Welcome to the new Understanding America! After more than 100 issues, UA’s scope had drifted and expanded to become a mix of column, commentary on America, and roundup of economic news. So we’ve tried to re-segment things, with more columns forthcoming at Commonplace and the economic roundup now available separately as the weekly The Real Economy newsletter.
Understanding America will come to you every other week, co-written by the whole American Compass team. As part of our broader project on Reclaiming American Citizenship, we’ll be highlighting the stories that best illustrate citizenship’s failure or renewal and explaining why they matter. Let’s see how it goes!
YOUR TOP READ THIS WEEK, from University of Chicago student Owen Yingling, is The Great Zombification (The New Critic). Our Abigail Ball writes:
The more AI writing I see out there in the wild (by which I mean the Wall Street Journal opinion page), the more I worry that we lack the social antibodies to fight off the worst elements of the technology. I thought it would be obvious that writing is a form of thinking and the source code for the modern world. By writing, we think more clearly; we sharpen, formalize, and sequence our arguments; and we are better able to remember what we’ve learned. So when I envisioned the future of AI in education, I assumed plenty of worthwhile fights about Ed Tech and whether kids should spend their class time staring at screens. Perhaps by devaluing “laptop work,” at least relatively, AI would push more young people toward the trades and we’d see a salutary rebalancing of post-secondary education. What I did not expect to see was the true ivory towers of liberal education willingly giving in to the wave of AI undermining the very premise of their existence.
Writing in The New Critic, Owen Yingling, a rising senior at the University of Chicago, provides a harrowing inside look at what exactly this has meant at one of our nation’s top universities. He describes AI use as a “cancer … that threatens to turn a generation of promising young Americans into a class of drooling morons, and it will grotesquely disfigure, if not destroy, the university as an institute in every way that it is imagined — as a sacrosanct humanist project, as a moral training ground, or even as a vulgar sweatshop for job training.” The whole piece is worth your time, especially if you were yourself educated in the liberal arts. The days of blue books and seminar-style Socratic dialogues are behind us; what remains are professors writing their lectures with Claude and students using ChatGPT to cheat even on in-class exams.
Worse still, Yingling explains how this is not merely happening as individual defections from the university’s desired norm. Campuses are welcoming AI with open arms, encouraging everyone to embrace these new tools. And yet, Yingling writes: “Every anecdote I hear about AI use shows that there is no ‘integration’ happening, there is simply substitution: for learning, teaching, and conversing. These are the bare activities required to enact whatever concept of the university you would like, whether it tends towards monastery or marketplace.”
The phrase “existential risk” is typically used in AI circles to describe an end state in which all of humanity is, well, dead. While I certainly wish to avoid this fate, I think the far more pressing “x-risk” is a potential new dark age brought on by the overuse of AI in education. I hate to sound dramatic, but I don’t know any other way to describe what would result from the total surrender of our institutions of higher learning.
Bonus link: A Society of Cheats, by business school professor John Paul Rollert in The Atlantic.
BUT IS IT GOOD NEWS OR BAD NEWS THAT THE AI DOESN’T WORK? Oren Cass writes:
The Alpha School pitch is that teachers are unnecessary, most of school is a waste of time, and kids can learn much more with two hours each day of focused, computer-based tutoring followed by hours to explore whatever interests them. The schools, they claim, achieve incredible academic results!
It’s rather silly. Of course there are teachers, the school just calls them “guides” instead. The school has selective admissions and requires engaged families that can afford exorbitant tuition. (Current list price in a Boston suburb: $65,000.) And the repeated comparison of performance by Alpha students to performance of students in ordinary public schools disregards the reality that these are not comparable students. (Though strangely, the organization proudly publishes data on how many standard deviations its students test above the typical student, which seems to show that they take in students testing 4 to 5 standard deviations above the national mean in kindergarten and produce students testing 2 to 3 standard deviations above the mean by the middle grades. Is that good?)
Now we have the first quasi-experiment applying the Alpha School model to a public charter school. As Dan Meyer summarizes, “Unbound Academy projected 60% proficiency in math off a baseline of 34% and ended the year with 10% compared to an Arizona state average of 34%. They projected 65% proficiency in ELA off a baseline of 40% and ended with 28% compared to an Arizona state average of 42%.” Not good.
Of course, Alpha School can run an elite private school for a very niche subset of very privileged kids. But there’s a lot wrong with using it as a platform to trash the public school system that must serve everyone else, and then trying to push for wide adoption of a model that obviously will not work in most situations. It’s a classic case where these guys either do not understand how inapplicable their bubbled experience is to the rest of the country, or they don’t care, and the only question is which would be worse?
THE SNUGAROOZ FILES. Meredith Meroney comments on The Chew Toy That Ate My Small Business (UnHerd):
When a blind woman tried to buy a Snugarooz Floos N’ Fun Ball from School For the Dogs, her computer encountered metadata that “interfered” with her screen-reading software. So, she sued. The Americans with Disabilities Act creates a private right of action for such lawsuits. This particular woman has filed at least 40. The small owner of the small pet business whose website was insufficiently accommodating declared bankruptcy, and then wrote about the experience for UnHerd.
