The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence

Your headlines are awash with Artificial Intelligence.

Big Data has given way to Large Language Models, and ChatGPT sits on a mountain of data, some of its own creation. The media is tripping over itself to sensationalize this trend and forecast a 'Terminator 2' style apocalypse. The government has leapt into the fray and is already discussing how to legislate the usage of AI. It is a cacophony of voices, ironically all feeding data into the very system that they are discussing.

Those who know me know that I have a passion for education. While I'm a technologist up top, education is my heart. As I sit gazing into the swirling chaos of the sudden attention that AI is garnering, I feel compelled to address a few key things that I have always held near and dear.

The "A" in AI needs to stand for "augmented".

My peers in education are tripping over themselves to figure out ways to handle the influx of AI to the classroom. A fellow faculty member once relayed the story of a paper that he graded that started with "As an artificial intelligence language model...". (C'mon, if you're going to cheat, at least do it well!) Some educators are ranting that we need to block large language models from our networks and ban the use of these in the classroom. Others take a more relaxed approach and invoke the calculator metaphor. (Math teachers were initially afraid the calculator would make them irrelevant, but we learned to use them as a tool to support learning, not replace it.) I have some amazing colleagues, and I'm finding that the leaders I work with take more of the latter approach...

Let's see how we can leverage this newly relevant tech as a tool and not a replacement of our good work.

Artificial is not an antonym of "real", no matter what dictionary.com tells you. When you buy a tree for the holidays, people ask if you like "fake" trees or "real" trees. It can even become a hot debate. (Politics, religion, and ...trees?) An artificial tree serves an important purpose for some people, and they are able to dress it up just as beautifully as its (formerly living) counterpart. It is not null. It does not replace real trees. Trees still exist, just not in your particular implementation. It is very much in the room. The individual wanted the look of a tree, but not the hassle of needles, sap, and the inevitable spider infestation that comes with putting a piece of the forest in your home. The reason I make this parallel is to paint a picture that AI should augment our lives, that it should have a place in our collective psyche. It should not be considered artificial, because while it is not comprised of neural tissue, it is very much a part of our living rooms and offices.

We should teach people to understand AI, and to leverage it if they choose.

Any tool should exist to augment our lives, rather than take something away. This is a simple concept and not an original thought, but I continue to be amazed at the number of people that consider AI a replacement, rather than an assistant. So rather than run around like Chicken Little, let's take a step back and think about ways that we can integrate it into our lives. AI has enormous potential to assist in key repetitive tasks but will never serve to replicate the aspects of humanity such as the ability to care, understand the perspective of the individual, or know when it should press forward or back off. We can use it to generate content, enhance our search experience, and perform mass-scale activities like cybersecurity threat management.

We can leverage AI to create an outline for us, but we should still be able to express the content.

That's perhaps why the calculator example is so ubiquitous. We still teach math theory, we still learn the long hand structure - but when we practice it in our real lives, we leverage a tool confident in knowing that our human sense of rationalization will effectively detect when something doesn't feel right.

As we move forward, it's important to apply augmented intelligence in a way that makes us collectively better - rather than look for ways to shortcut our humanity.