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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?
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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:
[Music]
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.
[Music]
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 that there is. It’s one of the best and most positive ways that we interact with and contribute to one another. So I do think it comes back to that core, our self-agency and our connection to this great web of humanity. I mean, it comes about through learning.
Beck: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay, it seems like we’re kind of coming away with: The point of learning is that you are able to kind of direct your own experience in this life in a way that you might otherwise, in a lot of ways, just be kinda tossed about on the tides of, like, history and aging. Is that fair to say?
Miller: I think that’s fair to say. And, I mean, to maybe even elevate it a little bit more, especially as a kind of an introverted person myself, I think of my own mind is that’s where I live. That’s ultimately, well, literally at the end of the day, that’s where we’re at. And our mind is our experience, and learning builds the mind that we live in.
Beck: Yes. I mean, ultimately, we are all just, like, in the black box of our own skulls, unfortunately, when it comes to how we engage with the world. We can’t really get out of there. When do you think technology helps with that purpose, and when does it get in the way?
Miller: So I like how you put that question of not good or bad, but more when. And I would add to that how. So instructional designers will always say, You have to start with the end in mind. So, you know, a professor will walk in and say, Well, I heard about this technology or this application, this quiz game or whatever at a conference. Should I do it? And they will always take a breath and say, What are you trying to accomplish? Or sometimes, What problem are you trying to solve? Where do you know that students are going to struggle? That’s where, sometimes, the boost of a technology tool can be helpful. And one case in point that really illustrates this, I think pretty clearly, is this: So there’s this principle or phenomenon called “retrieval practice.” We often contrast it with, for many students, good-faith effort. They think the way to study, say, a list of vocabulary terms, they think, Okay, I’m gonna reread that part of my textbook over and over. I’m gonna highlight, and I’m gonna read it again, and I’m gonna read it again. I’m gonna kind of have a general little gut check and say, ‘Uh, did that feel familiar? Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve got it.’ But what will deliver the ability to retain that stuff you’re reviewing is to close the book and answer questions, even if you don’t know the material very well. It just produces these huge, long-lasting effects that are very, very versatile.
Beck: Socrates was right. (Laughs.)
Miller: Yeah. So how does that figure in with technology? Well, first it was CD-ROM databases that had lots of quiz questions that students could answer, and you could track how the whole class was doing, and students could get immediate feedback. They didn’t have to wait for me to grade. It was great. And then we moved on to things like these little in-class clickers, where the whole class could do retrieval practice and answer a question. And now with AI, AI can generate lots of really high-quality questions, even open-ended questions. We’re no longer locked into multiple choice. So that’s a great example of how—it’s not just like, well, grab a phone, open an app, learning happens. But here’s a principle that helps accelerate this one particular aspect of learning. An expert has gone through and selected and said, Well, here’s what you need to know. And so we marry those two together, and then we get something that actually does deliver something that’s positive for students.
Beck: And when is it not helpful?
Miller: Where it detracts. If there’s something that you want to experience and remember in the moment, that’s a different form of memory. That’s what we call episodic memory. So if I’m finally visiting, say, in my area, the Grand Canyon, and I want to see this and remember this moment, that’s where technology is not necessarily going to help. Even things like—it’s very ironic: We take pictures to remember an experience, but there’s research showing that we remember less from an experience when we’re walking around taking pictures of it. And it’s really just an attention effect. Just these little phones—even if you have it on “Do not disturb,” setting up the shot takes away, takes you out of that moment.
Beck: Right.
Miller: So when that is the concern, technology is not your friend.
Beck: Hmm. That’s so interesting. As you were saying that, I was thinking about, you know, people— whenever you go to a concert these days, right, everybody just has their phone up and they’re recording the video of their favorite song or they’re taking a picture. And I hadn’t thought about it as learning, but I guess in a way it’s sort of like, your memory of your life is like learning the story of your life. So maybe you are not retaining that concert so much.
Miller: Perfect example. Yeah, we don’t have different, you know, pieces of the brain or parts of the memory that are like, Okay, here’s learning; here’s serious learning, and here’s all the other stuff.
Beck: Learning is just everything.
Miller: Learning is an experience.
[Music]
Beck: I guess to drill into it a little more, what is specifically the value of learning a thing that you can just easily outsource to technology and you don’t ever need to do it? Like, I would like to remember my trip to the Grand Canyon, like sure, but I don’t ever need to calculate a tip ever again in my whole life. I’ll just do it on my phone.
Miller: Yeah. And I mean, if that’s really the case, then I say: Have at it; pull out the phone.
