When is your job no longer a job?

There’s a thought experiment beloved of philosophy professors called Ship of Theseus. Without taking a trip into Greek mythology, which isn’t really my strong point, the basic idea is that if you gradually replace elements of a ship over time, you’ll reach a point eventually where none of the current components were part of the original. And, at that point, is it actually the same ship?

I now have a new version of the thought experiment.

If you replace every element of a teacher’s job with AI, is the person standing in front of the class still a teacher?

I ask because the BBC is reporting that staff in schools have been given permission to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to help ‘speed up’ marking and write letters home to parents. A hilarious example from the Department for Education suggests prompting a bot with an existing letter about nut allergies and asking for it to be turned into one about nits. (The headlice letters at my own kids’ primary school used to have huge images of the critters at about 50 times their actual size for effect. I guess AI could produce those too now.)

I think we could all agree that the nut and nit letters are drudgery and that teachers might be more usefully employed doing something else. But, to my mind, that would be something like err… marking the kids’ homework.

Except, no.

Apparently marking’s drudgery too and it gets in the way of teachers doing their actual job. So let the AI do the marking! After all, the poor children will probably have done their homework using AI anyway, so there’s not much point in too much head-scratching over it. Unless, I suppose, there’s an outbreak of lice.

So now the teachers are free to spend more time on things like planning lessons. Although, to be fair, that’s just the kind of thing that AI is really good at, so they’d probably be silly to waste their time with stuff like that.

You can see where this is going, can’t you?

Yes, the teachers can spend more time in the classroom in face-to-face contact with the pupils, although unless the timetable expands into the evening and weekend, it’s a little difficult to fathom quite how.

And in my recent book AI and the redundant human, I discuss the private school in Texas that doesn’t actually have any teachers at all. That’s because the children have bespoke AI tuition via computers for a couple of hours a day, while non-qualified minders watch over them. These adults can give hints as to how to get the most out of the tech, but are not qualified in the subject matter.

This is all part of a wider craziness that has taken hold in the discussion about AI and jobs. It’s not specific to education and goes across a range of different sectors.

The basic premise is that you’re currently wasting your time at work doing a lot of irrelevant and annoying stuff. If only you could be free of the form-filling and minute-taking and document-writing and spreadsheet-filling, you’d be available to do the really important stuff that you would like to be doing and which is fundamental to your job description. Your employer, who imagined they were paying you for actual work for the past five years, will be delighted to find you can now actually do it.

There are two fundamental problems with this nonsense.

The first is that for many people, their whole job may be form-filling, minute-taking, document-writing or spreadsheet-filling and when you take it all away, there’s nothing left. RIP. (I’ve seen the self-appointed gurus on LinkedIn advising people to focus on the more creative and strategic part of their roles to survive, ignoring the fact that most people aren’t actually employed in creative or strategic jobs in the first place.)

The second issue is that if you do have other more important parts of your job to focus on, they will almost certainly be just as vulnerable to AI encroachment. There will be continual attrition.

Eventually every part of your job has been replaced. And you may be left pondering whether you are really you any more.