S2E4 Bonus: Simon Chesterman
Summary Keywords
Reading habits, legal education, artificial intelligence, fiction, non-fiction, university education, law and literature, young adult, critical thinking, active reading, digital literacy, empathy, attention economy.
00:02 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Before I was a teacher and researcher at the National Institute of Education, I was a law student at the National University of Singapore, then situated at Kent Ridge. I remember those days, we would receive thick bundles of law cases printed on paper for subjects such as corporate law, criminal law and constitutional law, which we would have to plow through before each tutorial. These were often accompanied by thick textbooks such as Andrew Phang’s The Law of Contract in Singapore and Walter Woon’s Company Law. So, although I no longer read the law for work, having moved out of law into teaching, I do acknowledge that all that law school reading has done something for my thinking and stamina.
In this bonus episode, Professor Simon Chesterman, former dean of NUS law, Founding Dean of NUS College, David Marshall Professor and Vice Provost at the National University of Singapore speaks to me about the reading of law and writing fiction in an age of generative artificial intelligence. He is the author of more than 20 books, mostly academic. But more interesting for me as a literacy educator is that he writes young adult fiction. So, before we get into talking about AI and the law, I ask him about what he's reading and writing these days.
01:29 Host, Loh Chin Ee
What are you reading currently?
01:30 Simon Chesterman
I read quite eclectically. I read a lot for work, but try to force myself sometimes to read novels. Right now, I'm getting towards the end of This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, a YA book that was introduced to me by one of my kids, but I've just heroically, I think, finished the Three Body Problem trilogy by Liu Cixin, which really was worth the slog, and sometimes it was a slog, but really worth it.
01:56 Host, Loh Chin Ee
How old are your kids?
01:57 Simon Chesterman
So, I've got a 20-year-old, a 17-year-old and an 8-year-old.
02:01 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So that's a wide range. So you must do a lot of reading of different genres from...children's books?
02:05 Simon Chesterman
Yeah, and it really started off when my kids were growing into young adult fiction. That's when I really started to revisit the kind of YA stuff that I was interested in growing out of the sort of Enid Blyton, CS Lewis style tales into YA fiction. And as my kids started to introduce things to us, I figured I'd better start to read some of the kinds of things that they were reading. We Were Liars, One Of Us Is Next all these kinds of thrillers in a YA space. Just to have a sense of what they were getting into. Yeah.
02:34 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So I'm really interested in this idea that you write legal articles and you also write YA fiction, because most people wouldn't put these two things together. What's your inspiration for writing, YA fiction?
02:48 Simon Chesterman
So, it was a mix. And actually, the thing I've discovered is there's a lot of lawyers who are quietly writers, and some well-known Singaporean writers like Philip Jeyaretnam, who's now a judge, Simon Tay, Eleanor Wong is a playwright. What I've discovered, I think my working theory, is that lawyers manipulate words for money, usually for clients, and we figure we're quite good at it, and then occasionally we'll start doing it for fun.
So that's the kind of general thing about lawyers, but for me in particular, was really a way of trying to connect with my kids, because, shockingly, they weren't interested in reading law and practice of the United Nations. But if I could pitch a detective story where they might be able to identify as a protagonist, and in particular, I wanted to write something about a sort of young female character who combated the world and the adversaries that arose up against her, using her wits rather than her strength, not going down the Katniss Everdeen path of Hunger Games, then that was an interesting thing for me to explore.
03:44 Host, Loh Chin Ee
What do your kids think of your books?
02:48 Simon Chesterman
So, it was my now 20-year-old who first read the first draft of Raising Arcadia. And he sat by himself for a few hours, and then I nervously was pacing around. It's very much like a doctoral examination. And then he rubbed his chin, and his first response to me was, “it's a bit short,” which I figured was pretty good. If he wanted more of it, then that was at least a good sign. So, they're willing to entertain what they regard possibly as a kind of midlife crisis, trying to connect with the youth. But no, they've been very supportive and subsequently helpful with commenting on drafts and so on.
04:19 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So, what's the difference between writing fiction and non-fiction? Do you take a different approach to both?
04:25 Simon Chesterman
The great revelation as an academic, particularly as a legal academic, where rigorous argument and authoritative references are paramount. The great revelation about writing fiction is you can make stuff up and people won't check you on it. And indeed, that's been the kind of inspiration for my most recent novel, Artifice. I've been doing this work on regulating artificial intelligence for many years, and wrote this book very well researched, footnoted and so on. But along the way, there was all sorts of stuff I couldn't really justify putting in an academic work, the more speculative stuff. And so I realised that fiction could be a vehicle, not just for expressing creative urges and so on and trying to connect with a different audience but also exploring ideas that I wasn't really confident about exploring as an academic. And indeed, that's what Raising Arcadia, the trilogy, is really about something I'm not educated in particularly, but very interested in as I think all parents and educators are, which is trying to think through what the difference between nature and nurture is in the young people who go through our lives, either as children or students. How much impact we have as parents? How much impact do we have as teachers? And at what point do they start coming into their own and realising themselves as individuals?
