Author: Patrick Rhone

Something I’ve been thinking about for a while yet I’ve not found a “long form essay” way to spell it out so I’ll put my brief and disjointed thoughts here as a place holder and to spur further discussion…

• Culture change is very slow. An event or policy or law may be a trigger — a starting point — but the actual change is a process that often takes generations.

• We often like to believe that an action or a law comes as a result of a societal change. That somehow passing a law makes everything suddenly better. When, in fact, the law is simply a step that is generally near the start of the journey. A road that will take many generations to walk. Also, that road is not a straight line. That journey is a wave. It is often two steps forward and one step back or worse — the converse of that.

• Racism didn’t end with Civil Rights Act of 1964. We are now 3-4 generations past that time and still fighting many of the same fights with things often seemingly getting worse, not better.

• Segregation did not end when Ruby Bridges crossed the threshold of that school. Even with laws in place, we largely in American culture and society still segregate ourselves willingly despite it.

• All culture change is performative… It is all “fake it until you make it”. I would make the argument that most laws and policies are in place to force the faking.

• So, it should be no surprise when a company that was doing DEI way before it was cool can suddenly turn on a dime and decades of DEI policies and practices suddenly disappear or go in reverse. They were faking it all along and, you know what? That’s…

• Well… How it works. That’s how culture change happens. It happens by faking it until it just becomes the thing we do and it has been so long that people have largely forgotten that it wasn’t always this way or look at the way it was as completely abhorrent to who we are as a society and culture now.

Like I said, many of these thoughts are still forming into a more logical “Rhone Unified Theory of Culture Change and Societal Progression” but I’ll leave these here for now and welcome any feedback or further discussion.

Update:

I received a wonderful and important comment on these ideas from someone who wishes to remain anonymous but has allowed me to include it here:.

imo the missing idea here is that people create social change. It does not happen simply because a law was passed, or even that some people decided to fake it for a while. Social change is about the dominant culture changing, and culture only changes because people help other people change their beliefs or actions (or they are replaced in the culture by others). It’s people changing others that creates the change:

There are two types of activists: One who believes their side is right, and therefore banishes anyone who doesn’t yet agree. And one who believes their side is right, and therefore tries to convince anyone who doesn’t yet agree. I’ve lived in both camps. The latter is tougher, but it’s the one that fosters social change.

Of course, it’s never all of the culture that changes. Just the dominant part, the right now part, which is why that can shift over time. You can pass laws or change policies but not complete the necessary social change, and—bam—things can revert in a hurry in response. Faking it isn’t enough; if you’re not changing others (or keeping them changed), then the “other side” can do the work of changing others, and unwind the change they want.

I recently drafted the following thoughts to share with the Academic Dean of my daughter’s school. These were driven from a thread I recently started around these ideas on Micro.blog. I wanted to post them here for archives sake also/and to share them with my broader audience for further thinking and discussion.

A few days ago, I didn’t know the right settings for cooking white beans in my Instant Pot. So, I Googled it. The top result was Google’s AI telling me exactly what I needed to know. I did not need to click further. I now know the right method going forward.

Did I use AI for the answer? Did I learn?

Yes.

The point being that AI is everywhere now. If I search for something on Google the top result is increasingly often Google’s AI driven answer with the information I need. If I type in my word processor or email program and it makes word suggestions or offers sentence completion, AI is driving that. In fact, everything students and teachers write or post online — including everything in Google Classroom — is being used to train the very LLMs that the AI is using to provide the answers.

The truth is, AI is a tool. A tool that will very soon (1-3 years maximum in my guessing) be everywhere and in everything and the answers/solutions it will produce will be so accurate it will be indistinguishable from actual learning and, in fact, teaching.

AI is quickly becoming the first and final step of learning something new on the internet. My Instant Pot story is an example of this. I did not ask for AI but it was the first answer presented, had the right answer, and I learned from it. So, I “used AI” for the result.

Therefore, if a student uses AI to learn a better method for doing stoichiometry for Chemistry class because the one being taught is not making sense or if they learn the same thing from their learning coach, what’s the difference? Especially if they can now use that method going forward to get the right results? And if the student has learned something, what makes either instruction superior to the other? Now, what if the learning coach learned that new method from AI?

These are the sorts of things, of many, I believe schools of all levels will need to think about and should be having conversations about right now.

The bottom line is that without a specific AI policy that addresses what is appropriate and not appropriate use, I would argue that the school has neither the standards, understanding, or clarity about it to make any objective accusations about when/how/why/how much it was used. And if the school does not have a clear, communicable, policy regarding this, it can’t possibly expect the students to know the difference between proper use of a tool to learn versus intellectual dishonesty.

Especially without proper policy built from thinking about what AI is, the many ways it might manifest, how one might use it for valid reasons and learning, or even how one may not even realize they are using it at all (the typing an email example).

With a lack of clear specific AI policy, teachers are left without any objective way to test or defend against its use and this leads to a desire to use subjective suspicion as a basis for accusation.

If the school is going to remain all-in with using Google Classroom, then it must at least acknowledge the potential conflict of interest this might reveal; i.e. the students and teachers themselves are likely training the very LLM’s Google is using for their AI programming and results using the very coursework we are asking the students to do. What then happens when the AI result is something another student wrote or even the student themselves using the AI wrote previously? Is plagiarizing yourself possible? I suspect we’re about to find out.

I suspect within the next 2-3 years, any school policy broadly and unilaterally against AI — or as only mention in a broad cheating policy – will seem silly as it will be nearly ubiquitous, everywhere, and impossible to truly avoid using. It’ll be like being broadly against eyeglasses. The smart schools will realize this now and start to draft policy around how to use it ethically as a tool for learning more so than simply tying to ban its use with no clear guidance.

For what it’s worth, I remember similar arguments about pocket calculators when I was in grade school in the 1970s. I still remember a section in a mathematics class where we used a calculator to get the result but — with a creative twist – the result requested was the word the result numbers appeared to spell when you turned the calculator upside down. A very creative way to incorporate new technology seen as a potential threat! The more things change…

To summarize, AI is here. It is everywhere. It’s going to only be more so. It is being used right now to even write this. We can’t avoid it. We have to learn how to live with it and use it properly or go back to pencils and blue books, proctored exams, and lean more heavily into live (unassisted) discussion and presentation.