Iggy Peck, Architect Is an AI Doomer and Other Things I Struggle to Talk with My Kids About
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by Charles Logan
Part I: I Try and Mostly Fail to Play “Dissect That Sociotechnical Imaginary” with My Kids
I do this thing sometimes. My kids and I will be reading a book or watching a show or a movie and I pause to ask a question. Maybe two questions. Perhaps a third follow-up question. Some might say asking all these questions is annoying. Others might say I’m helping my children begin to recognize the ways the media portray technology. Sure, stopping mid-sentence to inquire about whether drones should deliver food to our door might interrupt the story’s flow, but posing lots of questions is all in service of strengthening my childrens’ technoskepticism (Krutka et al., 2020) on their journey towards deepening their analytic repertoires as philosophers of technology (Vakil & McKinney de Royston, 2022). Or so I say to myself. What do my kids say? Sometimes they indulge me; mostly they don’t say anything so much as they groan.
I don’t blame them. Wedged together on the couch, I can smell the sunscreen and the chlorine on their warm skin, spot the sand beneath their fingernails, signs that they’ve enjoyed another summer day. They’re tired. I know they want storytime, not Dissect That Sociotechnical Imaginary. But what else am I supposed to do when we’re making our way through a volume of Pete the Cat stories and in “Robo-Pete” we learn the origins of the eponymous robot:
I pause. My kids can sense that I’m deliberating. Do I ask my questions? Because I want to hear my kids’ wisdom. I want to know: Do you think Pete should program Robo-Pete to be just like him? What could be some problems with programming a robot to be just like you? What are other ways Pete might have programmed Robo-Pete?
I turn the page. The little bodies next to mine relax into the pillows. We continue the story.
A week or two goes by. We’re back on the couch, this time watching Ada Twist, Scientist. In the episode “DadBot”, Ada builds a robot to help around the house. But this familiar story (see Robo-Pete and riffs on Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”) includes a sequence that feels very relevant to this moment.
Wait wait wait. Did Ada just say since DadBot was built with artificial intelligence that he can think and learn because of AI? I scramble to find the remote so I can ask questions about machines and whether they can think and learn and then Iggy Peck drops this line:
Oh shit! Iggy Peck, Architect, is an AI doomer. How do I talk to a three-year-old and a six-year-old about TESCREALists (Torres, 2023)? Better to wait, I decide, and watch the hijinks unfold.
The observation that children’s media is one way young people are socialized into sociotechnical imaginaries isn’t new. For instance, in her book Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, Audrey Watters discusses The Jetsons and Mrs. Brainmocker, a robot teacher. But it’s one thing, at least for me, to be intellectually aware of the phenomenon–and it’s another thing to be forced to consider how to engage my kids in these discussions in ways that honor their desire to relax alongside my hope that they begin to analyze the ways technology is being told and sold to them.
Because it’s so hard to sit quietly through Ralph Breaks the Internet. Like when we meet Yesss, the head algorithm of the fictitious video-sharing site BuzzzTube.
I want to know what my kids think about a Black woman embodying an algorithm ultimately saving Ralph, a white man, from the virus of his own insecurity. And to point out that Ralph Breaks the Internet was released the same year as Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, a foundational work that analyzes how search engines’ algorithms are encoded with and further deepen anti-Blackness and misogyny. Yesss aiding Ralph and his fragile ego exposes the entire film as a white male fantasy about redemption. Without the willing help of minoritized women like Yesss and a suddenly self-aware band of Disney princesses, Ralph’s violent insecurity would have broken the Internet. Do I ask my kids to reflect on any of this? I don’t. Instead, I decide a start, however small, is better than nothing. I ask my daughter what she thinks of Ralph making videos of himself doing things because other people want him to. I hold off on examining Yesss and algorithms. Some suggestions exist for ways to talk to kids about AI, but for now, I’ll wait. Or should I? I don’t know. Thus: this blog post.
Part II: Building a Library of Critical Technology Media for and by Youth
One purpose for writing this post was to have a place for sharing my observations about the ways contemporary children’s media is shaping how we think about emerging technologies and my personal struggles engaging my young children in analyzing that media. Another purpose for writing this post has to do with sharing creative media and projects that I’ve encountered that take a critical approach to technology. Often these works are produced by and/or for young people, and they’re the kind of things that I plan to read and watch when my kids are older as well as when I return to classroom teaching more frequently after–fingers crossed–another two years of my doctoral journey. What follows is an incomplete list, mostly cobbled together over the last two years in a document that I keep open for copying and pasting while (doom)scrolling Twitter.