05:35 Host, Loh Chin Ee
I’ve asked you about writing, but what about reading? Do you think we should read fiction and non-fiction differently?
05:42 Simon Chesterman
each to their own. I suppose for me, I've realized now that I read almost all my non-fiction on screens and almost all my fiction in hard copy. And I think that's partly the different purposes. When I'm reading non-fiction, it's usually with an agenda. I'm trying to get some information, pursue some point, whereas fiction is very much for enjoyment, for pleasure. Often, it's late at night, I'm trying to get away from screens and so on. That being said, I'm currently reviewing some books for a journal where I'm going to write a kind of New York Review-style longer piece. And I did ask that both hard copy and soft copy of them, hard copy so I can sit and immerse myself in the book, but soft copy so I can search for things,
06:22 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So, making very deliberate choices.
06:24 Simon Chesterman
Yeah, and I suppose again, it depends on what you're trying to get out of it. With non-fiction, usually you're reading with an agenda, whereas fiction, hopefully you're reading more for exploration and pleasure.
06:34 Host, Loh Chin Ee
There are very specific ways of reading legal documents. I remember when I was in law school, I was doing research for Stephen Phua, and I was sitting in the law school library then at NUS and poring over the codes and looking at these different things. How do, how should lawyers approach the reading of legal documents? And I'm thinking about myself sitting in that room doing the research and wondering what I should do.
06:59 Simon Chesterman
Yeah. so this is one of the skills of being a lawyer, is working out how to read efficiently. And Stephen Phua, tax law is notoriously complex. The US tax code, I think, is now three or 4000 pages, and so no one's going to be able to read the entire thing in one sitting. And so you need to read strategically. The risk is that I think I'm old enough, and you're probably too young to have gone through the phase of looseleaf services, where we had to manually insert updates into these folders that would keep the book current. And that was at the end, at that time, cutting edge technology. Then we had digital versions of all this, and that was an incredible breakthrough, because it meant you could search, rather than just relying on an index, you could search. And so those innovations were very helpful in managing the large amounts of information. The risk now is that AI doesn't just help you search. It can do some of the analysis for you. But as we've discovered, if there is one area in which people are going to check your footnotes, it's law. And so, there are a couple of useful bad examples of people who use generative AI to take shortcuts and then got found out. Many of the listeners will be familiar with the problem of hallucinations or confabulations. When you do that in a novel, it's charming, perhaps, or maybe a bit distracting. When you do that in law that will get you disbarred. I think there's a real temptation to use these tools to summarise, to simplify, but the way in which I've suggested that lawyers and indeed employers more generally, need to think about AI, especially generative AI, is that it can be useful, but it's unreliable. So you need to think about it a bit like having a really high potential intern with a drinking problem, and you can't tell when they're sober and when they're not, because it can be brilliant, but you're not sure. You basically have to check all the work. And so, I think around the legal community, there's a lot of experimentation going on. They're finding it is very good at summarising, analysing large amounts of material, looking for patterns, but you need to be extremely cautious about the outputs and bring it back to someone who actually knows the subject matter to verify it.
09:03 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So what are the core skills that somebody who graduates from law school should have, and what kinds of reading needs to be done for them to achieve that core skill?
09:12 Simon Chesterman
Yeah, so this is one of the questions that's really hard to answer, because we don't know what's going to happen over the next 10 or so years. I'm still of the generation that think that the hard work of pouring through the tax documents for Stephen Phua as you used to, is worth it. Not because you have to do that necessarily today, but that skill, that the hours spent give you perspective. And this is the kind of challenge that I think many law firms and other industries are going to face, because it's easy to outsource some of the junior work, and maybe that means you hire fewer junior lawyers. But then where are the senior lawyers? Where are the senior practitioners in any profession going to come from if you don't have a generation, the next generation, who have done that kind of grunt work. If people think that the work of being a lawyer or creative work is entering a prompt and then getting an output, if someone thinks that writing an essay is a matter of getting a prompt and then maybe editing the AI's response, you can produce the output. But actually, the input was the point. The input is what gives you that sort of muscle memory, that skill, that perspective, that makes you useful. So back to reading. I'm still telling students that they need to do the work they need to read. It's not just a matter of getting a short summary of listening to a podcast on the way to do something else. It's a matter of actually working out how to spend your time efficiently, but also to get that kind of not just surface understanding, but a deep understanding of the larger issues, the larger principles, so that they can be useful, not just in answering the immediate question, but developing a perspective that will help them answer future questions, which are much, much harder to predict.
