AI implications for education

“If they don’t have the decency to interview you face to face, they aren’t worth your time,”

dehumanizing

Worrying about your personal use of ChatGPT is wasted time that you could spend on the serious problems of climate change instead.

Microso

Even where accurate, legitimate and relevant, turning information into data flattens richness and lived experience.

We should be cautious about seeing datasets as proxies for truth and reality, as there are gaps between people’s lived experiences and the data that has been collected. A care organisation collecting data on the number of visits to a vulnerable patient may have little understanding of the dignity, respect and safety felt by that patient.

Replacing existing consultation analysis with this Consult tool would save thousands of hours of work. However, this approach privileges quantitative over qualitative analysis, undermining the potential of finding a ‘golden nugget’ of data: a compelling quote or story that shifts thinking.

A more fundamental issue (sometimes glossed over by those enthusiastic about headline productivity gains) is that inserting technology into any system changes that system.

Instead, they create ripple effects - altering people’s behaviours and expectations around each technology. Professionals may defer to a tool, ignore it completely, or learn how to ‘game’ it to get the desired results.

As Goldman Sachs’ Head of Global Equity Research points out ‘eighteen months after the introduction of generative AI to the world, not one truly transformative—let alone cost-effective—application has been found.’  Indeed a recent survey of workers and C-suite executives found 77% claim generative AI has added to their workload, leading to increased pressure to work longer hours to be more productive due to using AI.

Where AI does successfully support public sector decision making, we must still carve out resources to complement that data-driven insight with other forms of qualitative, relational and experiential understanding from both publics and professionals.

As AI tools become increasingly integrated into everyday life, their impact on fundamental cognitive skills warrants careful consideration.

a significant negative correlation between the frequent use of AI tools and critical thinking abilities, mediated by the phenomenon of cognitive offloading.

One potential direction is to investigate the longitudinal effects of AI tool usage on critical thinking skills over time. This could involve tracking individuals’ cognitive development and AI tool usage patterns over several years to comprehensively understand the long-term impacts.

It may seem as though we are simply talking about technology, but when it comes to AI, we are talking about whether we can or should use the technology to attempt to know the unknowable, what William James described as “our indomitable desire to cast the world into a more rational shape in our minds than the shape into which it is thrown there by the crude order of our experience.”

The habit of confident prediction, especially when expressed probabilistically, gives a rational sheen to the most unhinged speculation.

Many skeptics are so focused on proving AI doesn’t work that they miss it when AI works exactly as intended, sometimes with disastrous consequences for individuals or society.

“tug of war in which recommendation algorithms amplify harmful content and content moderation algorithms try to detect and suppress it” will not be settled by AI.

As William S. Burroughs observed, capitalism eats quality and shits quantity.