The Aims of Education in the Age of AI

We are called upon to construe an ethic and a practical discipline adequate to the unique conditions of our time. 1 For the recent burgeoning of generative artificial intelligence, which simulates the operations of thought and expression, presents not merely an external convenience, but a challenge to the springs of human agency, to the formation of character and to the creative impulse itself. Yet it would be premature to define the contours of this problem in abstraction. The history of civilization is, in no small measure, a history of its responses to innovation, especially to those techniques which touch upon language, memory and the ordering of thought. Again and again, such inventions have been greeted with a double apprehension: that they might enfeeble the discipline of the mind and arrest the growth of the soul, or, conversely, that they might serve as instruments of its preservation against other perils.