Some of John Steinbeck's strongest writing focused on stories of people undergoing dislocating change. As a result, is it surprising that I'm not the only one re-reading the Nobel Laureate in this year of AI upheaval? This week, Milena considers what those classic novels, particularly his magnum opus East of Eden have to say about our time. The photo above, "Family who traveled by freight train" comes from the Library of Congress archive collection of images from the dust bowl migration of the 1930s, immortalized in another of Steinbeck's novels, The Grapes of Wrath.
by Milena Markovich
In 1952 John Steinbeck’s multigenerational novel East of Eden was published, set at the turn of the 20th century. But it wasn’t until 2021 that one of my best friends finally succeeded in wearing me down and I endeavoured to read East of Eden. She promised the book would be life-changing, and by the end of a difficult 12-months of picking up and dropping the book on beaches, busses and bedside tables, I remained unconvinced. Lately however, with five more years under my belt, I’ve been tiptoeing around reconsidering my initial judgement.
Particularly in the past few weeks I’ve found myself caught on the following passage:
“There are monstrous changes taking place in the world, forces shaping a future whose face we do not know. Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good” (Steinbeck, 1952, p.125).
As an avid reader from childhood, I am always captivated by a novel that manages to capture an unyielding human truth nestled inside a story that happens outside of daily reality. How curious it is that characters feel so alike to us, even when they are on adventures far away – or in a time long past, as in Steinbeck’s novel.
These days I hear so much of this sentiment of “monstrous changes” and a fearful unknown future mirrored in conversations surrounding Artificial Intelligence (AI) – especially its use in academic settings, from the classroom to the lab. Graduate students, even those attempting to remain blind to the cliff ahead, are increasingly bumping and tripping over encounters with AI. More and more we find ourselves attempting to decipher unclear publication guidelines on AI, or adapting classroom learning to students whose entire academic career has included AI use. All in all, a looming new age feels inescapable.
Beyond these logistical challenges, perhaps some of us even feel a fear for our careers and our futures. Science hinges on our ability to ask questions, find problems and think creatively to work towards solving them. What becomes of the foundations of research – curiosity, creativity, novelty and the pursuit of learning – in the face of thought mass-produced by a large language model (LLM)? Will we slowly train our minds to believe the patterns of AI, so neatly and conveniently packaged for our consumption?
I believe Steinbeck had some thoughts on this as well:
“It is true that two men can lift a bigger stone than one man. A group can build automobiles quicker and better than one man, and bread from a huge factory is cheaper and more uniform. When our food and clothing and housing are all born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking” (Steinbeck, 1952, p.125).
In sitting down to write this blog post, I circled the idea of writing a commentary or reflection on the role of AI in research and learning. I wondered whether I was falling into this mass-produced trap – leaning too comfortably into the common discourse perpetuating fear of an unknown new technology.
As such, I’d like to suggest the stance that AI is merely the newest “monstrous change” taking over our world. So, we must ask: can we find a way to learn to live with, adapt or coexist with a technological landscape that evolves more rapidly than we can any longer accustom ourselves to?
A couple of years ago, as generative AI was just starting to get more popular across classrooms and workplaces, I remember voicing a fear to my dad: I worried that people would start thinking less and eventually they would forget how to think altogether. I was worried we would become the most gullible generation in human history. I saw friends using AI to substitute their own communication styles, or to streamline a question that could have been a real human conversation. I saw a machine which researched, thought, analyzed and questioned for you, effectively pushing aside our own thinking.
Unfortunately (or perhaps rather fortunately) I was speaking to a man whose motto is ‘laziness is the driver of progress’. Never one to miss an opportunity to embrace new technology, my dad answered along the lines of: “we couldn’t possibly be the most gullible, only some hundreds of years ago most of our ancestors didn’t even know how to read”. The future no longer looked so bleak in comparison.
