The promise of artificial intelligence and its limitless uses is both sublimely beautiful and detrimental to the human capacity to think and to reason.
Ethan Seigel, writing in Nautilus, gives an example of the potential danger of AI. A recent economics class at Brown University with 86 students was given a take-home midterm test, and scores averaged 96%. Just five students scored below 90% in a class where midterm grades had never exceeded 80%.
The professor, knowing that the class had cheated, announced that the final would be held in person. "18 students dropped the class. 9 students didn’t show up for the final. And of the 59 who took the final, the average score was 48.6 percent, with only one student achieving a score of 90 percent or more," writes Seigel.
Professor Roberto Serrano told Inside Higher Ed, “We cannot afford to have a society in which a significant fraction of our best young minds think that cheating is OK. That leads to a declining society, to a failed society … We cannot choose to become idiots.”
Serrano obviously never saw the classic cult film, Idiocracy. Two people are placed in hibernation for a year in a military experiment that goes haywire when the base is shut down, and the subjects are forgotten.
When they finally wake up 500 years later, they discover that the average human intelligence has declined so much that Joe is now the smartest man in the world. The problem is that the technology from the 21st century is still running the planet, with no one knowing how to repair it.
The film flopped at the box office when it was released in 2006, mostly because Warner Brothers didn't believe in the project. It has since become a cult classic due to its exaggerated satire of a dumbed-down, hyper-commercialized society that feels disturbingly like a documentary of modern life.
As AI becomes more ubiquitous, critical thinking skills, already ebbing away due to a deficient public education system, are being lost, bringing us closer to the world of Idiocracy.
"Despite all that AI can actually do, the most dangerous thing it can do is erode our skills: a real danger if we outsource our actual learning, our critical thinking, and the time we spend struggling with puzzles and problems to a tool that purports to do it for us," writes Seigel.
Not surprisingly, Albert Einstein warned about this problem, from which we can extrapolate that Einstein almost certainly would not have used AI.
“It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”
This powerful statement, on its own, is sufficient to illustrate that Einstein would have chosen not to use AI/LLMs, even if they were available to him, to do anything other than look up facts (which he would then, of course, have to verify weren’t AI hallucinations). He absolutely would not have outsourced his critical thinking skills — or any endeavors that helped develop them — to a tool that would have taken those valuable efforts away from him. After all, thinking and struggling with the material, and mutual sharing in the expertise of a group of colleagues, is how Einstein grew his mind and attained his great achievements in the first place.
AI will be useful in many applications. But it will never be able to duplicate the process of "thinking." How many steps does the mind take from recognizing a problem to solving it? Too many to count, even for AI. Not only that, but how many different paths can the mind take to solve the same problem? The critical thinking skills humans acquire that gave Einstein supernatural insights into matter, gravity, energy, and the universe also gave him the innate ability to find the right path to the correct answer.
AI will never be able to do that.
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