10:48 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So the next question comes from me as an educator, because for me, in terms of teaching, in the last few years, I've had to change a few things, you know, there was that shift from examination to assignments where people could go home, they could do their research, they could then churn out their essays. But now I'm finding with some of the assignments, it's better to do in class, because you really need to check the students’ analysis, and that is how they do it. Are there changes in...law?
11:12 Simon Chesterman
Absolutely, and it's across the board. So, I can tell you what admissions now for NUS College, we're really discounting written material. The students are still asked to write some responses to prompts, but we're making it much more personal, and we're really prioritising interviews in terms of selection for students, along with proctored examinations from their A’ Levels or IB. In university, there are ongoing debates, and the key question here again is, what's the point of a university? Is the purpose of a university to provide a service to our students, to offer them a transformative education, help them realise their potential and so on, partly, or is it to produce graduates who will service the economy? Which is why employers look to us, why the government subsidises our work. So putting it bluntly, are students our customers, or are they our product? And obviously it's a bit of both. But as you think about the role of AI, it's a lot easier for universities to train and test people without AI, because you can make distinctions between them. If everyone's using the same large language model, it's very difficult to distinguish between them. So, the initial analogy that many of us embraced is like calculators in mathematics. So, if you're starting in primary school, you don't get access to a calculator, learn your times tables, but eventually you get given a calculator, and you're expected to do more complex mathematical processes. And then there are exams where you can use a calculator somewhere you can't, and probably AI ends up somewhere like that. The challenge at the moment is, when students are using the calculator equivalent of AI, it makes all of the work look very similar, and so that's the challenge. But it might well be that in years to come, employers, of course, will be expecting everyone to use a calculator. No one in business is saying, now, you do this work without a calculator. And so that's, I think, where we're still feeling our way. But my own position is, yeah, you still need that training of the mind, because that's part of what a university education is. That's part of what being a fully realised human is. And at least for the foreseeable future, I think that will produce someone who's better able to make judgment calls about AI, rather than just becoming dependent on it.
13:15 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Yeah, I see it as we need practice in thinking, so that thinking has to be a routine, whereas sometimes I think we spend too much time thinking that students need practice in prompting, but they need to be doing the thinking first and then be able to decide when they need to use the prompting for something else. So, moving to the future of reading, given all these changes in our world today, what do you see as the future of reading?
13:41 Simon Chesterman
I've got a kind of vested interest in this, hopefully people will continue to buy and read books. But also, I think it is important to be modest about our ability to predict the future and to keep in mind the past. So, I mean, Socrates was against writing. He figured that if people wrote things down, then it would suggest to us that knowledge was fixed. The only reason we know all this is Plato; his student wrote it down and passed it down through the ages. So, writing technology has changed the way we think. To me, the biggest concern, and reading is a subset of this, is how we relate to information, and just in the last 20 years, we've developed this ability to google information, as we would use the verb. And when you google information, when you search using Google and other search engines at the moment, that produces a series of websites that give you the option to pursue an answer. And the salutary consequence of that is it shows you there are multiple answers. And you know, some of it's been paid for by advertising. The risk is that we're moving into a world where people think that knowledge is produced by not sought, but prompted. And so, you ask a question, you get an answer, and it suggests one that there's one answer and you're not entirely sure how it's being paid for. And my concern, back to reading, is that this is how most people will engage with the world. They'll be having ever more personalised material that's tailored to their interests. It won't just be that you could have a book tailored to your interest or ChatGPT can produce something that you will enjoy. You will have multimedia produced to your tastes. And so, this has two consequences. One is that kind of lack of critical thinking that goes into the work of interpreting a text or even just choosing between different websites. The other is that we'll get ever better at sucking our attention in, because it won't just be a high-quality movie and so on that's a blockbuster. It'll be a movie tailored to your particular interests. And so the distraction, the monetisation of attention, will make it much, much harder, I think, to persuade people, especially young people, to pick up a book where you swipe the page and nothing happens, and it's someone else's perspective, rather than something that's tailored to either make you angry or excited or interested. And so, I do worry that occasionally we think about the sort of coming out of the pandemic where there was a lot of discussion about synchronous versus asynchronous, classes we all had to teach on Zoom. Actually, the thing I'm most interested in is the tension between active and passive, that students, young people, and all of us are really used now to being passive consumers. We sit back, we watch the next video, we let YouTube choose what we're going to watch. We let social media feeds choose what we're going to interpret. And that's very passive, whereas I think as educators, we want students to be intentional, to be active, to be given a text, and the purpose of reading is not just to ingest the text the way a large language model ingests material, but to engage with it. To be reading actively, to be thinking about it, to be coming up with your own responses to it. And so, I worry that all of the forces that are generating AI content and products will make it harder and harder for students to be incentivised to do that.