Beck: Mm. But is there still, I don’t know, whether it’s philosophical, spiritual, cognitive value of learning a thing that you don’t have to learn? For instance, learning a foreign language when you can just translate it with AI, or learning how to code when, from all reports, it seems like AI is kinda taking over that industry. Is there still value to learning those things regardless of that progress?
Miller: Yeah, and as I’m kinda standing—I think of myself kind of standing at the bottom of a mountain of: I wanna become expert in. And let’s take, for example, I wanna be an expert in fashion design. You know, where does that step start? It starts with really getting into the nuts and the bolts of the construction of what you’re doing. So maybe, if that’s my goal, I wanna learn how to knit a sweater from hand or sew a pair of pants. And even as an expert fashion designer, how many times am I gonna just sit down and sew a garment for a client or just knit something by hand?
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Beck: Probably send it to the factory, right?
Miller: Yeah, you send it to the factory! But to really understand How does fabric behave? Why do I wanna make cable stitches in a particular way? And how is cashmere different than cotton when I work with it? I wonder if there really is no substitute for sitting with it. So it’s not—I don’t wanna make it sound like, Oh, you gotta take your medicine and pay your dues. I don’t think it has to be like that. I think it’s more in the spirit of exploration and the spirit of actually physically seeing: How do the building blocks that I’m gonna work with from here on out, how do those behave? So that’s an argument for learning from the ground up, even when we can look it up.
[Music]
Beck: Okay, this is gonna sound very stupid, but why is or how is AI different than a calculator?
Miller: Okay. AI and calculator. Oh my gosh, talk about a conversational football that we’ve been throwing back and forth in my field right now. I mean, at its core, it does offer a few ways to do things that were time-consuming and maybe even sometimes do them more accurately. Well, that’s where a calculator perhaps is even better than AI in that way. Calculators don’t hallucinate. They are one-trick ponies, but boy, they do that trick really, really well. So that’s one perhaps smaller difference. But AI is not like a calculator in that it can mimic authentic human communication. In, say, contemporary higher education, you hear horror stories of students who are like—you ask them an icebreaker question like “What’s your favorite movie?” and they have AI pick a favorite movie and fill that out. And you’re just going, Oh, why? And here I am on the other end, pouring my heart and soul, and not AI, into this course. And who’s even on the other end? So I think it raises more questions about what’s kind of the contract between professor and teacher and student?
Beck: Yeah. Well, thinking about the calculator comparison, I mean, that’s something that I just hear a lot from people who are, you know, very excited about AI or not too concerned. Just sort of saying, Calculators made us more efficient. They let us just do things better. And we don’t generally consider using a calculator to be morally bad or a sign that we are degrading our ability to think because we did our tip calculation on a calculator. But does AI fall into that similar category to you, where it’s like, Ah, this is just progress. We can outsource stuff we don’t need to do, or is something about it inherently different?
Miller: Well, I do think that it challenges in a new way, in a perhaps a more painful way, our ego, frankly, and our value as educators, and that’s something that I also encourage people to think about. How much of this resistance, if you have it, is because you’re saying, Well the knowledge that I have for you, what I had prepared, what I want to profess, has a different value now than it once did. And I don’t know, but I would wager that there were people back in the day, individuals, who could add, subtract, and divide. That was a high-end skill. And somebody came along with an abacus, and now any old person can do it. Or being able to use a slide rule like my grandfather could do as an engineer. So I kinda keep falling back on those as well. But I think the upside is also potentially so much more vast than a simpler, more targeted one-trick pony like a calculator.
Beck: Hmm. The way that I’ve been thinking about it is like, are you outsourcing a task? Which could be good or bad or neutral, depending on the situation. Or are you outsourcing your own thought process? Which to me is like a betrayal of your own humanity. Is that a reasonable way to think about it or would you frame it differently?
Miller: Mm-hmm. I mean, if I would reframe it at all, kind of the way you’re coming at this, it’s also to me a matter of who’s in control of it? I think that we’re starting to, those of us who’ve tried AI, we’ve started to have that feeling of like: When is it driving the conversation and just doing the thing? And when am I giving instructions? I’ve even played around with— I wish that we could say, instead of, “Oh, ask AI,” “Tell AI.” Wouldn’t that be a different world? Because that’s where AI shines, is when it does exactly what you, the human user, tells it to do. So I would love for us to kind of charge into this, um, with that sense of, I am the boss of you. I am giving instructions. I am telling you. Don’t do—I mean, we learn pretty quickly. That’s one of the most useful phrases that you can share in something like a ChatGPT is, “Do not write or draft or change until I tell you to.” So perhaps we can start to approach that and share with our students more planful and intentional ways of getting to that point, where there’s a boundary, and the human is putting in the creativity, and the human makes the final call.
