To my future self: you'll never write a title as snappy as the one I just did. Ok, that's out of the way. This essay is about the unexpected ascendency of self-taught learning in my education. This runs personal but I will make efforts to open the reflection to put space and room between the thoughts. That's where conversation lives, ideally.
I like teachers, was a teacher, and still think very highly of the craft. But I suspect like unhealthy people becoming therapists that I worked as a teacher as a productive revenge against the systems that didn't serve me very well. Public schools most of my life, and these are the uneven US American types. Then a private small college. That was four years of class consciousness creeping and then crashing into my awareness, then a few years after of resenting the experience as a small, isolated, suburban, and detached haven of those with so much money they could have whatever politics they wanted, it didn't matter. I resented the experience maybe two years after graduation, when it dawned on me that most of the classmates I'd admired wouldn't have to work for a living. I maintain that it is very, very personally cool to be rich. For democracy, capitalism, and humanity it is primarily bad. But have you ever met an actually rich person? Their problems are so different, their burdens so weird and inscrutable. Most of them are glamorously crazy. Like all of us they are best at age 20 - still beautiful and apparently protean. In actuality they'll just go off and inherit something, but at uni there's that fun collective fantasy that "anything" could happen in life. I don't miss it and wouldn't go back.
All that is to say that my biggest education at uni was one in class consciousness and class difference. In the short years after before I tried out graduate school, I was imitating my hyper wealthy, opinionated, oriented, and wanderlusting friends from college. In imitation, I actually distanced myself from them. Had I been more like myself, I might still be friends with some of them. Imitation invites the conundrum of familiarity breeding contempt. What they wanted, of course, were a few interesting friends of different classes. Confession: my family is far from poor, but far from rich in the terms these people were used to. It is a privilege to travel to Europe for a family vacation (my family). It is a different state of being to travel to Europe on your family's personal ship, or count among your close relatives a living monarch. I've reached the state of age and distance from this time to say I would not change anything about it (if I thought really hard, I probably could think of a couple of things). Meeting the sons and daughters of famous poets, musicians, politicians and, of course, the more shadowy and less public mover and shaker class of lawyers, financial goblins, and other people who eat money was a valuable thing. I can't call in any fancy favors and I haven't gone to too many glittering weddings, but that's probably for the best. Since the 2000s the class warfare of America has been getting louder, and I think I consciously leaned back from some of these connections.
So maybe I was upper middle class enough to keep up with the vernacular and jokes of the rich and that kept me in good pacing. At times I wonder if I successfully integrated. I must have, in certain moments and at certain times. Rich kids though often have two mixed advantages: as children of divorce they were forced into emotional cynicism early and, as overexposed to worlds of high taste they develop at least the mask of an aesthete earlier on than the rest of us. I got my music from local radio; they got theirs from parents' private collections. I watched films that offended but tempted good taste; they followed film critics' lists. They knew from earlier ages that there really is a better world of creative objects and there really are more enriching ways to spend a weekend. As said before, material goods are the biggest difference between classes but intellectual good are the most important ones.
I was teased almost continually by these privileged peers, not in any devastating way but like papercuts. I sort of deserved it. I didn't know who David Bowie was. I thought Pink Floyd was an underground band. I couldn't and still can't name famous contemporary artists. Talking with the hippie kids with parents extracting wealth through oil or military contracts, I couldn't dance, take reggae seriously, or follow the spotty logic that vegetarianism was impactful politically. That wealthy New Yorkers and wealthy Texans and wealthy Californians could all get drunk at the same dormitory parties without falling into fistfights taught me most of what I still believe about class warfare. There is one war, and it's directed downwards; fights at the top blow over pretty quick.
It wasn't my intention to run so deep into these old memories, except to illustrate how my undergraduate education consisted mostly of my learning what my place in the world was. I got a good education, for the record. I was a decent student and fairly engaged with the professors who put in the effort (as we all should be; it's a rare gift to meet a professor with a pulse). When I graduated, I began reading more and more widely than I had before. Out of the enticing social circles, away from the parties, cut off in a way from the social education, I turned and faced all those lingering questions and famous names floating somewhere in my head, planted there by seminars and exams.
Grad school was far less socially engaging, as I was a commuting student working part-time at a bar. I don't think I have the most consistent views or practices concerning class warfare. Basically I'm not sure of which class I really fit in with. Am I alone, or are you here with me? Class is a tricky thing; much of its definition gets thrown to subjective perceptions of small material wealth. A good joke out of the 2000s tore down (mostly white) young adults telling each other they were 'poor' when they couldn't afford the bar, the club, whatever. What these adults really were was broke - the only thing poor about them was their planning. Really they could call on family ties if things got dicey. This was true, too painfully true, amongst my friends and I. In fact, I'd say it was so fundamental to the deception we'd been taught to replicate that it hurt us in the bones.
