Children of the Code

Critical thinking, creativity, crisis and the cringeworthiness of excessive alliteration

On the 5th and 6th of July 2019, Goldsmiths, University of London, will host the 8th annual London Conference of Critical Thought (LCCT), the second time it has done so. The laudable ethos for this institution-hopping event stems from the fact, according to the first conference’s organizers, that they

all felt that the most interesting panels and papers always seemed to appear at the margins of the event and the margins of disciplinary boundaries more generally. From this we were inspired to find a means of developing and sustaining the sense of community we found on these margins. Central to this vision was an interdisciplinary, non-hierarchical, and accessible event which made a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emergent academics. For these reasons we decided against the common practice of including keynote speakers. It was also agreed that the conference must be free to attend.

On a total sidenote, compare this last point, to slightly unfairly pick on one example out of myriad others, to EdTechX Europe 2020’s pricing structure, with its more than 60 keynotes and its snip-at-the-price early bird rate of £382.80 — given that this represents 60% off entry, I’ll let you do the maths should you ever be worried about being a tardy little bird.

Anyway. The LCCT typically bases itself around a number of guiding ‘streams’, towards which writers, researchers and practitioners in a variety of fields can propose a paper, and each of these streams is generally open-ended enough that the remit of papers proposed might fit one or another. In effect, they each serve as a sort of mini-conference in and of itself, spread across various sessions during the two days, and in 2019’s edition, they include such weighty fare as ‘Art Manifestos: The Future of an Evolving Form’, ‘Radical Ventriloquism: Acts of Speaking Through and Speaking for’, ‘Difference, Evolution and Biology’ and ‘Rethinking New Materialisms: Ethics, Politics and Aesthetics’. The nature of the conference, with its roots in a number of flavours of Critical Theory, can sometimes be rather radical, if somewhat theoretically heavy and wordy.

Nevertheless, amongst these streams, there lies one in particular that captured my attention: ‘Automating Inequality: AI, Smart Devices and the Reproduction of the Social’. In its call for papers, stream organizers Juljan Krause and Matthias Benzer observe the following:

The growing pervasiveness of AI and machine learning, the ubiquity of smart devices, the increasing appification of social worlds and the Internet of Things pose unique challenges for philosophy, social theory and cultural criticism. If inequality is increasingly being automated so that discriminatory practices are now routinely performed by machines, who — or what — is the object of critique? Today, neural networks make independent decisions that are not derivable from observable starting conditions, leading to a ‘black-boxing’ of AI decision-making that complicates notions of the relationship between knowledge and power.

While this is more than interesting in and of itself — the main point being that social inequalities and power structures could potentially (yet at the moment unknowably) be preserved rather than ameliorated by technology — I would like to focus for a moment or two on a question this raised for me (and maybe did for you too), instead of the ins and outs of that particular observation/debate. Let’s assume that increased reliance on technology does indeed simply repeat (maybe even exacerbate) such social problems as inequality and discrimination, as Krause and Benzer suggest. Is there any way of avoiding this in the future?

Again, just to offer one of many responses to this question, we could look to properly educate the next generation of technological progenitors, to get them tech-ready and on a level playing field with each other from an early age, to inculcate in them a sense of technological and social responsibility that they in turn pass on (osmotically or directly) to the programmes and machines of tomorrow. In short, we could do what many have been suggesting or actually doing recently, and start teaching children how to code.

Such an idea is not new, as evidenced by John Naughton’s impassioned piece in The Guardian in 2012, unambiguously titled ‘Why all our kids should be taught how to code’, and as David Buckingham points out, in the UK at least, this ideas goes yet further back, to the dawn of true personal computing in the 1970s.

In the present day, technology company Tech Will Save Us — well, it may not really need spelling out — believe that tech will save us, and therefore produce educational, programmable ‘toys to prepare us for the future’, as a prominent tagline on their website has it, while in a similar vein, Ali of Code Created writes:

Raising a generation of children who can code will have massive benefits to our future economy. Children are playing video games, using social networks, and texting their friends on a daily basis — understanding how these devices, apps, and services work is not only important to their education, but it’s something that children are genuinely interested in.

Teaching coding puts children in control of the computer and lets them turn into reality the amazing and creative ideas they have, whilst mastering concepts such as logic and consequences. At the same time, skills learnt during programming workshops and coding sessions carry over into other subjects, and likewise the reverse is true. Maths, for example, is critical to programming, and artistic and design skills play a massive part too! Likewise, teamwork, and social skills can be developed through coding — we’ve seen pupils who wouldn’t typically get along, bond over their love of videogames and create some really interesting and creative work! (from ‘Why all primary and secondary school children should learn how to code!’)

Several bold claims are made here: that children coding will impact the economy; that coding will let them ‘master logic and consequences’; that it can proffer other important transferable soft skills; and that it will make them more sociable as well as creative. However, claims like these, not at all exclusive to Ali, are a bridge too far for Buckingham, who retorts that ‘ there is no convincing evidence that learning computer programming enables children to develop more general problem-solving skills, let alone that it will “teach you how to think”, as its advocates claim”.

A swift aside with a big fat pin in it here, namely, Buckingham’s wording in specifying ‘how to think’, not ‘what to think’. The distinction is important, as I hope to show.

Buckingham goes on to say that even the economic arguments for a deeper technological education for children are fallacious:

The idea that compulsory Computer Science will create employment is certainly dubious. Computer Science graduates routinely top unemployment tables. The reasons for this are complex. Black and ethnic minority students make up a much higher proportion of computing graduates than in other subjects, and they are generally more likely to be unemployed than white graduates — thus pointing to some of the limitations of attempts at ‘widening access’.

In some ways, this bolsters rather than dismantles Krause and Benzer’s position that technology’s onward march merely reaffirms social inequalities, even with progressive educational and economic factors considered.

So, to repeat my earlier question: is there any way of avoiding this in the future? Buckingham doesn’t discard the teaching of coding to kids wholesale, saying there is no harm in it for those who want to do so, so long as it is not something enforced by curriculums nationwide, and as to the economic side, he has some other suggestions:

If the government wants the UK to become a leading player in the global technology business, it may be much more in need of creative entrepreneurs than programming drones. Likewise, if we want to revive our flagging position in the games design industry, we need imaginative scenarios and compelling characters, not just lines of code.

Certainly, balancing coding skills alongside Buckingham’s call for ‘compelling characters’ and ‘creative entrepreneurs’ seems like a happy middle ground, if such a terrain could be effectively established within early education or even elsewhere. However, whether or not you or I agree with Buckingham’s overall sentiment is not so much what is at stake here for me, whilst his closing remarks match up better with how I would like to close here myself. He writes that ‘what’s self-evidently missing here is any more critical understanding of technology, and its role in society, politics and culture. Without this, compulsory coding would seem to be just another way of disciplining children, or wasting their time’. We can decide to teach kids how to code whilst also teaching them the reasoning that led to such a decision and that it was not necessarily one that was clear cut.

Exposing children to the guts and brains of technology just because it is prevalent in society, and will be more so in the shaky future that belongs to them, could be nothing but a form of teaching ‘what to think’ rather than ‘how to think’. Would it be so radical, so unthinkable, to teach young children philosophy and critical thinking, so that whether or not the technology of tomorrow were pernicious, or messianic, or something else entirely, they could evaluate the situation and act? Could they not learn to decide these and naturally other things for themselves? Or is it too much of a stretch to countenance that the future’s saviours may need more than transferable skills from coding (or any other school subject) in order to navigate the opaque world to come? It’s one to ponder, but if you think not, then it may ultimately spell the end for events like the LCCT — not that I think they would mind.