AI has no voice (even though it speaks)

Those of us dedicated to university teaching continue to wonder what the competitive advantage of the human being who teaches is compared to a kind and gentle, all-encompassing artificial intelligence. Our worries and shortcomings are largely covered by the superpowerful capacity of this dancing universe of millions of data points.

Sometimes we talk to students, accustomed to following the professor's instructions to the letter as if they were robotic machines. Unlike in Darwin's time, we are no longer concerned with being like the great apes (chimpanzees, orangutans, and company, absolutely endearing beings in whom we recognize our own way of doing things) but with something else that keeps us awake at night: what is the difference between a supercomputer and us, poor second-class mortals?

In these peculiar circumstances of today's world, teaching the history of education is an almost impossible task, because the perception of time has changed so much and because young people don't want to study historical events. They've already done this in high school, and everything has remained the same after the cramming for the exam. One day, talking with the students, I ask for my parents' names. They write them down. Then for my grandparents' names. They write them down. Then for my great-grandparents' names. No idea. A gap in their knowledge opens up before them, leaving them perplexed. I ask them to think about it the other way around: their great-grandchildren won't remember their names. They will have disappeared from the family memory. They will no longer be anyone. They will have died completely.

I propose inviting several grandparents to class. Two grandfathers and two grandmothers from the students in the group volunteer for the experiment. Let's hold a press conference. The students formulate questions, always aimed at making these great-grandparents (the parents of the invited grandparents) and their generation visible. The grandparents who have come are kind, tolerant. Sons and daughters of the post-war era. One of the questions the students asked was: "What is the best gift your parents ever gave you?" One of the grandparents answered a bicycle. Another said, "Giving me life: that was the best gift."

In the written assignment I gave after that day, most of the students expressed that what we had done couldn't be found on the internet, nor could the gpt tool do it. Because the grandparents spoke of the absence of their parents, from whom and through whom their story unfolded. Suddenly, we heard voices we didn't know existed. AI can tell us how to get to a restaurant or who Maria Montessori was. And it does so well. It speaks to provide information, but it doesn't know it has no voice. Because the voice is the point from which the meaning of our lives is organized. We know where we come from by recognizing the voices of those who are with us, and especially those who have left a vital mark. And now I ask: how should education be structured to rescue this voice hidden behind so much artificial language? Perhaps this is the challenge that awaits us.