AI is old enough for Social Security

In 1985, I was involved in a project out of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and under the watchful eyes of some of the leading computer scientists and education philosophers of the day, we were conducting an experiment with the emerging technology of the personal computer. 

We worked with what we called an interactive optical digital data disk as a computer component, and a small motorized device with the child-friendly name of Turtle at the end of a wire, which was plugged into the box of components. The interactive part  was supported by a simplified computer language called Logo. 

Seymour Papert had written a book called Mindstorms where he expounded on accessible computing power creating what he foresaw as a "a radical shift in how human beings, particularly children, develop thinking skills by actively interacting with technology." I was among a group of educators tasked with launching this technology with a nine-year-old crew. 

Papert had a remarkable career, having earned multiple doctorates, and studying under the renowned educator Jean Piaget, followed by arriving at MIT to work with Marvin Minsky.

My thinking for this piece today started with Minsky having popped into my information feeds last week. Dartmouth University introduced a conference at the end of October with the title AI at 70. The university reminds us that John McCarthy from Dartmouth, Marvin Minsky of Harvard, IBM's Nathaniel Rochester, and Claude Shannon of Bell Labs -- yes, that Claude -- met in the summer of 1956 to explore machine simulation of human reasoning. 

Another powerful technology we largely take for granted was also launched that summer. On June 29 1956, US President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highway Act. On reflection, it strikes me as a particularly bright summer for human ingenuity.

By the time I was introducing my third graders to conceptualizing geometric shapes on a computer screen, then directing robots to draw them on large sheets of paper, AI was already 30 years old. We had two technologies for helping the third graders learn geometry and spatial relations. We had the computer, Logo, the turtle; and we had a block corner with 1 inch to 18 inch wooden blocks in various geometric sizes and shapes, together with relational one centimeter cubes, rods, flats and ten centimeter cubes. 

The children got lessons in the potential for both technologies, then were permitted to play, which is to say, voluntarily engage the technologies in experiments of their own devising. 

Students interestingly tended toward one technology or the other. We pretested them in grade-level geometric understanding at the beginning, and we tested them at the end. We made no claim to having done definitive research. The sample size was tiny, the children selected themselves into the use of the technologies. There was no control. All of them used and were influenced by both. 

At the same time, the students who had spent the most time with the blocks scored definitively higher on the tests of geometric understanding. It leaned toward the findings of another line of research in multiple intelligences initiated by psychologist Howard Gardner in which I also participated at the time.

Multiple Intelligences

Those of us who participated in the research got the benefit of having access to the computers for our personal use. It was then I took advantage of the word processing capability for personal and classroom use. We were also allowed to take them home nights and weekends. They were the first portable computers, if you call lugging a 30-pound box out to the trunk of the car, then carrying it up three flights of stairs to my third-floor apartment, portable. It was there that my writer friend, Morse Hamilton, came to my house summer mornings to produce his first word-processed novel, Effie's House. 

This morning I've used the seventy-year old interstate highway system to move efficiently between two states, and I've used a natural language model -- very spry at 70+  -- for research support. At the same time, the LLM led me to the mission of the MacArthur Foundation, "building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world."

AI reminded me, AI and I still have a lot of work to do together.