Head of School Jay Rainey Addresses Eighth Graders
The MICDS Class of 2030 celebrated the end of their middle school journey on Thursday, May 28, at their Eighth Grade Celebration. Head of School Jay Rainey addressed the rising freshmen and their families, encouraging our young people to never silence their inner poets. Here are his remarks.
Good evening, everyone, and congratulations to the MICDS Class of 2030. One more day until you are officially Upper Schoolers!
I wonder how many of you have ever heard of synesthesia? It’s a phenomenon of the brain in which the stimulation of one sense triggers an experience in another. Smelling a particular scent, for example, might bring to mind a specific color, or hearing a word might conjure a particular taste. According to neuroscientists, it’s likely that between three and six of you, members of the Class of 2030, have some kind of synesthesia.
I am a sort of “synesthete” myself. For as long as I can remember, each day of the week has had a unique color. I hear the word “Sunday,” and I see a light green hue in my mind’s eye. Monday is dark green. Tuesday is yellow, Wednesday is orange, Thursday is purple, Friday is black, and Saturday is white. I can no more prevent or think my way out of these synesthetic associations than I can think my way out of being hungry or thirsty. My synesthesia is beyond the reach of my intelligence.
In the opening lines of his 1935 poem Man Carrying Thing, Wallace Stevens declares, “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.” It’s certainly not very intelligent to walk around thinking that Wednesday is orange, but it is perhaps poetic to think so. A different opening couplet—that of Blue Monday, a 1950s hit song by Fats Domino—declares, “Blue Monday, / How I hate Blue Monday.” You don’t have to be a synesthete to know that “Blue Monday” would have struggled on the pop charts if it had been called “Sad Monday,” or worse, “Back-to-Work Monday.” For the same reason, Steely Dan’s 1975 song Black Friday isn’t called “Terrible Friday” or “Market Crash Friday.” The name “Black Friday” is poetry, a linguistic idiom of sensation and emotion. “Market Crash Friday,” on the other hand, is prose, a linguistic idiom of intelligence—and intelligence is a lousy poet.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term “artificial curiosity” or “artificial ingenuity.” I’ve never heard of “artificial wonder” or “artificial originality” either. Don’t these all sound like oxymorons—like self-contradictory expressions similar to “jumbo shrimp” or “exact estimate”? No one ever says “artificial originality” because the term is absurd; but it seems like everyone these days is saying “artificial intelligence,” because intelligence—unlike curiosity, ingenuity, wonder, or originality—can be artificially simulated.
Class of 2030, after this week and the upcoming summer vacation, as your education continues through your years in the Upper School and college and into your adulthood, I am confident that conversations about AI, temptations to misuse AI, and fears of being replaced by AI will continue as well, at MICDS and in the world more generally. I urge you never to silence your inner poet as they do. You may or may not have synesthesia like me—the fact that today is Thursday, for example, may or may not make you see purple—but I’ll bet you have a favorite color; and, as I noted in remarks to the Upper School earlier this spring, AI cannot have a favorite color. It cannot be original —
It cannot be a poet.
But you can be a poet.
Only maybe you don’t know it?
This speech is just a seedlet.
I hope you soon will sow it,
And after that will grow it.
Don’t be afraid to show it.
MICDS—your school—is an academic school. Intelligence has always mattered here, and now artificial intelligence matters too. You would do well to be simultaneously skilled in and skeptical of the combined human and artificial intelligence phenomenon that is ascendant in our world. “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” Wallace Stevens warned. It is a losing battle but a necessary one for the preservation of our humanity. I wish you happiness and fulfillment in the fight.