16:46 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So I guess my last two questions, and this bit, is, does technology support or hinder reading? I think you've hinted at some of your thoughts.
16:55 Simon Chesterman
So technology supports access to information, but different kinds of information, I think things like machine translation have been tremendous in opening up possibilities. I don't want to discount the role of education technology in promoting educational outcomes. The ability to reach people like Khan Academy and Khanmigo will have a transformative effect on people who would never have access to a high-quality education. But yeah, I do worry that, essentially, our attention span is shortening and the demands on our time are increasing. And it's interesting, the reason why students will use ChatGPT and other sort of large language models, we had a discussion within the faculty here, why might students use this? And there are some people who think students just looking for any way to cheat, get out of doing work. If they wanted to cheat, they could plagiarise that, that's always been a thing. There's another group that thinks students are kind of lazy and so don't want to do the work and students taking shortcuts, that's fair enough. The group that actually worries me, and this comes back to reading, is that there is a category, and I fear that it's a growing category of students who just don't think they're smart enough, or don't think they're able to navigate the information space, and that's partly because AI appears to be so clever, but also because there is so much material out there. I grew up where there was an encyclopedia like 22 volumes on the shelf, and you could sort of dip into that. Now we've got the internet, vastly more information than anyone could process, and today you've also got the possibility of generating essentially infinite content. And so, I think many students are making what could be a rational choice, that there's no point trying to read in depth, because you're never going to be able to read enough. And so, to the extent that you can draw on these tools that can be useful in navigating the world. The risk is the tools don't just empower you, they become a crutch that actually hobbles you. And so unless we can work out a way to get young people in particular to do the work, to see the work as value in itself, rather than just looking for shortcuts, and I worry they're going to not just lose as we comment about our devices, we don't remember telephone numbers, know how to navigate and so on, or even to add up, but they'll lose the ability to form an opinion, to articulate a view, and that would be not just a kind of educational loss, but a kind of loss to society as a whole.
19:13 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So, what can we as educators do?
19:16 Simon Chesterman
UNESCO did a big study on ethical guidelines for generative AI, and the one thing that they could agree on is keep it out of the hands of children. And again, back to my calculator analogy. So, I've got an eight-year-old, and tough luck, he gets no access to a calculator because he's got to learn his times tables. The challenge really is getting people to be intentional about technology. And here the risk is just starting with families, there's so much pressure on parents to monitor screen usage and so on and how children using their devices. And that seems like kind of empowering families, but what it means is that the families are against some of the most powerful, wealthy corporations in the world, with highly trained people whose job is to monetise attention. So, that’s a clearly unequal battle. That's why there are big debates about age restrictions. And then when you're looking at older people, I think it's hard to control what adults do. I think we've got to incentivise people. I suspect anyone who's listening to a podcast like this, we're not so worried about it because they're interested in reading. But how do you make that attractive to a larger number of people without just giving up and reducing culture down to something that's easily digestible in sort of 15 second videos on TikTok, and I think that's going to be a dilemma, but we've grappled with this in the past. When movies came out, they said that'll be the death of theater. It wasn't, I mean, it did change theater. When television came out, they said that would be the death of reading. It hasn't been quite, but I think it's going to continue to be a struggle.
20:42 Host, Loh Chin Ee
So I guess my final question, so, what element of the human do you see as crucial in this age of AI?
20:48 Simon Chesterman
The big change that we're grappling with at universities is that for centuries, we've focused on IQ, the origins of the modern university in Italy, you had students who would basically group together, and they would work out what they wanted to pay a professor to teach them, because they wanted to learn that information, that sort of transmission of information, where my students might come to me, and they'd pay me for information that I had, that I could give them. Over the last couple of 100 years, that's moved towards more skills based and the problem is, this is something that AI is getting better at, the kind of critical, analytical skills. The challenge, I think, might be that universities that people realise that IQ might not be so important, and that EQ might be emotional intelligence, the ability to empathise, to engage with people, to communicate effectively, to mobilise a team, and that's going to be an important part of being an effective human in the world, because the other stuff is going to be much easier to outsource to machines. And so for the moment, at least in terms of what's important to being a human is our empathy, our ability to understand one another, feel one another, and hopefully work together to get the benefits of all of this wonderful technology around us while minimising or mitigating the risks.
22:04 Host, Loh Chin Ee
Empathy, the ability to understand what someone else might be thinking or feeling and applying that understanding to our relations with others, is indeed a crucial element for getting along with each other and getting on in the world. And reading, as some studies have suggested, does help us to step into the shoes of others and broaden our perspectives. This is why reading real books, and not summaries of books, still matter. It helps us get into the heads of characters, imaginary worlds, and to experiment with our ideas so that we can see others better in our everyday relations.
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