Graphic Novels and Short Stories
Power On! by Jean J. Ryoo and Jane Margolis; illustrated by Charis JB
The Civics of Technology community may already be familiar with Power On!, a graphic novel that follows four high school students as they learn about technology’s encoded injustices and organize for change. You can read the authors’ Civics of Technology post to learn more about why they wrote the book.
Beyond Dark Matter by Neta Bomani, Romi Ron Morrison, and Sabii Borno
Originally published in what was then called Logic, which is now Logic(s), Beyond Dark Matter is “a tween zine about time traveling and overthrowing master technologies featuring Gem, a young student who is always on the go, Ms. Johnson, an elder who runs the local community kitchen and Archie, a retired postal service worker and handyman who volunteers at the community kitchen.”
The Future Is Now from European Digital Rights
“These four utopian fictional short stories illustrate some of the obstacles people face when engaging with technology, how people can be part of the solution; and what our collective futures could look like.” I also appreciate that each story comes with an illustration as well as an audio version.
Comics
From The Nib
Coded Resistance by Alexis Hancock and Chelsea Saunders
With resonances of Simone Browne’s Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness, this comic explores how “the Black community has fought back and avoided surveillance through intricate networks and communication for hundreds of years.”
I’m a Luddite (and So Can You!) by Tom Humberstone
Come for a lesson on what the early 18th-century weavers “can teach us about resisting an automated future” and stay for how Humberstone connects the Luddites to other social movements, like the Black Panthers and Vietnam War protestors.
Our Labor Built AI by Dan Nott and Scott Cambo
A good primer on the types of labor–often non-consensual and sometimes traumatizing–involved in building the models used in machine training systems that are now marketed as AI.
“How a computer scientist fights bias in algorithms” from NPR
An interview with Joy Buolamwini plus a comic inspired by the interview.
Zines and Films
Check out “We Teach These Stories to Survive: Towards Abolition In Computer Science Education - Zine Edition,” a collaboration between Stephanie T. Jones, Natalie Araujo Melo, and Mia S. Shaw. And read the original research article too.
Ruha Benjamin’s Ida B. Wells Data Justice Lab
Students in the Ida B. Wells Data Justice Lab have created a lot of inspiring work, including a zine on Shotspotter. The project “Liberatory Technology and Digital Marronage” includes a zine and a Github repository with liberatory forms of different tools.
Sepehr Vakil’s Technology, Race, Equity, and Ethics in Education Lab
The Young People’s Race, Power, and Technology Project is “an innovative research-based curriculum that empowers youth to explore, engage, critique, and reimagine the role of technology in their neighborhoods, schools, and communities.” The program culminates with students creating documentary films, which make for excellent resources if you’re tired of digital citizenship curricula focused narrowly on being nice on the internet. You can view the documentaries from 2020 and the documentaries from 2021. (Full transparency: I’m a member of this lab.)
sava saheli singh’s Screening Surveillance film series
This series of four short films “aims to raise awareness about how large organizations use data and how these practices affect life chances and choices.” Each film dramatizes the harms of surveillance, including in education, healthcare, a workplace, and a “smart” city.
Like I said, an incomplete list. What else would you add? How might Civics of Technology become a central hub for discovering and sharing the work we’re finding and creating as a community? And, selfishly, how do you talk about the intersectional harms of technology with the children in your life? Because I really want to know, and I pinky-promise I won’t blame you the next time I have to pause WALL-E to ask my exasperated kids about whether they think robot teachers are a good idea.
References
Krutka, D. G., Heath, M. K., & Mason, L. E. (2020). Editorial: Technology won’t save us – A call for technoskepticism in social studies. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 20(1). https://citejournal.org/volume-20/issue-1-20/social-studies/editorial-technology-wont-save-us-a-call-for-technoskepticism-in-social-studies
Torres, E. (2023, June 15). TESCREALism: The acronym behind our wildest AI dreams and nightmares. Truthdig. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-acronym-behind-our-wildest-ai-dreams-and-nightmares/
Vakil, S., & McKinney de Royston, M. (2022). Youth as philosophers of technology. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 29(4), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/10749039.2022.2066134