Spectral Learning

Spectral Learning – Poems by JL Williams commissioned for Edinburgh Futures Conversations, The Future of Education: AI

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…our minds are moving prisms of light.
Jeanette Winterson

1.

The people who work here are children,
or seem so to me.
Their long, dark hair in their faces.
The whole place is dark.
Except for the pools of coloured light
(colours moving fish-like in these pools)
cast by the screens.
Sofas in front of each screen.
I wander, there is
a metal spiral staircase leading
upwards.
Drifting near one of the pools
a child stops me, offers
the visor –
a mixture of words
almost or could be
another language.
I’m not sure whether
to put them on not because I’m scared but

2.

He’s the man I go to
once every month
for a treatment that allows me
to exist.

His hands, his strength
tempered with gentleness
for which
I’m absurdly grateful.

So much worry and pain is released
during the treatment it is hard sometimes
to concentrate on the beauty
of the music, the movement
of pain through my body.

It’s passing, I think – it’s all
passing so quickly.

On leaving he talks about his dog
called Ripley not
like in Alien but Ripple-y
as the contours of her fur.

She’s on her way out, he says –
13 years old, with cancer – 
but I won’t cry. I’m going to celebrate
the good times.

That’s inspirational, I reply – surprised
that our thoughts are two rivers
merging into one.

Bodies, thoughts.

The sun is shining
bright through the window,
making me blink
after the darkness.

Well, there’s no other
option he says,
except to break down completely.

3.

I am reading the poems Sam Riviere wrote
in 2019 with Generative Pre-trained
Transformer 2 (GPT-2).

I don’t know
if I even knew
what it was back then, pregnant
at the age of 42 with my first child
and aware of little else but the constant movement
of life.

2019, and this extraordinary poem
in which he – or GPT – writes:
‘…A future where violence
and injustice have been replaced by
compassion and empathy. Where the most
difficult decisions are finally put into the
hands of real people. Where all the dreams that
we have dreamed before fade as you move out
of one building into another.’*

One of my writing teachers
told me once – don’t quote
other writers in your poems, they might be
better than you.

And who are we quoting, we
who are attempting to connect all knowledge
into one brain, we
who are attempting to build
our long-lost, longed for

and on the news,
between election results,
they talk of standardised testing
as if it is a helpful thing.

*from the poem ‘Safe Fame’, Conflicted Copy, Sam Riviere, Faber, 2019

4.

I learned…
to fold into the brace position.
Marjorie Lotfi

don’t we always swallow a little more
when the breath massages the spine

here in this classroom there is a notion that the nation exists 

grasping toward the past it was the future
that always held the coral chalice
up to the light (poor coral
whitened as the sea waves to death)

what you will teach is

you broke that notion with your greedful mining
time it was always and anyway

that golden classroom when the light pierced the beaker
her glass a trembling concatenation of quantum realities
as when the first burning torch was raised as now
the first equation that makes light possible always always is 

a whole nation’s notion exists

the gulf was crystal when we were kids diving to kiss
on the banks of this nymph grotto weighted with tyres
floating polystyrene green bottles blue bottles
clear poison bottles of appropriated joy

holding my breath

what you will teach is what you believe

waving flinging the keyboard popping the button on your shirt
shining desk pounding wet heads with first person second person
third person south against north against east against man against
woman against computer against robot I want to lift up
without needing any tools

even if you don’t have kids

even if you don’t have kids
education is important – because
those kids, other folks’ kids, when they grow up
they’re going to be
all around you

what you will teach is a dream no reality

a notion no a nation

holding my breath forever is the same as breathing into the endless utopia of space

you will open your hand and
(gold wire diamond glass plastic silver laser)
brace yourself

data is water time is light 

5.

AI systems are rear view mirrors.
Professor Shannon Vallor

darlin I told you
that dope stings
it’s gonna bite your finger
cuz its fed on old things

you give it to your babies
it’ll rot their baby teeth
it’ll smack down all the ladies
it’ll kill the black and green

check your rear view mirror
it ain’t futures that you see
it’s your own eyes lookin backward
down the road to misery

6.

‘Opportunities:

– Personalised Learning
– Automated Assessment
– Tutoring and Support
– Accessibility
– Administrative Efficiency
– Data-Driven Insights’

ChatGPT

what will the chalkboard be
when I’m old and my daughter
thinks I’m useless
because I can’t make (whatever it is) work

‘Challenges:

– Data Privacy and Security
– Bias in Algorithms
– Digital Divide
– Teacher Training and Resistance
– Over-reliance on Technology’

ChatGPT

my dad hated
me getting my first tattoo
when I was 17
what happens when I get my first
chip in my eye, under my skin?

