AI can't learn for you
On student newspaper editorials, physiological feedback, and certain aspects of life that can't be substituted away
The student newspaper at the University of Pennsylvania has come out with guns blazing in an editorial against the prevalence of artificial intelligence in the educational environment. Even for a college newspaper, the language is fierce: “AI cannot coexist with education -- it can only degrade it. As technology advances and workers are replaced by machines, schools are some of the only places we have left to explore and wrestle with human thought. With our own university leading the charge, AI is now corrupting those few sacred spaces and leaving us with nowhere to engage in true scholarship.”
■ The stakes are high, so perhaps the intemperate rhetoric is suitable. It’s nothing new for an innovative technology to make a lot of waves before inviting a backlash, even if this particular hype cycle seems to be playing out at 10x speed.
■ Philosophically, a certain limitation cannot be escaped: While it is obviously the case that some subjects and skills can be learned without any reflection on the part of the learner, the real root of the liberal arts is that humans need to study for becoming, rather than being.
■ In learning one thing, we discover deficiencies, errors, or omissions in what we know about others. It’s a process that takes place across time, and furthermore, it is one that imposes physical sensations and chemical changes within our brains. The “Aha!” moment isn’t some dull bridging of two file trees inside a digital disk drive. It’s an experience with a “before”, “during”, and “after” -- and it’s often as emotional as it is intellectual. It feels good, literally, to solve problems.
■ A thing without physiology can’t have those experiences, can’t understand them, and should never be asked to substitute for them. There will be ways artificial intelligence will enhance certain specific learning processes. But some people seem so eager to see it as central to an arms race that they miss the huge range of impossibilities that it cannot escape, and that human nature can never be successfully reduced to mere outcomes.