Can A.I. Make us Moral?
I once bemoaned the declining appreciation of the liberal arts to an acquaintance. Like others in my club, I value knowledge not for showing off at parties, but because learning from the past and the mistakes of others can points us to a more virtuous path. College should teach you more than a skill.
He responded:
As it stands now, there is a lot of hypocrisy. Students go through the hoops prescribed by the best liberal arts schools a bit cynically, to get the credential that will land them the right techno job on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. The schools themselves are pretty content with this: they want the big donations down the road, when said liberal arts grads have made their fortunes. The schools practically say: take our humane curriculum seriously—but not too seriously!
That hypocrisy seemed immoral but then I read David Labaree’s A Perfect Mess. A veteran professor, Labaree admits American higher education is awfully contradictory but asserts amelioration would be worse, destroying the academic freedom that makes America great.
Labaree would tell my friend that colleges offer a form of liberal education that harkens back to the colonial-era seminary’s goal of elevating the soul. But students wanted something more practical and colleges met students where they were. in 1866 Harvard ended daily chapel and stopped grading students’ “conduct” in 1869. Required classes were eliminated by the 1890s.
Capitalism relentlessly seeks for comparative advantage; an 1890’s ag extension program that trained farriers did not prepare its students for the future any more than a 1980’s tech program that taught C++. Yogi Berra said “It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” but it’s safe to say that vocational skills have short shelf-lives.
Accounting seems like an eminently practical degree. When last the AICPA checked in 2018 about 55,000 newly minted BAs and MAs were arriving on the market every year.
So a story by technology writer Kevin Roose about accounting automation struck me. He writes that “recent advances in AI and machine learning have created algorithms capable of outperforming doctors, lawyers and bankers at certain parts of their jobs. And as the bots learn to do higher-value tasks, they are climbing the corporate ladder.”
Let’s go smash some looms boys!
Like water seeking its level, capital will replace labor the moment it earns a higher return. Roose cites research from highly credible economists suggesting AI bots are “just productive enough to be adopted and cause [job] displacement.” He quotes one researcher saying, “We haven’t hit the exponential point of this stuff yet. And when we do it’s going to be dramatic.”
When I opened my school seven years ago I automated as many of our accounting processes as I possibly could. I wanted as many dollars as possible to go to hiring teachers and buying books, not to counting pennies for bureaucratic reports few would read. Of course I needed accurate financial records to analyze our past and plan for our future, but I questioned the received wisdom of how to do this. We grew from 150 to 415 students, a staff of 10 to a staff of 65, and revenues of nearly $10 million with one, part-time, bookkeeper.
Meanwhile real thinking, the kind that involves a knowledge of the past, an appreciation for our fellow humans in all their glorious, maddening diversity, and hope for the future remains in short supply. Thinking that leads to moral formation comes from a knowledge of the past, not an automation routine. I know I’d do well to take Yogi’s advice and avoid forecasting, but maybe the AI revolution provides higher education with the chance to refocus itself on what humans can uniquely do?
