registered users, with students spending billions of hours of learning on the platform.

Teachers are concerned that AI could undermine their expertise, much like satellite navigation diminished the skills of London Black Cab drivers.

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It seems to me that AI has the potential to upend the Khan Academy business model, however Khan does not take the opportunity to discredit AI or even to highlight its dangers in a bid to reinforce the advantages of his existing products. Nor does he buy into the doom and fearmongering about the impact of digital technologies on young minds, as Jonathan Haidt does in his recent bestselling book Anxious Generation. Instead, he writes a hopeful and imaginative book on AI’s potential for further transforming education for good.

Khan’s perspective comes amidst great fear in educational circles that generative AI will mean the end of education. Students can currently ask ChatGPT to generate an outline for them for an essay, suggest copy, check grammar and accuracy, offer improvements, translations, and factchecks, as well as write a conclusion, edit for wordcount, add footnote references and more. Indeed, entire books available for sale on Amazon have been allegedly written solely by AI. Teachers and lecturers are understandably concerned about the potential for plagiarism. If teachers are no longer able to discern what a student has written for themselves and what a computer has generated, the assessment process becomes meaningless.

Teachers are concerned that AI could undermine their expertise, much like satellite navigation diminished the skills of London Black Cab drivers. After years of mastering 'The Knowledge'—an arduous and demanding process requiring exceptional memory and recall—this once-essential qualification was rendered almost obsolete. New drivers now need little more than a GPS and an Uber account to compete, a shift that highlights how quickly hard-earned skills can become irrelevant in the face of technological advances. Many teachers fear a similar fate as AI continues to encroach on their domain.

While AI may not be the evil monster that will destroy us, neither is it the perfect saviour that will solve all society’s ills.

Khan offers an important alternative view. He sees the possibility that AI could, for example, help coach students on essay writing. By reading work, marking it and suggesting improvements, AI could not only save the teacher valuable time but help students take their work to an even higher level.

Khan offers a similar hopeful alternative to those who blame digital technology advances for the crisis in young person’s mental health. What if AI could help offer coping mechanisms, coaching and tailored advice that can help improve the mental health of students? His vision for the Khan academy virtual assistant ‘”Khanmigo” reminded me of BayMax from Disney’s Big Hero 6 – the large inflatable, huggable robot with a calm, compassionate and loyal personality, highly committed to every aspect of his user’s wellbeing.

Amid voices that demonise AI, Khan’s is a useful antidote, however I wonder if he has gone too far. While AI may not be the evil monster that will destroy us, neither is it the perfect saviour that will solve all society’s ills. Understatement is not Khan’s strong point. Instead, sometimes he becomes so carried away in excitement that I feel his book begins to sound like an infomercial for his own, current and future products.

I wish that Khan had taken a slightly different tack – no less inspiring about the potential of AI, but also recognising its limits. After all education is as much about transformation as it is about information. It should lead to character formation as much as skill acquisition. Emphasising these aspects of moral and perhaps even spiritual mentorship, we can see that education remains irreplaceably human.

AI has huge potential to help and to hinder us in our educative responsibilities to the next generation– and so questions remain – not if AI will change our world, but how. We need to ask not just what benefits it could bring, but who it could benefit most usefully.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Psychology

4 September 2024

5 min read

Who’s missing from Inside Out’s internal family?

Where Riley’s writers could go next.

Henna Cundill

Henna is a researcher with the Centre for Autism and Theology at the University of Aberdeen.

Cartoon characters of emotions at a control desk.

Inside Riley's head.

Disney.

Once upon a time a man got angry. Then he got angry at himself for the fact that he got angry, which of course didn’t help. As the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh would say, “If we become angry at our anger, then we will have two angers at the same time.” Similarly, there was an occasion when he got really nervous that he might make a mess of giving a speech, and his nerves became so overwhelming that he delivered the speech badly. A self-fulfilling prophecy, one might say.

