Tyranny of Text: Education, Work, and the AI Revolution

I have just visited the Ramesseum, and the statue that inspired Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. This part of the world seems cursed by being the place where ‘writing’ was first invented, religious books written, each granting different groups a sense of stupid, eternal entitlement. They’ve been at each other’s throats ever since. When people dream of text-based heavenly Paradises, they can't see worldly Paradises in front of their eyes.

We are drowning in a sea of 'text' in learning. From 5 to now 25, young people spend almost all of their time reading, writing and critiquing ‘text’ in an educational system because it is easy, creating the illusion that you can assess most skills through text -  you can’t. 

We have decimated vocational learning by sucking up funding into often purely text-based Degree subjects. Lecturing is easy, teaching is hard. Setting essays is easy, assessment is hard. Producing text is now easy, doing things is still hard. Once you see LLMs as producing text as calculators produce good numerical solutions, you relax a bit on AI.

Less is more

AI is not about generating more text. Its true purpose has been in generating LESS text; summarising beautifully, producing grammatically perfect text with no spelling or punctuation errors. Most text is not in books and essays but in mundane communications, as emails, messaging and social media – and AI is largely an aid to communication.  In work and life, communications is often over-long, badly written and error prone. That problem is being solved.

Young people are quite adept at short, concise messaging, they do it all day every day. The problems come from people fed on a diet of long-form text, who tend to see everything as a potential essay, so in organisations and government bureaucracy, which existed long before AI, is text-heavy, the production of unnecessary forms, documentation and reports. AI will optimise and automate this.

Learn by doing

Most of work and life is about doing, most education is about writing. Yet much text production in white collar work may well be automated out of existence. Let’s recognise that AI is now fundamentally multimodal, using speech, images and video, also creating 3D worlds, robots and automated vehicles. This is not to eliminate text, just see it as not primary and over-egged in education, work and life. With multimodal AI and robotics, AI is moving fast into the real of doing, both teaching us how to do things and doing things for us and in place of us. The lines are now blurring, with increased scepticism over text-only education. Education is for both life and living.

AI may have seemed like a text-based phenomenon, but it is proving to be more about communication, speech, robots, data and automation. We will be made more productive by having less text, automating as much as we can out of the system, dissolving text-laden bureaucracy. Most of the critics of AI come from those who deal with text as a living, in education and work.

PODCAST on Invention of writing
PODCAST on Literacy & Orality