Ultron Wrote My Bio

Vision Quest has been on my mind lately. Particularly how AI is represented: the voices, the personalities, the intentions. Give a machine a little sarcasm and James Spader’s voice, and suddenly I’m willing to hear it out. Historically, a questionable decision.

Naturally, I had an AI-generated Ultron voice read a bio about me.

Could I have written a normal introduction? Yes. Did I need “his tolerance for incompetence remarkably finite” delivered like a threat to civilization? Apparently.

But one line stuck with me:

“Where institutions demand compliance, he proposes evolution.”

That’s where the joke wandered into my actual feelings about education.

We ask children to think independently, then build much of their day around following directions. We tell teachers to differentiate, then expect everyone to stay on the same page. We say every brain is different, then act surprised when the same approach doesn’t work for everyone.

And when it doesn’t work, we often ask how to get the child to fit the system before asking whether the system needs to change.

There’s an Ultron parallel there. Give something a worthy mission, let it become completely certain of its methods, and watch what happens to the people it was supposed to help.

That’s my interpretation, anyway. Education has plenty of people working hard for children. I’m one of them. But good intentions don’t put our routines, expectations, or favorite spreadsheets above questioning.

The audio says I want to “dismantle [education’s] limitations and engineer something superior.” A little dramatic for someone who still has to remind third graders to put their names on their papers.

Still, I do want a classroom where a child can need something different without becoming a problem to solve.

If that sounds ambitious in James Spader’s voice, you should hear it at a faculty meeting.