Artificial intelligence has arrived on the scene and is already taking over every aspect of our lives. People use it to write almost anything, medical professionals use it to diagnose illnesses and prescribe treatments, we use it to think and we use it to decide. Before you know it, AI will be running your life. One risk is we will become helpless because lost most of our skills, especially, and the most problematic from my point of view is we will have lost our critical thinking skills. I know we are in an arms race with China and countries around the world to develop this technology and apply it to innovations we cannot even fathom yet. And still, I have some major concerns. My intent is to address concerns regarding privacy, liability, and safety in a bill dealing with the unspoken dangers of artificial intelligence in the next legislative session. For now, I would like to draw your attention to something happening to our young people which, if we don’t make changes, will only get worse in the immediate future: the deconstruction of our educational model.
There once were programs like Turnitin.com where teachers and professors could detect plagiarism (intentionally misspelled here as evidence that I personally wrote this with my iconic and meta sense of humor that no machine can replace). Those days are gone; AI has already evolved past Turnitin’s detection capabilities. Soon all students will have immediate access to feed their homework into an AI system, math, writing, history, and science homework. There will be no meaningful way to tell if the student showed his work with the help of AI or not. You can just prompt AI to show the work for you. You can prompt the AI to make the writing sound exactly like you. That’s the point I’m making; you can prompt it to do almost anything, and it will get more and more sophisticated with the information we feed it and as it learns and adapts. Fortunately, for now anyway, take home art projects and science projects with three dimensional aspects are still relevant. Because of the rise of artificial intelligence, most homework now contributes to a rapidly accelerating problem of children who are no longer learning.
By now, most of us have seen studies correlating AI usage to declines in problem solving, writing, and memory ability. It makes sense that what we use mentally gets stronger and what we do every day we do better, but what we no longer use we lose. We are past the point where the genie can be put back in the bottle. For better or worse, our generation will grapple with the possibilities for our future and danger to our humanity of an AI world. Grappling with this problem, and not ignoring it, is exactly what we must do. One way we must grapple with it is to ensure our children learn not how to prompt but how to think. How to sit and concentrate on a problem. How to go down a rabbit hole of intellectual exploration and inquiry. How to be suspicious of the easy answers. How to question what doesn’t add up. How to create. How to mentally persist. How to build in the mind first then build in real life. How to be an independent thinker.
If we are not careful all those things will be entirely taken from the children who will become the next generation of adults. What follows after this is a society potentially helpless and dependent on AI. That makes our country vulnerable from the national security macro level down to being treated by a doctor who has no understanding of the patient besides what a computer program tells him or a legal system run by lawyers who quickly generate motions but have no understanding of justice and the abstractness of law and the reason and philosophy behind the law.
I know our local educators have been working diligently to balance equipping students for the future with skills of how to think and act and knowledge of how to use technology. I want to work with them and the state board of education to refine our education system so that there is more work in the classroom done without the aid of AI and more focus on developing the skills and abilities we are going to need human beings to have in the next generation. We are at a very critical time in history, unlike any before, our world is about to dramatically change. My imploration is that we don’t lose our humanity, our reasoning ability, our self-reliance, and our sense of right and wrong and that we don’t give up our independence as human beings to something as simultaneously powerful and fragile as artificial intelligence.
