By Sarah Buchwalder
Early in the morning in the deepest part of this January’s cold spell, I walked our dog through a neighboring stretch of pine woods. The cold was brutal; every now and again I’d startle from a sound like a gunshot as a tree would swell and crack. The sun had barely risen as I pushed through the dark narrows of the abandoned snowmobile track. Two things were foremost on my mind that morning: Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and the takeover of generative A.I. in nearly every sphere of life.
The Inferno famously begins: “Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray/ from the straight road and woke to find myself/ alone in a dark wood.” My junior-high-school- aged homeschooler and I have been working our way through Dante’s Divine Comedy this year as we revisit the Middle Ages. Somehow the dark wood seemed a natural metaphor not only for Dante’s purposes, but the place we find ourselves in human history.
When I was very young, I had a Little Golden Book version of one of the stories from The House at Pooh Corner. In it, an exasperated Rabbit purposely tries to lose the rambunctious Tigger in the woods, but instead gets himself, Winnie the Pooh, and Piglet lost. They realize their situation as they repeatedly circle a sandpit. (Spoiler alert: in the end, Rabbit is eventually found and rescued by Tigger).
In my book, one particular page stood out in lurid 1970’s Disney chiaroscuro as the animals looked down the path into a very dark forest. It was essentially the first horror story my four-year-old self encountered. Many decades later, I would dream over and over again of iterations of this scene while battling prolonged illness with fevers. (In the original version of the stories, the import is humor rather than a moral, and the Ernest Shepherd illustrations are gentle pastorals of the animals in a mist: a perfect example of why, as a parent and the primary educator of my own children, I have been very careful about what I have made available for consumption for very tender young souls and minds. I am certain no life-long nightmares would have resulted from the winsome pen and ink vignettes of the original Pooh stories, had I been exposed to those instead).
Recently I took the time to zoom in on an A.I. generated image on social media that was intended to portray a wholesome family-oriented scene. One figure in the image appeared to have his arm around another figure, but viewed up close, the arm was extended to grotesque disproportion – the equivalent of a six-foot-long arm with a cadaverous-looking hand peeking out at the other side. Ordinary objects were similarly but unintentionally warped, giving the image a sinister aspect overall, like Salvador Dali painting. Many features viewed up close were simply senseless shapes. It looked like another horror story.
Early in the advent of generative A.I. apps, I remember one journalist remarking, “A.I. has trouble with hands.” That seems an eerily apt symbol of the dark side of artificial intelligence: the warping of the human image and a distortion of human labor. “The fruit of the earth and the work of human hands” intones the Eucharistic liturgy at a Catholic Mass, in reference to the bread; until very recently, all products of labor were at least one or the other of these.
It’s important to pause and carefully and critically consider whether A.I. is really any different from other catastrophic technological leaps. The poet William Blake alludes to the Industrial Revolution as “these dark Satanic Mills;” have we soberly and unhypocritically reckoned within ourselves what, for instance, mass media, mass production, the internal combustion engine, or even clock faces have done to the human person, the family, or human society? Have we taken stock of the false advertisement of labor-saving technology contrasted to the far less leisure we actually enjoy, uprooted as we are now from natural rhythms of light and dark, winter and summer, workday and Sabbath?
What ARE our concerns about A.I. at this juncture?
- Surveillance and data collection (what personal information might we be unwittingly parting with for the sake of marginal convenience or entertainment?)
- Pervasive aspects and the lack of choice. (Have you ever tried to disable A.I. settings?)
- Loss and stunting of many skills: writing, critical thinking, research, social….
- Erasure of human creative endeavors and creative fields
- Addiction
- Uncritically allowing minors to be formed by the worldview of tech giants
- The impact on natural resources (A.I. servers guzzle water in their cooling systems)
- The abnegation of parental responsibility
- Further isolation and fracturing of human relationships and community
I’m no prophet and can’t tell you whether A.I. is or is not inherently different from any other perilous brinks in human history. On the return journey on that early morning walk, the sun had climbed high enough to illuminate the trees – a diamond light in that frigid air. All colors blazed out super-saturated, as in a medieval manuscript, and tiny birds revived. My heart swelled and lifted; the dark wood appeared enchanted rather than sinister. It’s not lost on me that some of our most critical moments as a species have also produced great good; Romantic poetry and literature, the Arts and Crafts movement, the cooperative business model, and legal measures safeguarding the well- being and rights of workers and children all bloomed in response to the degradations of the Industrial Revolution.
What I can tell you is this: I believe homeschooling remains a profound way to stay human, connected with other human beings, and especially conducive to keeping alive that mysterious spark in human efforts that is truly generative and creative. In short, I believe homeschooling remains a way to keep ourselves from getting lost, but only if we commit to consciously noting the trail blazes – or choosing a guide as wise as Dante’s.
Sarah is a classically homeschooling mother and transplant from Long Island, New York. Her background includes fine arts, literature, and philosophy, and she helps HOME with legislative oversight. She likes the quiet in Maine but misses real pizza, bagels, and Italian bakery cookies dearly. These days her spare time is spent trying to adequately exercise the family's large Siberian husky dog.