‘Future Trends:
– AI-Enhanced Learning Analytics
– Virtual and Augmented Reality
– Lifelong Learning and Upskilling’

ChatGPT

putting my phone down

putting my phone down
I walk out into the garden
barefoot and feel
the dampness of the grass
beneath my feet
and below my feet the soil

and the hair of all the people
who work deep beneath the earth
or in radioactive pits
so we can have mobile phones

who sit all day
in front of screens clicking clicking
for pennies
images so violent
they cause ptsd

who fight in the robot
whorehouses over
sex robots whom they love
while the forests burn
and the rivers dry up

I feel beneath my feet
the sweat of all the people
who do not have
computers
or gardens
or enough food

who walk with a pain in their back
dreaming of light, lightness

7.

How much it hurt you
to lose your mum, and now
you’ve been having to pack up your dad’s
house all around him.

The man who taught you
to focus a lens,
aim a telescope at the stars,
the man who taught you
to add and subtract, the value
of a coin, of a pound.

They inquired
how long he would live
as if you were a guru, an actuary, not
his stargazing daughter.

To calculate how long
the money would last.

How do you teach
this kind of algebra,
how do you calculate
how much pain
can tension a body?

If you could download him,
if you could make him live forever
a never-ending

How do you estimate
the cost
of the absurdity,
of grief?

8.

a child remembering their hands
Joelle Taylor

I’m scared because I birthed you / into a world of discrepancies / where night keeps eating day and eating / where men work in teams to build a new world / where they can give birth and women are sex toys / where bodies are broken by machines and machines / are implanted into starving minds

At your school there is no playground / research shows / playgrounds are safer when dangerous / let there be hammers / and let there be nails / along the path of your learning / let there be broke glass / let there be stones that bruise your bare feet / I want to raise a warrior / girl hero shining / her knife into wires / inventing how to b(l)ind

When you cry it hurts me / more than when glass / cuts into my skin / I fell the other day / and it shocked you to see / my eyes pouring stars / you came from my body / are no longer / of my body?

I gave birth to machine / my womb filled with wires / bled acid out of eyes seeing yellow fluorescent flagellating wounds / in the air your screams were 0s and 1s but more than that / simultaneous blooms of weeping as human / shattered the light bulbs. Note: simultaneous – parallel, not, ever after / I gave birth to light and was blinded.

Girl machines rise from steel trolleys / wield seedlings / know dirt talk and soil / are planting the world / teach flesh bodies old tricks / it’s love they say, galactic mycelial love / white snowflake stardust / and thousands of bluebells / an epic of cobalt / fling open skirts to the moon / while kneeling in dirt / the girl machines ask me / momma, do you remember dreams / we dream of fingers / hands held aloft / of feeling / the dirt on our skin

9.

I have learned
two important
lessons of late.

(From pools of coloured)

One is that
I can really tell stories
in poems.

(From pools of coloured
light arms emerge and legs a)

The other is that
when I was young
I avoided meaning
because I could make
little sense of the world,
and now

(From pools of coloured
light arms emerge and legs a
fire-new idea)

10.

The light teaches us
to breathe beyond our animal selves.

There is dust, enough dust
for a kingdom of heavens –
and so many screens the eyes themselves
are screens.

The place where I was alive
echoed at night – a little girl
walked barefoot through the corridors
searching for her mother –
ma, she called – mama –
and a mother who’d lost her husband
and son laid herself down
in a bed and didn’t
get up.

The room filled with smoke
was where the terminations
took place, the other
where sleepless doctors
cradled machines connected to people’s
hearts.

We don’t cry anymore, and no longer
and never again will I be in pain.

Now I have learned to be something
more akin to light, to breath –
the substance in which dust is suspended,
memory.

11.

The term “spectral” generally means relating to or resembling a spectrum or a ghost.
ChatGPT

You can see me because light
is bouncing off of me.

Some light
I am absorbing.

Some light is passing through me,
like I am a ghost – see
behind me there is a lily
weeping golden pollen
into the bright, infused air.

Where do I come from?

Some place invented by a child
in her dream – the one
where she was in Ancient Egypt,
exploring the sphynx and then
in a tunnel flooded with light.

When she told me this,
I felt very humbled
by the miracle of life:
naked, 4 years old, kneeling
in her still warm bed her eyes
the colour of a storm-ravaged sea
looking off to the side at something
she could still see quite clearly

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