In the Oct. 25, 2024, episode of “A Lively Experiment,” moderator Jim Hummel and panelists discussed the rising costs of the demolition of the Washington Bridge. Panelists also gave their takes on whether using artificial intelligence in schools is actually cheating.
Hummel was joined by Lisa Pelosi, a Republican strategist; Patrick Anderson, a state House reporter for The Providence Journal; and Steph Machado, a reporter for The Boston Globe and a contributor to “Rhode Island PBS Weekly.”
This discussion has been condensed and edited for clarity. Watch the full episode of “A Lively Experiment” here.
Pay now or pay later
The Rhode Island Department of Transportation issued a change order for the demolition of the Washington Bridge that more than doubled the original cost.
But DOT Director Peter Alviti said in several interviews that the work needed to be done sooner or later.
Hummel said that the scenario reminded him of the Fram oil filter commercials from the 1970s, where the public can “pay me now or pay me later.” Hummel said it looked as if the public may have to pay now and might have to pay later.
Anderson agreed, adding “We’re gonna keep on doing it.”
“It’s just a drip, drip, drip of added costs,” he said. “I mean, we knew this was in the mail because they’ve been making changes. They’ve been encountering all kinds of difficulties along the way.
“In the demolition, in the procurement, all of those delays add to the cost. Every time you change everything, you add a little bit more to the cost.”
Anderson added that there were a few more costs that were “baked in,” including paying for the recent pause in the work that has yet to be figured into the accounting.
“So this number is just gonna keep creeping up and up and up,” he said.
Anderson added that officials “botched the first procurement about as bad as you can do it.”
“So what went well with that? I mean, the first time they went out for bid, they essentially just tried to dump all of the risk on the contractor and say, ‘Do it faster than is humanly possible and take all of the risk if everything goes wrong and reuse this old part of the bridge so we don’t have to tear it out,’” Anderson said. “At the same time. It was never feasible. And they basically, the industry has basically told them, ‘No, we’re not going for this. You did it wrong, do over.’”
Pelosi mentioned Anderson’s earlier reporting about the bridge’s environmental impact just before it was discovered that the pilings of the bridge needed to come out.
“So I don’t know if that’s been factored in … the cost of doing that and the timeline of delay that can happen too,” she said.
“Well the more you go into the river, the worse it is for environmental permitting,” Anderson said. “There are river herring that swim .. back and forth up into the streams and East Providence and into Seekonk (Massachusetts).
“And so the more you mess with the river, the more DEM (Department of Environmental Management) and the feds will look at that.”
Machado said she would push back on the idea of officials having to pay to remove the pilings.
“The original plan … was to leave the pilings and piers in the water, let the contractor decide whether to use them or whether to take them out,” she said. “And so it wasn’t a definitive.
“I don’t know if there would’ve had to be a change order, like how exactly that was gonna get paid for. But it certainly wasn’t in the original cost estimate to take the pilings and piers out of the water,” Machado added. “Now they’ve added that to the demolition contract and now the demolition is going to take much longer than expected, not finished until the end of 2025.”
Pelosi said the bridge is “the gift that just keeps on giving, especially if you’re writing on it,” pointing toward Anderson and Machado.
“And I think this is like job security for you going forward, you know, how this is gonna be turning out and then to have the congressional delegation doing their job, getting the money, but based on what they thought the cost would be,” she said. “And it seems like we’re gonna have to go back to the federal government for even much, much more money to get this covered right now.”
Is using AI in schools a form of cheating?
Turning to education, Hummel referenced a front-page story that Machado wrote for The Boston Globe about the use of artificial intelligence in schools. The idea of AI, he said, was “an interesting concept,” and it was tough to determine how it fits into today’s schools.
“It’s a tough question, and I think what we learned in exploring the story was that state education departments have been very slow to issue any sort of guidance to school districts about (whether) you allow AI to be used (and) in what capacity should you allow it,” Machado said. “Where’s the line between using it as a useful tool for research versus basically cheating on an assignment?
“And the jumping off point for the story was this a court case out of Hingham where a student got a bad grade on a paper because he used AI on his outline for the paper. And the teacher determined that that’s plagiarism and gave him, I think he got detention and a bad grade and he’s now suing.”
Machado said the student argued that a rule against using AI was not in the school handbook and that the poor grade he received was going to affect his college prospects.
“We talked to a number of teachers who said, ‘Yeah, it had not been contemplated until my students started using AI. And I realized that I needed to set rules for my own classroom,” Machado said. “They’ve banned ChatGPT on their computer networks. But students are using this in their regular lives ... you can talk to an AI chatbot in the Snapchat app. You know, there’s a lot of ways that teens have very easy access to this technology. So schools have to figure out how it fits in.”
Pelosi said that school officials have to figure out how to incorporate the technology “because it’s out there, it’s going to be used.”
“And I think, not to simplify it, but it should just be reference,” she said. “So I think what happened was some of the students were using the AI totally not referencing it and saying, ‘This is my work.’
“So I know years ago when I was in grad school, Wikipedia was just starting to come out so you had to cite Wikipedia, the professors wanted to make sure you did that. So it’s just making sure that you’re citing something that’s not your own work.”
However, Pelosi said that AI can be helpful and educators have to figure out how to incorporate it into their curriculum.
Anderson said he did not have an answer about AI, but he expressed surprise that there was not more of a debate in Rhode Island over the use of cellphones in schools.
“I thought some candidate somewhere would make that an issue of like we should ban these. And like some places they are, some places they aren’t,” he said. “I know in Connecticut, (Gov.) Ned Lamont came out (and said) ‘We should get phones out of schools.’”
Anderson said he asked Rhode Island Gov. Daniel McKee about the issue but the governor “didn’t really have any thoughts about it.”
“I’m just surprised no one has like picked that up as a baton of like, ‘We should get ’em out.”
Machado said in a story she wrote for Rhode Island PBS earlier this year that school officials in Central Falls were putting cellphones in pouches.
“There was a little bit of opposition … where they said, ‘Well, in the real world your phone’s not in a pouch so you have to learn to live with the technology,” she said. “But honestly, most of the people I talked to were really in favor of (it).”
Hummel said the school district in Los Angeles ruled against phones in school, adding it was “too much of a distraction.”
“Yeah and I hear from teachers all the time who are like, ‘I’m so glad the phones are gone because it’s so much like for the teachers to have to constantly say, get off your phone, get off your phone, get off your phone, listen to me,’ is such a time suck in their day,” Machado said. “But at the same time technology is growing and it should be used in education, so there’s a balance.”