[Music]
Beck: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: Does outsourcing our learning pose a threat to democracy?
[Break]
Beck: I’m really curious how you think about all this when it comes to civics and, not to put too fine a point on it, the continued existence of democracy. (Uneasy laughter.) Just because, you know, if people start to abandon learning or, maybe less extreme, abandon control over their own learning like you were saying, what might we lose or what might happen on the level of society and democracy?
Miller: Oh my gosh. That is a really big challenge, and it means that when we go around and say, Well, our fellow citizens should just, you know, develop critical thinking, I, as an educator, go, “Okay, yes, they should, and oh my gosh, that’s hard.”
Beck: And like critical thinking for what?
Miller: Yes, critical thinking for what? And it’s simply hard. I sometimes say that critical thinking is like learning to walk on your hands, you know, or any kind of formal reasoning. We can do it if we’re motivated to do it. Nobody does it as a default. Nobody comes in and says, Oh, here’s something in my feed that says, you know, lemon juice will cure every disease I know, and I should just drink lemon juice. I think we’ve all seen those blog posts that go by.
Beck: Yeah, the terrible ads at the bottom of articles. “One mom discovered the secret to anti-aging.”
Miller: Yeah, discovered the secret to anti-aging. You need to think critically about that. But you need something on the order of six weeks, a whole semester, or more to really produce measurable gains. So we do not need to fear that the presence of AI is gonna wipe out critical thinking. In fact, though, we do need new critical-thinking skills. There’s even research on visual critical thinking, which all of a sudden we need to know, like, how do you look at a photograph and get some immediate red flags of: Is this AI-generated or not?
Beck: Oh yeah, that stresses me out.
Miller: It stresses us all out. So we need it, and this is the time for us to speak up and say, What are the ways that we can use our technology to develop critical-thinking skills, and how can we challenge ourselves to resist those biases that are at the center of a lot of critical thinking? So things like: Don’t just cherry-pick what you agree with or feels good on a gut level. Don’t just go with anecdotes. Be sure you understand correlation versus causation. All of those things are incredibly important, and technology can be a positive here, but only if we’re very, very deliberate about it.
Beck: Mmm. Often when we talk about technology, right, we mean a pretty small slice of technology, like modern digital computing-based technologies. And as we were saying, like, knitting is technology; archery is technology. Many things are technology. They’re just not new. So I wonder, would expanding our minds about what technology actually is make a difference in how we think about using technology to learn, how we learn alongside technology? Do you think that would change anything?
Miller: Well, I think yes, in the sense—especially in the sense if we talk about our relationship to it. And we sometimes do speak about it like something that came from outer space and was just sort of imposed on us. And we have to remind ourselves, technology, whether it is a knitting needle or it’s a social media or a chatbot, is something that, at least collectively, we human beings created because it did something that we very much wanted. And so it is part of us. And sometimes I, you know, instead of thinking of it as this external thing that showed up, think of it as a mirror. And I would also steer us away from, if I could, thinking of it as this environmental pollutant. And that’s hard because that is a very sort of clickbaity—we wanna see, like, Oh my gosh, exposure to technology does X, Y, and Z to kids, or is affecting my brain in some way.
Beck: Like it’s a carcinogen.
Miller: Yes, it’s almost like it’s like smoke or, you know, electrical waves from some place. But it’s not a pollutant. It’s not a carcinogen. I don’t think that that’s an appropriate metaphor. And when we talk about it that way, it does steer us into that binary, right? Like, should children be around cigarette smoke? No, they should not. Probably nobody should be around secondhand smoke. But with technology, it’s like, well, all right, but what was the type of use? What was the level of use? We see this all the time in research on technology. It’s not the hours on a smartphone, for example, that makes the big difference in cognitive or even mental-health factors. It’s: What were you doing when you were on it? So getting back to: What are you doing with it? Why are we doing it that way? Why did we even build a technology that could do this at such a high level, and why did people want it so badly? In my ideal world, that’s how we would talk about technology.