This conversation has stuck in my mind – filed in the same folder as Steinbeck’s reflections on mass-produced thought and these unknown forces which seem evil. In my arrogance I had forgotten that I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to face a “monstrous change” and feel as though I am staring down the “future whose face we cannot know” (Steinbeck, 1952, p.125).
Steinbeck’s characters faced a rapidly changing economic landscape, in the hurricane of the Second Industrial Revolution with electricity, mass production and railway lines creating national import routes. Sitting at his desk fleshing out these same characters, Steinbeck himself wrote in the shadow of two World Wars which unleashed weapons of mass destruction beyond previous human comprehension. Today I turn over Steinbeck’s words having been born at the turn of the 21st century, growing in parallel with an evolving internet and increasing computing power over the past two decades. Today, it feels as though we hang on the precipice of the AI age.
But perhaps this is not a cliff whose face we have never seen. Perhaps this is a vaguely familiar mountain we have climbed before. Despite the best effort of Anthropic and OpenAI, I can still tell clear as day which students have used AI to write their assignments. Even when I read Google’s AI summary of my search, I often find hallucinated information from unrelated references. While AI has rapidly proved itself an effective tool as a complex calculator and identifying pattern recognition, we have the power to continue exercising critical and creative thinking while still adapting in this new age. Just as the Trasks embraced the looming technology of the 20th century, so too can we brave this tide in the 21st.
The commonly cited crux of Steinbeck’s East of Eden hinges on a Hebrew word from Genesis 4:7. Luckily my Hebrew school education has come in handy here; unluckily Steinbeck’s interpretation of this passage is technically incorrect. If you look at the Hebrew of the original Torah text from Bereshit (Genesis) 4:7 the message given to Cain was indeed that he will “rule over it (sin)”. “Thou mayest” is an interpretation based on the context of Cain and Abel’s story. The text itself says “timshol-bo” (תִּמְשָׁל־בּֽוֹ), from the Hebrew root word “mashal” (מָשָׁל) which means to rule or govern with the “ti” (תִּ) prefix implying a future-tense “you”. As we follow the story we see Cain choose to succumb to his sin, which is why the translation often includes the replacement of “will” with “can” or, per Steinbeck’s interpretation, “thou mayest” (Steinbeck, 1952, p.301).
If we choose to treat these biblical texts as a moral framework, perhaps we can see the message more clearly. This passage doesn’t just show us that we have free will to turn against a promised future; it shows that we have a duty to indeed govern over fear, both our own and those around us. There is free will in our choices – in Bereshit (Genesis) 4:8 Cain makes a choice to turn towards his own vices and slaughter his brother, despite the statement that he will govern over them. It may be written that we should govern over our own fears, but our daily choices make or break whether we rise to the occasion.
Today, as far as my research work goes, AI occasionally plays the role of a well-meaning high school intern. I can change the color scheme of my plots in half the time it would have previously required for me to sift through several Stack Overflow comments and understand errors quickly. However, with regards to picking out scientific questions, reviewing literature or building a procedure, I continue to hold that process close to my own mind. At the end of the day, I believe that there is never a shortage of demand for people who know what they’re doing and have done the work to understand a topic – both in industry and in the academic setting. Sitting in front of my defence committee this past May, I was still responsible for answering every question, defending every design decision and assumption and verifying all my work.
While “mass method” thinking has certainly grown easier than it had ever been before, this is not the first age where we fear the loss of individual thinking and other “things we hold good” (Steinbeck, 1952, p.125). Just as in the past, every day we have the choice to sit down; do work we are proud of and work towards expanding scientific knowledge. We have a responsibility to govern over our fear – whether that be by embracing AI technology in the ways that it can help expand scientific progress or turning away from anti-intellectualism and lazy thinking mass-produced for us by LLMs.
I remain hopeful that at the end of the day AI cannot completely take over the curiosity, creativity and human intuition required to execute and communicate good science. Though we have the free will to turn towards despair, it remains our duty to reel in the fear of a dark unknown future; timshol-bo.
John Steinbeck appears as a young man in this 1935 photo.
