Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming education at an unprecedented rate, reshaping school systems, classrooms and student behavior. By enabling machines to analyze data, learn patterns and emulate creative activities such as writing, educators view generative AI as a disruptive technology that has diminished incentives to get students invested in their learning and academic growth. Although AI can certainly support academic success, its misuses, which can range from generating completed writing assignments to bypassing plagiarism checks, pose challenges to student growth and academic integrity. Educators worry that if AI becomes less of a tool and more of crutch, a path that seems possible as student AI use skyrockets, this dependency will ultimately diminish autonomy, creativity and critical thinking as students rely on generated content instead of developing their own ideas.
The gap between short- and long-term thinking helps accounts for the discrepancy between teacher and student perspectives on AI. Many students view generative AI as a lifesaver for meeting short-term goals such as deadlines and passing classes at a time in which admissions competition is rife, and the high school diploma has become essential for economic well-being. Meanwhile, teachers are worried about the health of society and the long-term fate of the student in a social environment marked by widespread dependency on generative AI. Although students may struggle to see the bigger picture of constant prolonged AI use, novels have historically been a way to enlarge students’ worldviews, and many believe they can encourage students to think about the long-term social effects of AI.
Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995) is an excellent resource for this task, with the novel receiving cosigns from historians of education and cultural critics at The Atlantic. Stephenson’s dystopia portrays a future without traditional notions of work due to the widespread availability of artificial intelligence technologies that have the power to make objects on demand, effectively eliminating the need for most manufacturing jobs and most incentives for citizens to learn related skills. While this future seems to create a society in which creative energies are freed, allowing individuals to transcend seemingly rote and redundant activities, the novel also explores the social challenges and inequalities that arise from this radical reorganization of labor and human-skill development.
In profound ways, The Diamond Age embodies a world educators fear, a world in which human beings offshore literacy, society’s most fundamental cognitive, practical and creative skill to artificial technologies. At the same time, the novel stands to widen students’ perspective, helping them make text-to-world connections by reflecting on the long-term effects of constant prolonged dependency on generative AI. Through guided reflection, this novel serves as a way for educators to get students to see what is truly at stake in a high-tech future marked by high rates of creative and literacy stratification.