Cognitive Pollution

A couple of weeks ago, I used Claude to vibe code three formative assessment widgets to use in Jupyter and Marimo notebooks. It took less than two hours to get them working, and another 15 minutes to build a fourth. Given how rusty my JavaScript is, and how little I know about the AnyWidget protocol, I believe it would have taken at least a couple of frustrating days to write them by hand. I only have a high-level understanding of how they work (mumble mumble traitlets mumble mumble), but since they are exploratory proofs of concept, I’ve told myself that doesn’t really matter.

Two weeks from now, I will fly from Toronto to London, then to Edinburgh. By doing so, I will be responsible for the emission of approximately one tonne of CO2. That won’t do any measurable harm on its own, but when combined with the emissions of several billion other people, it will make the world my daughter inherits poorer and more dangerous in countless ways. I know that, but I’m still going to get on the plane.

Here’s another analogy. Synthetic opioids have destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people, and while low-level dealers are routinely incarcerated, none of the Sackler family has ever faced serious consequences. On the other hand, the only thing that made the last few months of my brother’s life bearable was a steady drip of those same drugs. I would fight hard against them being banned, but I would also fight hard against them being completely deregulated.

Here’s a third thought. My brother died of mesothelioma, a cancer that is caused by exposure to asbestos. We grew up in a logging town on Vancouver Island; he did cleanup work at the local sawmill as a teenager, but it took decades for the cancer to manifest. I expect it will similarly take years or decades for us to discover the effect chat bots tuned to maximize engagement have had on what young men believe about what women enjoy.

What ties all of this together for me is:

1. AI is useful.

2. It is already causing harm.

3. Saying “just don’t use it” isn’t going to have any more effect than saying “just don’t fly” (or preaching abstinence to teenagers).

4. The people driving the AI goldrush have proven that they don’t care about anything except adulation and profit.

We now recognize the ill effects of the cognitive pollution caused by social media. I believe current attempts to address them via age verification are naïve; I think it would be more effective to regulate or ban the use of algorithmic ranking based on personal data, but the truth is that I don’t know. I don’t know enough about how safety standards became normal for the chemical, pharmaceutical, food, and transportation industries to feel that my opinions about regulating AI are worth listening to. What I do know is that people have devoted their careers to studying these things, and would probably be willing to explain them to us if we asked.

Looking back, I’m very glad that I took the time to learn a bit about evidence-based pedagogy before telling other people how they should teach. I therefore think that before we make recommendations about what anyone ought to do about AI, we ought to find out what has and hasn’t worked elsewhere. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, but I still don’t know how to make it happen.