Short Stories

Occasionally an absurd idea will enter my mind that warrants the writing of a short story. Sometimes they are absurd enough to share with others.

The Great Calculator

There is a common theme that I have noticed in the present discourse of academia: how to deal with AI in education. The recent advancements in AI have ushered the world of education into despair. Well, not entirely. There is one field that has mostly shrugged off the AI craze, only because they already had their own invasion of mindless robots over fifty years ago. It’s a story that is known to all, a testament to how education can overcome the obstacle of human innovation. It’s a story of compromise, of adaptation, and of a battle between two sworn enemies: the math teacher vs the calculator.

The story is simple. The math teacher discovers that their students are able to cheat by using a calculator, and responds by promising harsh punishments for anyone who gets caught. Assignments done in class are now weighed more heavily towards the final grade. The calculator fires back by becoming smaller with the advent of new transistor technology. Students carry it in their pockets, wear it as a watch, and very quickly the teacher and the calculator are locked in a heated stalemate. However, as the students age and advance through higher math classes, the calculator becomes less and less useful. Seeing its disadvantage, the calculator retaliates by getting smarter. Now it can graph. It can solve polynomial equations. It can even do a little bit of calculus. The teacher loses their lead and is once again forced into a stalemate. 

Only now, the stalemate doesn’t last nearly as long. Humanity invents the most prolific calculator it has ever seen: the internet. In an instant, every math problem worth assigning, in every conceivable level of difficulty, is shared with and discussed on The Great Calculator. There is no escape. Deep within the catacombs of academia, educators huddle together and speak in hushed voices about how to overcome such a daunting enemy. After a long pause, one brave soul speaks up above the others, unafraid that The Great Calculator might hear them, uttering these ten words that would finally put an end to this war: “we should probably start making our students show their work.”

Welcome to the present. Now the calculator has become sentient and threatens to take over the entire academic world. We need to figure out how to fight it before it gets even smarter and kills everyone.