AI and intellectual audacity (I)

Suddenly, we hear a loud noise from our car's engine. Since we're not very good at car mechanics, we fear it's a serious breakdown and immediately take it to the mechanic. He lifts the hood, listens to the noise carefully, and immediately perceives it as a precise symptom of a malfunction. He tightens a couple of screws and solves the problem. All in two minutes. But these two minutes are the synthesis of many years of learning, of overcoming increasing difficulties that have allowed him to fine-tune his hearing. Where the layman only hears noises, the expert hears a language. Those who are ignorant of mathematics, for example, are completely unaware that nature is always speaking to them, precisely because it speaks in the language of mathematics.

Until now, expert status was achieved by overcoming what we might call desirable difficulties. However, today some believe that experience has outlived its usefulness, since, with AI, we have all the answers almost instantly. Why not let it take care of interpreting things?

Astrophysicists, doctors, engineers, economists... are using AI with spectacular results. So are erotomaniacs, those looking for sophisticated ways to poison their partners, or those who want to know what Led Zeppelin would sound like if Jimmy Page had been Paco de Lucía.

Technologies are anthropological prostheses that amplify our imagination of the possible, and among the possibilities available to us is the renunciation of the effort to learn the world's languages, which implies losing the ability to ask the right questions about reality.

Everyone might find it beneficial to order food from a restaurant from time to time. It's easy, fast, clean, and not very expensive. But if we make this behavior a habit, we'll forget the noble and sophisticated art of cooking, the ability to converse with the products of the market. Perhaps we're witnessing a growing gap between those who love cooking and those who just want to eat.

What should schools do: teach people how to shop for food or teach them how to cook? Or, to put it another way: Should AI help us place students in desirable situations or transfer human mental processes to machines?

Some researchers are convinced that this transfer is responsible for the famous Flynn effect (the decline in IQ in developed countries, especially those in Northern Europe, since the end of the last century). It seems that the depletion of procedural memory weakens reasoning, hinders learning, decreases efficiency, and encourages cognitive laziness (especially through the reduction of self-regulation, self-correction, and thoughtful reflection).

I'm not saying that new technologies are merely instruments for the massive transfer of human intelligence to exomemories, but rather that we should use them as a spur, not as a substitute for our intellect.

It's true that astrophysicists and doctors use AI with spectacular results. But these results highlight what the alliance between the expert's capacity for questioning and technology can achieve.

Today, American educators appear increasingly skeptical about the effects of AI. Fifty percent are very concerned about the possibility that it will encourage the spread of lies, erode personal privacy, eliminate human jobs, and manipulate human behavior. Are we facing a temporary phenomenon?

In my opinion, the pedagogically urgent question today is this: does our use of AI nourish our cognitive potential or hinder its development? Does it place us before increasing, but desirable, difficulties, or before facilitators that do not contribute to intellectual growth? Is it strengthening our status as authors or as consumers? If AI does a job for us, wouldn't we be co-authors? And if we ask AI to correct the style of our own text, aren't we renouncing the will to style, to leaving the imprint of who we are on what we do in order to become interchangeable beings? Is it still true that le style c est el homme mêmeCan you achieve your own style without the effort to achieve it?

Let us remember that style comes from Latin stilus, which designated the stylus used for writing. Today, when the stylus has been replaced by the keyboard, is it still true that, as Proust said, style is the quality of vision?