The following is a letter that my sister wrote to a Luddite professor she had last semester:

I was a student of yours once. I earned a mediocre grade in your class, and didn’t submit work I feel met my abilities at the time, but passed nonetheless. I remembered some aspects of your teaching, but was reminded of them recently when a friend of mine in your senior year English class mentioned them to me, upset. I’ve thus decided to write you a letter regarding this matter and give you my opinions on it.

I have the impression that your curriculum has lately been analyzing the computer age and its impacts on human culture. This is an important topic and certainly one which needs to be discussed. However, my friend tells me that your approach has been, on the whole, biased, claiming that you’ve said many times that “the information age will destroy us all,” and that you dislike computers and computer people. This is fine as a personal opinion, but not as instruction material in a class meant to educate students on the virtues of literature and methods by which to fine-tune writing skills. I’ve had many good and bad English teachers, but the ones i’ve learned from and respected were those who tore my diction, sentence and paragraph structure to pieces, graded my papers objectively, and encouraged me to dissect literature without the distraction of movies and even their own views.

I am a technology enthusiast. For this reason, I find your stance–or how it has been relayed to me–offensive. You have every right to espouse the opinion that technology is dangerous and dehumanizing–indeed, in some ways this is true. However, advancements in technology are responsible for saving countless human lives. Many of the people closest to me today would be dead without the help of computers. In addition, the popularity of the internet has allowed cultural exchange like never before. Individuals are able to access information from multiple sources with little effort, reducing the influence of biased media. With the help of a computer, an investigation on global injustices is a simple feat; Americans, who used to be confined to a selectively limited media shell, can now explore new worlds and learn about the joys and pains experienced by others, thousands of miles away. This is a blessing more than a burden.

Although the future of artificial intelligence is unsure, and the ultimate result of the information age unclear, rest assured good things will come with the advent of an objective analytical artificial intelligence. We may enter an age where death will be, thankfully, a forgotten atrocity, due to further medical advancements made by beings with unlimited computational capacity and empathy. Overpopulation is a concern, but who on their death bed would say no to another ten years, hundred years, or infinite number of years of life, with a renewed form? As a teacher, you understand the value of education and learning–personally, I hope to never stop learning–and so, perhaps you can see the infinite joy in infinite life. Though space on this earth is limited, universal space is unlimited.

In a recent assignment where students were instructed to give presentations on the topic of emotions, I was told that the majority of the students described emotions from a subjective perspective and related the objective definition of emotions to sterile computers. Emotions are a beautiful thing, and part of what makes our lives so worth living, but it would be ignorant and depressing to consider them accessible only to humanity. Numerous studies (Kalin, Ned H., Shelton, Steven E. “Nonhuman Primate Models to Study Anxiety, Emotion Regulation, and Psychopathology.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 1008 (2003), Banister, Nuri. “Animals May Share Same Emotions as Humans.” Journal of Young Investigators 13 (2005) ) have revealed that mammals on many tiers of cognitive complexity are capable of experiencing emotions: rats, primates, and humans alike share this beloved ability. Would it be so disastrous if artificial organisms could one day partake of this joy we hold so dear? Would they be persecuted for being the products of human construction? Emotions are special, this much we know, but they are only special insofar as we do not yet fully understand the neuro-chemical mechanisms which underlie their activation and formation. But, I am confident that we one day will, because they, like every other function in the human body, are governed by chemical and physical law. You would be well advised to research evolutionary psychology and neuro-chemistry if you wanted to truly understand what emotions are.

Lastly, I was also informed that you previewed the movie, The Matrix, to your students, and encouraged them to discuss its prevailing themes. The Matrix, to me, is a joke movie which promotes xenophobia and misunderstanding. The entire scientific community was in uproar with its release. Neo, a fictitious character played by Keanu Reeves, battles against emotionless, demon robots in a dystopian future ruled by artificial intelligence. Firstly, if an artificial intelligence wise enough to construct such a system existed, it would be able to figure out immediately that humans are a poor source of energy and a waste of space, and would obliterate us all rather than conserve our bodies in a virtual reality environment. Secondly, if it understood humans well enough (and were in the first place inclined) to emulate a perfect replica of our modern terrestrial environment, it would feel some empathy toward humanity. If this were the case, it would see us as having value and would therefore be entirely opposed to letting humans endure pain, instead wishing that we have complete autonomy over our futures. This seems black and white, either complete destruction or complete harmony, but individuals far more educated on the topic of AI coding than the authors of The Matrix have explained in detail why these are the only two options. If the AI were empathetic, it would desire to help us, and part of this help is the fulfillment of our wishes (which would presumably not include being confined to a VR world). Conversely, if an AI were not empathetic, it would not relate to humanity and see us as entirely useless, considering the basic atoms available in our bodies as more efficient fuel than a living human (which requires food, oxygen, waste disposal etc.) I just hope that the students of your class didn’t get the wrongful impression that AI and computers are evil by watching that joke, The Matrix–I didn’t get to see their responses to your prompts, so I wouldn’t know–but if they did, that would indeed produce an awfully skeptical, needlessly fearful graduating class.

My hope is that with this letter, you might reconsider your opinion on the information age. Humans are creative and amazing creatures, and one of our greatest accomplishments is the computer. It saves lives, has opened new doors for expression and art, and may one day lay the foundation for a new and beautiful species, or an improvement of the human species. Optimism and education are always the best approaches to understanding the future.

Thanks for your time,

Nina Anissimov