Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Tom Haymes's avatar

I don’t see how we get away from #3. You can’t ban it. It’s not like bioengineering or nuclear weapons. You need a lot of technology (just ask the Iranians or North Koreans or Pakistanis) to build nuclear weapons. There are a lot of choke points.

Banning AI is like trying to ban the wind from an outdoor wedding.

As I have blogged about before, the real threat AI poses is not to learning but to established systems of education. We have to get past this idea that learning and education are the same thing.

We can protect learning and go well beyond that to augmenting it if we are willing to see AI for what it is, face the flaws of our existing processes (like extrinsic motivators such as grades and everything that flows from them), and imagine new possibilities for our students and citizens.

If we don’t do those things, the existing systems are doomed in any case. If we do, we can reinvent our institutions for a post-Gutenberg world. I am hopeful that we can do the latter or that alternative systems will emerge that do embrace those possibilities.

Our priority needs to be to protect and augment our humanity. It’s inhumane systems (like assembly line learning and adjunct gig workers) that produce the outcomes that everyone seems to fear the worst, not AI.

Expand full comment
The Mental Forge's avatar

There is no “AI cheating crisis.” It is a crisis of “academic rigor,” and education’s failure to adapt when technology catches up with its tradition of teaching to the lowest hanging fruit in terms of learning outcomes.

Expand full comment
47 more comments...

No posts