In this short post, I dig into why a podcast about a teacher using (rather than banning) OpenAI’s ChatGPT program seemed eerily familiar…
If you have a stack of dishes to do or face a 30 minute drive, then don’t miss the January 13th episode of Hard Fork a podcast from The New York Times hosted by Kevin Roose (NYT) and Casey Newton (Platformer).
They interview Cherie Shields, who teaches high school English in Sandy, a small town in Oregon. Shields pivoted quickly into using rather than banning ChatGPT in her classes. (Roose also wrote about her in this NYT article.)
Shields is a master teacher with 30 years of classroom experience, and her decision to embrace rather than ban ChatGPT is fascinating. I admire how she is getting her students to use ChatGPT transparently as a hyper-personalized writing and researching assistant rather than as a way to cheat. Learning how to tune a prompt to the AI helps students to understand the material better.
This is generally true: you never understand something so well as when you have to teach it to somebody else, even if that somebody isn’t human.
After I finished listening to the Hard Fork interview, something nagged at me. This story seemed familiar. Then it came to me: this is the plot of a classic children’s book: Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine from 1958!
Danny Dunn is a classic “good bad boy” of American literature (like Tom Sawyer): mischievous but brilliant and with a good heart. Danny and his widowed mother live with Professor Bullfinch, a scientist for whom Danny’s mother works.
In the Homework Machine book, Danny and his two BFFs (Joe and Irene) get access to MINIAC (short for “Miniature Automatic Computer), a computer that was small in the 1950s because it only took up most of a room rather than an entire building.
As they learn the basics of programming MINIAC, Danny realizes that they can program the computer to do their homework for them—saving time for fun instead of dreary schoolwork! The three friends embark on a series of mad hackathons (although they don’t use that term), pouring all the requirements for their assignments into MINIAC, which then disgorges completed assignments with the right answers.
After adults discover these extracurricular computer science activities, Danny is crushed to learn that nobody is upset because the three kids did a lot more work—and learned the material in a deeper, more complete way—by programming MINIAC than they would have simply by doing their homework the old fashioned way.
Retro futures have fascinated me for a long time. One of the reasons I love science fiction is that you can learn a lot about an era from what they thought the future would look like, whether a utopian future (like Star Trek) or a dystopian one (like Brave New World or The Handmaid’s Tale). Even better, when you compare those futures to how things turned out in reality, the difference between science fiction and real life can help you to understand how we got to where we are.
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