Horatio Alger - that bootstrap myth - is like a toxin running in the veins of every US American. Fairy tales can be very, very dangerous things. We know stories of princesses chasing princes doesn't do much for the contemporary world of gender politics. US Americans still cling to the idea that they should (or even could) "start with nothing and reach the top". I'll take a risk and say this has never happened. Those with nothing do not reach the top; maybe their grandkids do. Those who reach the top do not start with nothing. But around the time I was in grad school, a lot of my social circle floated somewhere between nothing and the middle almost intentionally - myself included.
Bringing me to autodidactic practice, or teaching-oneself. If you'd asked me prior to or during the PhD I would have said this practice played some role in my life, sure, but it was tertiary to the real education I was getting from institutions and formal educators. Now, though, I'm not so sure. There's the possibility I've simply forgotten what my mentors, parents, and teachers taught me, and they'd be unhappy or irritated to know I can't remember it all. If that's the case, I have to beg forgiveness; I know not what I do (or did, or learned).
And maybe it's that in youth we are strictly and formally taught if for nothing else to be socialized and disciplined. Don't run around, don't scream, don't spit, and so on. Then by adulthood as we approach abstract thought in fuller forms, the lessons cannot be so simple and so do not feel as handed down. Add to this that Horatio Alger myth driving so many US Americans' imaginations. Blend the immigrant story with the poison of Ayn Rand and you've got a worldview that sees people as, really and truly, all alone. So we victimize ourselves as forgotten rather than products of the systems around us and determine the only way through is out, and it's time to hustle to reach the top of a clearly unjust system.
Thumbing through old books, good and bad, in used shops and clicking through online databases, I think I thought exactly along these lines: no one was going to show me these things so I had to find them for myself. My rich friends in college were all disappearing into their predetermined paths of home ownership and helium-balloon careers (meaning of course that their pay was going up and up, but also that their voices were getting smaller). In grad school I met people I should have actually been better friends with: most were working, some were much older, most had similar experiences to me. If there's a great 'miss' in my life, it's probably my not going full-time in grad school, living near campus, and nurturing a real community. But that wouldn't be very Ayn Rand of me, now would it?
LLM loops
I'm at an early stage of my relationship with LLMs. I held out on using them, as I did smartphones in the 2000s because I was wary of their addictive features, data extraction, and constant surveillance. For the record and for all time: we smartphone skeptics were basically correct about everything. But to say the world is wrong isn't to say it can't carry on. Somehow with all the evil in it, the human world just thunders or rolls or slides on. I got a smartphone sometime in my mid-20s, five or six years after most of my friends. (I remember one friend of mine being so surprised I finally got one; and in the next 2-3 years I went through 2-3 of them, as they got stolen. I maintain that they are very stupid).
My lesson from smartphones was it's better to know your murderer than get killed by a stranger. Or, something clever and folksy like that.
The 'workflow' I've developed so far feels like I'm managing the most helpful and most drunk personal assistant in history. I ask for something, it gives it to me. Immensely gratifying. But there's little thought from me, and even less from it. So first two characteristics are bound up together:
1) Instant gratification
2) A hollow product with no process
Thus we dive into the tinkering; the extensive prompt engineering or prompt art, whatever you'd like to call it. This is where I feel the tool becomes a toy, or the toy becomes the tool, or the wall between the two breaks down. Were this a conventional creative process, the dissolution of toy/tool would be desirable. This is where conventional work would perhaps enter into flow.
With LLMs so far, I feel instead that the 'flow' is still bound to a feeling of being a delegating manager or producer rather than active maker. I am sorting and arranging ideas rather than pulling them from air. They come to me, perceptually out of thin air via the bot, yet they come in strange form and uneven in quality and execution. With some of the imagery I've asked for, I realize simultaneously that I could/need to spend much more time asking for changes and that I just don't have an interest in doing that. Thus, the third characteristic is something like:
3) the human is the Executive Producer
The fourth characteristic undergirds the others, so maybe it should come first in later drafts of these ideas. It's the basic insight that this process relies heavily upon the linguistic capacity of the human. The more verbose, specific, articulate, and referential I can be in my requests, the closer what is made comes to what (I think) I want. This is said elsewhere, even in the tutorials for the bots, but it's still too important to be left off the list even if it's redundant:
4) Linguistic skill is essential
There's a long, probably mostly stupid and dull, road ahead of me working with LLMs. Potentially this road is for all of us who wish to stay professionals in this era. I feel I have to learn to be comfortable with being an Executive Producer rather than a craftsperson. Or, maybe the craft that takes center stage is that of the prompt-engineer, and I'll have to get better at speaking out my thoughts.
