Technolandy

Day 18 (of SOL 2025) #tEChursdAI embrace the silence and ponder what jobs are actually AI resistant (or embracing that resistance is indeed… futile)

I am a fan of serendipity – and this week doing some learning from  Will Richardson, I have been simmering with: Be comfortable with the silence. Lean in … Trust and learn from the silence

It made me think of the power of silence – which is part of the reason why so many ‘great ideas’ come to us when we are in the shower… on a road trip.. out on a walk… providing the brain an opportunity to slow down (yes, AI can help this!) but it takes practice to go into the silence:

I have long suggested “boredom breaks” (they always became a popular random moment that would pop up in our school day – I ran things via keynote/powerpoint and would randomly shuffle the break into the routine – building up the rigor to get to 5 minutes of boredom (admittedly, extreme silence) which means: no music… no drawing/doodling… no reading… no chatting… embracing being alone with the brain <— harder than one may think since silence can be very uncomfortable (admittedly with my tinnitus, it’s never actually silent, and why I value having background music/sounds on the go…

And I’ve been glad to see research catching up to this… Silence, Stillness, And The Power Of Profound Boredom

Where boredom may now be considered a ‘privileged mood’ as we tend to prefer different distractions – from podcasts to checking emails to doomscrolling ___ to seeing the delightful bunnies jumping on a trampoline… 

So, where and how might AI help with this? Again, rolling on the theory of leaning into the uncomfortable and against what is more ‘logical’- (logic in education rarely works the way it should on paper – much as my classmates used to joke about communism – great on paper, horrible in practice – although… maybe much like BC’s Year 2000 program, and portfolios instead of report cards, and calculators being available for under $10 (though free apps are still banned by schools banning phones as I suspect there is collusion with Texas Instruments to ensure the $200 calculator becomes a barrier for ‘some kids’ to enter the maths… <— total sarcasm, much like the ‘birds aren’t real’ experiment… or the fake story about how many spiders you eat in your sleep… lets’ see if this conspiracy can also go viral…!)

Why AI to get to boredom? Well, an ‘alarm’ is being sounded: https://apple.news/AZOdBw7f2Sw-ArUhLWgf-0w IF A.I. CAN DIAGNOSE PATIENTS, WHAT ARE DOCTORS FOR?

Indeed… list the jobs that AI/robotcs is not poised to replace… 

1. Live theatre (less so on visual streaming medias)

2. Live sporting events (though esports might be a hybrid)

I think that’s the list… (and not that I think AI/robotics should replace all the others… but it can…

New job: question development (so practice your Design Thinking models!!)

So, I am now repeating a ‘thing’ that one of my high school teachers shared with us – when he went to university, in addition to the English courses (nice to have a published author as an English high school teacher) he also did a lot of learning with physical education – because… keep in mind this is from the middle of the 1900s… the world would be so automated that people will need something to do with their spare time – so the work of PE teachers is going to grow and expand as people will have all the time in the world to explore recreational complexes and do all the activities they could want!

Maybe a tad early…

But, now that technology has caught up… personalizing education works as well as a generalist approach (as highlighted by BC Educations Educated Citizen work <— beautiful philosophy that a bunch of educators like my dad loved in the late 1900s… but neurological learning has likewise expanded, and as a wise role model says… do the best you can, until you know better… 

So, we need to also spend some time teaching some other ‘soft skills’ to help our learners – with such a focus on technology doing things faster, more transparently, more efficiently with fewer errors, and so much scrolling potential (reddit, YouTube shorts, tiktok, instagram, etc etc etc) we need to spend some mindful time being bored (thus my ironically scheduled boredom breaks).

AI can help us carve out time for:

• Being bored
• Guide som reflection strategies
• Keep track of what we are thinking about
• Make our key connections more authentic, and mass emails be taken care of for us

• Moderate when we have moments for pause, if we resist the compulsion to fill the space with sounds, visuals, candies being crushed…

• And mindfully understand, learn, and practice how we might more positively and mindfully use the social media tools that are so powerful, but easily mis/over/-used ~ as it was like a candy store was opened to us without restrictions and we want to blame ‘it’ for our choices… 

• We can have AI tools help better curate our algorithms… set times for how long we go down rabbit holes – because many quiet moments are great opportunities to follow a rabbit hole and uncover the broader warren lying beneath our feet! How else can ‘what song was that’ lead to a fuller understanding of the many iterations of SuperTramp and how that band was so much more influential than I thought… and then led me to better understand my own fascination with dystopian music, not just books that are dystopian/utopian depending on the lens you read it with… 

If AI can take care of some tasks, instead of adding new ones, perhaps we explore more into what could happen if we give more opportunities to more people to follow passion projects (googles 20% time that led to school structures like GeniusHour) which can then lead to the understanding and acceptance that intrinsic motivation will keep innovation and creation happening, and perhaps we can shift to more of a universal income system (sorry, bad for the 1%) and experiment with a few c communities into the Star Trek/Orville view of a utopian future – that does not rely on generating $$ but a persons wealth is instead measured by their contributions to society – which can be as varied as providing live teaching opportunities (the dystopian version is that human-teachers are a ‘value added’ service that comes with a surcharge/tuition so that only some families get that opportunity, because AI teaching its looking like it could do pretty well for a majority of learners…gulp!)  but also being an unparalleled barista who enjoys creating works of art from coffee; – where ‘jobs’ become more artisan and are done because you want to, not because you need a paycheque… yes – significant social upheaval would be part of this – but we can start small… experimental communities (dystopian version: with big walls to keep applicants out) and schools focusing more on soft skills and having reading writing and mathing as the electives.

I know it feels… uncomfortable… but banning things never seems to work (except for bringing some extra attention to some very good books – you have read GenderQueer and not just the out-of-context artwork that gets highlighted, right?) and if we instead focus on how to better leverage and use the digital environments – I am mindful of the warning “they also limit the deeper kind of reflection that allows us to engage with life and ourselves fully. They make us lose the capacity to inhabit silence and confront the unfilled moment.” but that might just be about the way we (mis) use them. I suspect by leaning in we can better unpack FOMO (fear of missing out) and help better articulate this ‘tool of distraction’ much as we have with all the other disruptive medias that started out as attention-stealers that later became much better curated and used to become a bedrock of ‘how did we do anything before?’ = looking at the fad of reading books as the benchmark for this (my reminder blog: https://technolandy.com/2024/12/09/day-67-of-2024-25-maybe-this-reading-words-fad-has-run-its-course-to-read-or-not-to-read-op-ed-for-theatlantic-and-edutopia-to-consider/)

Perhaps the most AI-resistant skill of all isn’t in the coding, nor even through creativity – but our willingness to pause, and in embracing silence… perhaps if AI can automate the noise, maybe our job as educators and leaders is to make sure students still learn how to embrace the quiet – because inside this quiet is where the next questions, not just the next answers, will come from…