RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Children still learn long division even though calculators exist, and many people continue to study languages even as AI translation becomes faster and more accurate. Is there a deeper purpose for learning that technology will never touch?
In this episode of How to Touch Grass , the co-hosts Natalie Brennan and Julie Beck hear from Michelle Miller, a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University who studies technology and learning. She explains that although the changing tides of tech may shape what and how we learn, as humans we still have the autonomy to build the minds we want.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
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Michelle Miller: Learning is how we build ourselves as individuals, and it’s how humanity shapes its course.
Julie Beck: Michelle Miller has thought a lot about the purpose of learning. She’s a cognitive psychologist at Northern Arizona University focused on attention and memory and how technology shapes education. As she said, learning is a very human endeavor. But what we learn and the kinds of learning we value are shaped by the changing tides of technology.
Beck: I’m Julie Beck, a staff writer at The Atlantic .
Natalie Brennan: And I’m Natalie Brennan, a producer at The Atlantic .
Beck: This is How to Touch Grass .
Brennan: Julie, that sentiment—that what we learn changes with the tides of technology—feels really relevant to a change I’ve noticed in the last decade. I think of coding and how big of a push that was when I was in college to Learn to code or you’ll be left behind. But just a few years later, now my coder friends are really worried about job security, and the thing we’re being pressed to learn is learning how to correctly prompt AI so that it can code.
Beck: Mmm. Yeah, I’ve noticed that too. And the thing that I keep thinking about now that so many people are starting to outsource so many things to AI—coding and other things—one of the biggest questions I keep coming back to is: What is the point of learning something when you no longer have to? When a machine could just do it for you?
Brennan: Well, this is one of those questions that keeps coming back around, right? Why do I need to learn math if a calculator can do it?
Beck: And yet, generations of children still continue to learn math!
Brennan: True.
Beck: So we’ve come to some consensus that there is value to learning long division even if you don’t end up using it much as an adult. But the question feels especially relevant right now, because the kind of things that technology is currently threatening to replace are more wide-ranging and complex than just arithmetic.
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Miller: I look back and I say, At every big turning point in history, how many times was it: and then we learned how to? This is what forward motion really is.
Beck: We really wanted to talk to Michelle about this because she has a really expansive view of what technology is and how it shapes us. Not just whether tech is good or bad for learning, but what kinds of tech help or hurt, under what circumstances.
Brennan: And it all depends on how we use that technology.
Beck: Exactly.
Michelle, I’m curious: Have you learned anything new recently?
Miller: Oh my gosh. Well, one of the things that I’m working on right now is barebow archery.
Beck: Oh, okay!
Miller: So really low-tech, you know, think really traditional wooden bow and so on. And I have a coach, and I share my archery range with a lot of individuals who are doing more of the actual hunting type of archery with the big compound bows. So that’s not me. I’m the lady who’s over shooting at 15 yards just with my little quiver of arrows trying to just get a little bit better every single time.
Beck: I love it. You’re like Legolas.
Miller: ( Laughs .)
Beck: I was gonna ask if, you know, technology was involved in anything that you had learned recently, but I mean, I guess a bow is technology of a very ancient sort.
Miller: It absolutely is. And it is funny, though, that even something that is so almost primal in that very physical, what we think of as low-tech, although it would’ve been high-tech at some point in human history—
Beck: In the Bronze Age or whenever that was, yeah.
Miller: — it’s still complemented these days by technology. And I think of something else that—I went through a relearning journey about starting 20 years ago, which is knitting.
Beck: Mmm.
Miller: But it is fascinating that there, too, you think of something that’s so tactile, so physical, and it’s really enjoyed a resurgence in the modern age because of technology. Because we have the ability to, you know, I no longer have to depend on maybe my great aunt or the lady down the street to show me, Oh my gosh, how to get out of this problem? I have my choice of instructional videos. There’s communities. There’s whole sites that are just devoted to this. So—
Beck: That’s definitely true when it comes to my hobbies. But I want to step way back for a sec, for the big philosophical view. Are you ready?
Miller: Okay.
Beck: What, to you, is the ultimate purpose of learning?
Miller: Ah, the ultimate purpose of learning. I think that there’s a lot of ways that we as people and our minds and our brains evolve and change over the course of our lifetimes, and some of those are kind of out of our control. They’re sort of “nature takes its course.” But the changes that are wrought through learning are the ones that, in a sense, we have the most agency and control over, that we can self-direct. Whether it’s saying, I wanna learn a new crochet stitch, and this would be a way to make something that’s unique or to spend time with people I care about, or to test myself and my own creativity and limits. The way that we can do that is learning. And we’ve talked about the technology angle of it, but it’s still also something really social. I think that teaching another human being how to do something—that is one of the highest and best expressions of humanity tha...
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