Complaints about serial litigant abuses under statutes like the ADA typically emphasize the economic effects. Investment and innovation don’t happen, small businesses go under. For many Americans, including Millennials and Gen Z, owning a business is the realization of their American dream and an opportunity to “control their own destiny”; the prospect of its arbitrary destruction through a broken legal system reinforces their economic precarity. When business owners and would-be entrepreneurs cannot even determine what would constitute adequate compliance, laws intended to provide protection instead become another unpredictable feature of the lottery economy.
The social dimension deserves greater consideration as well. These kinds of lawsuits are in part a function of the atomization and isolation that disconnects citizens from one another, making it easier for unethical lawyers and their clients to inflict harm. Is there even a real person behind that website? Why not make a quick buck by effectively blackmailing remote small (and big) businesses with the threat of lawsuits grounded in the misuse of well-intended laws with ill-defined standards of compliance? It’s “legal,” after all. Creating anything of value, sadly, is beside the point.
THE WOLVERINES NEED ANOTHER DO-OVER. Peter Balos comments on another mistake from the University of Michigan, but this time the B1G replay officials aren’t coming to the rescue. University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to ‘Curb Mental Health Crisis’ (Wall Street Journal):
American higher education epitomizes our national shift from upholding standards and pursuing excellence to embracing cheap affirmations and relative truths. Rather than help students understand their own abilities and constraints, perhaps even expose them to adversity or failure, the University of Michigan is opting for participation trophies. “Can handle receiving grades” should be a prerequisite for admission to any university, especially a public one that is in turn setting expectations and helping define success for the K-12 system that feeds into it. Instead, UM seems intent upon taking its own easy way out, handing one to its students, and leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.
RAGING AGAINST THE FLOCK. Brad Littlejohn writes:
Data centers aren’t the only place where the public is now venting its rage against the machines. In some communities, vigilantes have taken to vandalizing the Flock cameras that many municipalities employ for vehicle surveillance and law enforcement, part of a wider backlash recently chronicled by Axios. While automated license plate readers have played some role in law enforcement for decades, AI is supercharging their analytical capabilities, leading to mission creep as officers move beyond identifying stolen vehicles to predicting just who might be smuggling weed across state borders. A chilling recent essay from Transformer argues that “we’re sleepwalking into an AI surveillance dystopia” reminiscent of the film Minority Report: using algorithms to identify and arrest likely criminals before they can cause trouble.
In many ways, we’ve already made our peace with a post-privacy society and turned the Fourth Amendment into a dead letter, but we used to console ourselves that even if someone, somewhere was tracking our every move and keystroke, no one would ever be able to sort through the terabytes of data. Thanks to machine learning, that’s no longer the case. Advocates of this surveillance society will claim, perhaps correctly, that it will make us safer—and indeed our incentive structures of risk mitigation will always tend to function as a one-way ratchet in favor of more monitoring and less liberty. But liberty isn’t the only thing we sacrifice on the altar of safetyism; perhaps worse is the tendency of such a panopticon to deaden us into collective irresponsibility. In a world where the AI cameras are always watching, no one needs feel any obligation to intervene to stop a shoplifter or carjacker. Citizenship, it turns out, is a lot more work than being watched over by machines of loving grace.
AND FINALLY, R.I.P. WENDELL BERRY. Abby, again:
Wendell Berry died last week, leaving behind an incredible legacy. He had an ability to stand outside time, to live according to his values and one one else’s. He was an advocate and a prophet; a poet and a farmer. He understood deeply what it is to be a citizen, not merely a consumer, and examined the obligations we have to each other and to our land. John Carney at Breitbart explores how this led Berry not to nostalgia, but to a rich vision for the future: “the man who wrote to his fellow Americans for decades from his home in Kentucky did not devote his life to making the past picturesque. He asked how a people might have a future worth inhabiting.”
In The Atlantic, Joe Fassler looks at the other side of this coin, describing how Berry focused his attention on the present: “Obsessing about the future, he argued, also has devastating moral consequences. It allows people to avoid engaging with the urgent realities of the present. … He dared his readers to live in a way that honors the situation at hand, at this very second.” This kind of love of the here and now is more radical than ever in a culture dominated by optimization—multi-tasking, taking work home, always thinking about tomorrow’s to-do list. Berry instead simply embraced the work at hand.
He leaves us with a huge body of written work, but I’ll recommend one essay and one poem here:
“Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer” by Wendell Berry (1987)
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry (1973):
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
YOUR CONCLUDING THOUGHT FROM RECLAIMING AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP:
Decline is a choice, and we can choose otherwise. It is the precise purpose of our republic, as described in our Constitution, to “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In such a republic, a citizenry committed to reconstituting itself still controls its own fate, can still elevate leaders committed to that process, and so has the power to determine its future.
My husband and I have long referred to woke, cancel culture etc as the ‘zombification’ of the country…
I'm amused that AI use by college students has devastated a whole industry in Kenya which used to produce the fake essays.