These are not my examples; they are examples given by psychologist Richard Schwartz in his introduction to Internal Family Systems (IFS). This therapy (sometimes also called “parts therapy”) is a form of self-analysis in which participants learn to resist supressing or controlling their difficult thoughts or emotions, the different “parts” of their inner world, and instead adopt a posture of curiosity towards each of them. This posture allows people to be in a beneficial relationship to their emotional lives, rather than being ruled by them.

Fundamentally, the relationship that emerges is one of compassion, understanding that our thoughts and emotions have a job to do, even the uncomfortable or shameful ones. So, anxiety, for example, guards us from committing social faux pas, whilst joy helps us to keep hold of a sense that life is ultimately worth the living, no matter how hard things get. Even sadness and grief, as much as we fear being overtaken by such emotions, have an important role to play, for example by helping us to define what things and people are most valuable and important to us.

For those who haven’t seen the Inside Out films, the writers cleverly take this idea of the “internal family” of emotions and create five relatable characters that embody them – Joy, Fear, Sadness, Anger and Disgust. In the first film, we see how these characters interact inside the head of a little girl called Riley. They are helping her to hang on to her sense of self despite the upheaval she experiences in her outside world, when her family relocate to a new city, and she must settle in to a new home and school. In the sequel, we rejoin Riley as she enters the turmoil of puberty, and the five initial characters are abruptly forced to work alongside some new arrivals – the “teenage” crew of emotions: Anxiety, Ennui, Envy, and… the biggie… Embarrassment.

This Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something large.

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When he first developed IFS in the 1980s, Richard Schwartz was, by his own confession, a committed atheist, with what he describes as “a distain for religion”. Schwartz writes of the frustration he felt at that time when several Christians got excited about IFS in its early stages of development. His peer, Robert Harris, even went so far as to publish a book that set out a Christian version of the therapy. Initially, Schwartz felt the biggie – embarrassment – that his therapy was being taken up by Christians. However, as time went on, and as much as Schwartz tried to push aside the spiritual dimension of IFS, he increasingly found that spirituality could not be eliminated from the picture:

“As I used the model with clients through the eighties and nineties, increasingly they began having what can only be described as spiritual experiences. These vicarious encounters with the mystical profoundly affected my own spirituality and I became interested in Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, shamanism, Kabala – everything but Christianity.”

Over time, Schwartz’s antipathy to the relationship between IFS and Christianity began to wane. He saw how much he had been working on the basis of prejudice, limiting his own exploration of Christian ideas in response to some unhelpful encounters he’d had with a few heavy-handed fundamentalists. He made deliberate moves to engage with Christian dialogue partners across the breadth of the tradition and began to see how congruent IFS was with the teaching of Jesus. The posture of curious compassion towards oppressive and uncomfortable emotions that Schwartz was encouraging his clients to adopt was mirrored perfectly in the attitude that Jesus advocated towards “enemies” in the outside world: do not judge, instead seek to engage them with kindness, and work towards their healing.

In recent decades, Schwartz has come to rethink IFS as an integration of psychology and spirituality, rather than as a form of psychotherapy. He speaks of “spirituality” as an innate essence at the core of each person, which he calls the “Self”, and acknowledges that many of his more religious students prefer to think of this essence as “the soul” or “Atman” (the eternal self within Hinduism). And, whilst he still describes himself as fundamentally agnostic and is wary of making his own definitive religious commitments, he has come to agree that this Self is transpersonal – it exceeds the boundaries of who we each are as an individual person and connects us to something larger.

Screenwriting for a popular audience of all-faiths-and-none, it is perhaps unsurprising that the makers of Inside Out have thus far eschewed the deep and fascinating spirituality of IFS. Riley’s “sense of self” is at the centre of both films, but the way it is depicted implies that it is something that only comes into being at birth and exists entirely to regulate Riley’s engagement with the outside world. So far, there has been no exploration of more existential questions such as faith and eternity. However, the concept of the film is so brilliant, and for a complex idea it is so well executed, that I am sure we can look forward to many more Inside Out films to come. If that is the case, then just as Schwartz found himself going on an unexpected journey of spiritual exploration, the writers of Riley’s may well find themselves doing the same. I, for one, look forward to finding out what Riley discovers.