Beck: I wanna go back to something you said about standing at the base of the mountain. You wanna become an expert in something. Even if you’re standing at just a little hill, right? And you don’t even wanna be an expert in something, but maybe you just wanna be okay at it. For instance, I’m trying to learn Korean right now. My in-laws are Korean. It’s hard. My brain is aging. I don’t retain vocabulary as well as I used to. I could just hold the phone up and have it translate for me, but I feel like that wouldn’t be the same. So I guess I’m curious, not just when you’re on a journey to becoming an expert in something, but when you’re just trying to learn anything to be a little bit better at it, or to be pretty good, is there still value in learning that thing that you could outsource or that you don’t have to learn?
Miller: Languages, as always, they’re kind of their own special category, right? And the thing with spoken language: They’re real time. The substantial amount of time and energy. I mean, there’s always opportunity cost, especially in learning a language. I can think of nothing else where it’s like, if you’re gonna—it’s not gonna be a hill. It’s going to be a mountain, and you’re going to need to climb and climb and climb, and there’s a lot of things you’re gonna have to let go that you can’t learn and you can’t do if you choose that one. But that’s up to you, and you’ve got this clear picture of: Here’s where I’m gonna be on the other side. I am going to be able to speak in my own voice with no delay, with no weird barrier in between us, to these people who I love and care about. And that feeling too, you’re probably experiencing that, and I think this is common to lots of things that are difficult to learn. Barebow archery, I mean, when you hit that bullseye, wow, you feel it. And when you have the words coming out of your own mouth and your own brain? That feels really, really good. I mean, that’s your brain’s reward systems kicking in. Our reward systems don’t just kick in over, you know, sugar and doom scrolling. They kick in when we get it right, and that’s your opportunity to get it right.
Beck: Yeah. That’s so true. And going back to the, like, building the brain you wanna live in, like you said, I mean, people will always say, and I find this to be true, that if you think in a different language, like you do think differently. You are almost a slightly different person in a different language, when you embody a different language, than in your native language. And so if you outsource that, then you maybe lose that opportunity to find out who you are in Korean, to find out who you are in French, or whatever it may be.
Miller: Yes, and a plug for language learning as well. I mean, we haven’t quite gotten into this other highly practical aspect of learning, but time and again, we’ve seen that really substantial learning projects, like learning a language in particular, may offer a buffer against, you know, some of the typical changes that come with age and possibly against some age-related diseases and disorders. Now, that said, I always caution people: Don’t think of the brain as a muscle and you’re just gonna build it up. But when it comes to something like actually jumping in and learning Korean. I mean, you’re physically building whole new structures in your brain, and that can actually help. So we could see some real improvements if we did make even greater—if we did invest even more as a society in serious lifelong learning.
[Music]
Brennan: Julie, from what I am hearing from your decision to learn Korean is that a core part of the answer to the question that we posed at the beginning of this episode—why we learn things we don’t have to—is that to you, that intention matters right? It’s a way of showing your devotion.
Beck: Yeah, I mean, a machine might be able to say what I want to say in grammatically perfect Korean. Or maybe not; I do think machines sometimes miss out on cultural nuances. But regardless, I have to imagine it means more to people hearing me try and make mistakes and make that effort to connect.
Brennan: Right, like trying is the meaningful part.
Beck: Yeah. You know, there’s this quote from the writer Oliver Burkeman that I really like. And he wrote, “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort—which is to say the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”
Brennan: Yeah, like that feels like the point of learning to me. Learning is a way to engage more deeply, whether that’s engaging with a relationship, engaging with the world around you, or engaging with your own mind. Like Miller said, building the brain you want to live in. Whatever you’re learning, learning is a way to invest care.
Beck: Yes, totally. And that really brings me back to the question of: What is the connection between learning and democracy? Or between learning and being a good citizen? And I think it’s that. Like, do you care enough to engage, or don’t you?
[Music]
Beck: That’s all for this episode of How to Touch Grass. This episode was hosted by me, Julie Beck, and co-hosted and produced by Natalie Brennan with production help from Elena Schwartz. Our editors are Claudine Ebeid and Jocelyn Frank. Fact-check by Gisela Salim-Peyer. Our engineer is Rob Smierciak. Rob also composed some of the music for this show. The executive producer of audio is Claudine Ebeid, and the managing editor of audio is Andrea Valdez.
Beck: Next week:
Jenny Odell: I think we don’t realize how much of our habits kind of live in other people. Like think about it, like when do you pick up your phone? It’s when the person you’re talking to picks up their phone, right? The person picks up their phone, what are you gonna do? Sit there? Stare into space? That habit lives between people.
Beck: I talk with author Jenny Odell for advice about how to break some of those habits and maybe heal your attention span in the process.
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That’s next time on How to Touch Grass.