Maybe one more characteristic to explore here:
5) The magic is tempered by the need for patience
I should find a better way to say this, but I hope it's clear in that wording. There is that instant gratification, that almost magical feeling of watching something said become something that can be seen. How can I know what I think until I see what I say? One of my favorite stupidly clever quotes, and it gets new meaning in the age of LLMs, for instead of having to imagine something, we can produce visuals of it. I'm not convinced imagery is superior to imagination, or that bots are the solution to the problems real artists contend with. LLMs are economic engines, not soulful craftsmen. They don't solve any of the real problems humans have, unless you think stock prices and deadlines are real problems in which case we must say: stop reading this and go read a good book.
That the magic of LLMs is tempered by the need for patience makes me wonder if this period of awe regarding the new tech will repeat the pattern of previous periods of awe: we will discover that TV cannot really be educational, that electric vehicles still cause traffic and their production still squeezes resources, that in connecting everyone the internet gave a lot of stupid people undue fame and power. I contend that new tech doesn't create new problems; it rotates us around a wheel that we as a species are bound to, of solutions and problems. We oscillate between our deadly sins, our base instincts, our higher aspirations, our soulful connections.
Autodidactic Practice and LLM Loops
In these four characteristics, I see the great potential for autodidactic practices to sweep over huge masses of people. It's already here in the enthusiasm of early adopters: they say they 'talk' with these bots for hours, just asking it questions.
What happens to the ideas surrounding education when a cheap or free tutor is distributed to anyone with a smartphone? This is the question I want to use to tie everything together. I reflected at length on my difficulties throughout my educational career related to balancing my social life, the coursework, and the troubling reality of class difference that ultimately made the deepest impression on me. Try as I might, I was never quite comfortable with the really rich kids I was in class with, and there were even fewer times that I felt I really connected to a professor. I am not one of the lucky ones to have established a real friendship with a mentor in my life (not yet, and I'm in middle age so mentors look different now I suppose). In a real sense, my education was solitary because the US American system teacher people to think and act that way. I really believe that, and it would take a great deal to convince me otherwise. For I do not think I was alone in being alone; it takes the individualistic habits of everyone in a society to create a society of loners. Had I been pressured to be less ambitious and striving, maybe I could have leaned away from the rat race and towards the social and communal projects a lot of happier if less ambitious people engaged with. I remembered distinctly a housemate in grad school telling me he wanted enough money from a good job, and the rest was all family, friends, and fun for him. No great aspiration to reach the top of the money pit (and it is a pit, despite how tall they build the buildings). No big plans to buck a generational trend, become a generational legend, or change the cultural landscape around him.
His words stick with me mainly because, finally in middle age, I understand him.
With LLMs there is an immense threat that Ayn Rand's zombie continues shuffling around us, whispering in our ears. Who knows what she'd think of bots; moreover who cares about her thoughts at all, except that they have influenced the influential, who exert that influence through vulgar and explicit peons to money as a value in of itself. Like we live with war crimes and historical genocides, US Americans have to live with the emptiness of selfishness Rand pushed. LLMs won't help. They look and sound like everyone's best bet at becoming a millionaire, given the right idea and enough hard 'work' of Executive Producing.
No accident that the bots frequently start with a prompt saying: what are we working on? Nothing shocking about my first idea with LLMs was to see if they could help me produce a video game concept I've kicked around for a couple years (and that I spent 4-5 hours developing those ideas with the help of the bots).
Political economy would advise us to see where real power lies. The bots may help us incidentally as their real goal is to extract data, centralize knowledge, and leverage this incredible amount of expert experience and talent to become superbrains that can...well, all I can think of writing after the word 'superbrain' is something out of the dumbest science fiction. Smarter people than me are going to figure out what to do with the data LLMs as siphoning out of the law firms, medical professionals, and professors currently addicted to their magic boxes. Surely something smart and devastating can be done "with AI".
So it may be that we all create a superbrain by acting like autodidactics, talking to our bots more than our own brains (and much less other people). The feelings I had in education, of class warfare, social integration, looking for mentors, might just keep recurring across my lifetime. Instead of finally arriving in a place where I find a real community and settle down into something that feels conventionally and instinctively like a human home, I'll only find towns and cities nearly silent and emptied of people on the street, as the people are not out in the public square, but at home tinkering away with prompts.