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"Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-esteem."
- Thomas Szasz
Education will never be the same. AI is changing everything.
AI gives students an opportunity to generate acceptable answers using a fraction of the work and time, and without requiring any critical thinking.
In short, some use of AI exploits a student’s character flaws. Its use filters for students with character, who resist trading short-term, cheap benefits for long-term, sustainable character formation and outcomes.
My Technology Ethics classroom at Texas A&M.
Part of the reason AI use is so difficult to resist is because Googling and AI use can feel exactly the same from the user perspective.
I want to know which web page has an article by Arthur Brooks that mentions Wittgenstein, so I use Google and find the right Atlantic article I'm looking for.
I want to know what the main objections are to consequentialism because the class essay includes a question about it, so I ask AI and it gives me good results.
From a young student’s perspective, what exactly is the difference here between using Google and using AI?
The information is public and immediately accessible in both cases. Why would I be expected to do something that takes far more time and effort when just asking "the internet" yields the same result?
Anyone under the age of 40 or so has been taught almost all their lives that in most contexts, even in education-related contexts, it’s perfectly good and reasonable to find information and answers on the internet. That’s where we store things so we don’t have to keep all of it in our head or on pieces of paper.
And now we want to tell students it’s not ok to use this because…?
The AI genie will not be going back into the bottle. There’s no going back. But in this transition phase when AI use is relatively new, the growing pains are significant. Check out the testimonials in this piece, “Teachers Are Not OK” (language warning), for some examples.
I feel a lot of what those testimonials are talking about: "Why am I spending any time at all grading this thing that almost certainly was written by a robot? Why is so much of my grading time (and grading is by far the least enjoyable part of teaching) spent evaluating a robot instead of my students?"
There seem to be two basic approaches to the problem:
1) Evaluate work by students that is not generated digitally (blue books in class, oral responses, etc.)
2) Somehow evaluate the way a student uses AI to generate answers and responses, since AI use is inevitable.
I can’t see the second option working, because from a teacher’s point of view, we’re not equipped to discern which parts of a written response reflect the student (if any), and which parts reflect AI.
The solution to AI use may be a surprising upshot: making the classroom one of the last and only places on the planet that is tech-free. Instead of becoming another victim of the global tech takeover, it’s possible that the classroom becomes one of the only tech-free sanctuaries left, filled with pen and paper and on-the-spot, impromptu responses.
For that to work, people will need to place a highvalue on tech-free learning and critical thinking, which will become more and more challenging the more ubiquitous tech becomes.
It's possible that the more society becomes tech-dependent, the more rare and valuable the tech-free classroom will become.
That won't be the case for every department or every classroom, but it will for many.
​Last week I talked about the process/product ambiguity in the context of learning. When we talk about learning something, we might mean the process of learning or we might mean the product or outcome of learning.
Those in the business of educating will need to demonstrate the value of the often difficult learning process, in the face of AI’s capabilities of replicating the learning product.
And the learning process takes fortitude and resilience: a desire to do hard things.
Education administrators and faculty will need to force students to exercise fortitude and resilience through the learning process in the classroom, and students will need to force themselves to accept those challenges, forge ahead, and start forming their long-term character.
It’s anyone’s guess whether educators and students will step up to these challenges. But I don’t see a way around it if education in the form we’re familiar with will have any chance to survive.
This goes beyond just formal education. Education fuels the job market.
Consider this quote by Morgan Housel, who is the author of The Psychology of Money (who you might recognize from a previous newsletter):
The Gary Works steel plant in Gary, Indiana, is the largest steel mill in North America. It used to be the largest in the world. A jewel of the manufacturing boom, it employed 30,000 people in 1970 – a third of all jobs in Gary – churning out 6 million tons of steel a year.
Things have changed. The plant today employs 5,000 people, down 83% from its peak. But, remarkably, it produces more steel than ever: 7.5 million tons a year.
Make more stuff with less. Productivity. That’s how the economy grows. Workers figure out new tricks, machines get faster, and the resulting efficiency means people who used to make steel can now make apps and lithium batteries.
Fewer people now use their backs and biceps to do their jobs than ever before. Machines have replaced that need. Where do those people go?
"People who used to make steel can now make apps."
But AI is now also changing how apps are made. AI can code. It can make apps. So people who now make apps will eventually be replaced with AI that can make apps.
So what will those people do?
I have no idea, but I bet they'll need to be critical, nimble thinkers who can offer on-the-fly responses. The world will need more people who can think outside the algorithm, and fewer info searchers.
And where will they get the education and training to be critical, nimble thinkers?
In the tech-free classroom, if those responsible for education can keep it that way.
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Scratch that philosophical itch with Selling Plato's Dialogues weekly. Read what philosophy has to offer you for daily living, and subscribe here so you never miss a post, an episode, or an opportunity to learn even more through a philosophy course 👇🏻
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