As AI takes us forward, students’ critical thinking skills could go backward

I have used artificial intelligence to translate texts in foreign languages and to transcribe interviews. It’s impressive, inexpensive and fast. It’s not a good development for the people who until recently got paid to do the transcription, but new technologies have often made whole professions obsolete. Not all shortcuts, however, have great long-term effects.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has reported on the cheating epidemic that has overtaken schools and universities as students outsource their assignments to a chat bot. One student interviewed said once he joins the workforce, it doesn’t matter if someone has reasoned out a problem or crafted a text personally. What matters is the output, and the faster the better. There’s no need for people on the job to show their work when all it does is slow things down. Why should math students in school bother doing the same?

Perhaps schools and universities are indeed, as some claim, vocational schools where students prepare for jobs. Under that assumption, it’s probably true that learning how to let AI do your thinking provides one with workplace readiness, much more than interpreting poems or learning history.

If school is where you learn how to think, however, producing schoolwork by having machines do the labor negates the whole purpose of education. It also removes many of what I always considered to be the most interesting parts of teaching, such as designing courses and classes to promote complex thinking, and reading students’ work in relation to them.

Peter Smagorinsky. (Courtesy)

Even that part of the job is now in jeopardy. Writing produced on computers is increasingly graded by machines, with New Jersey using AI to evaluate high-stakes student essays. A number of teachers have been concerned that the machine grades do not match their own sense of an essay’s quality. Who could have seen that coming? I’m reminded of my daughter’s middle school essay, graded by a prototype for today’s AI, which told her that the essay she’d written in a large, impersonal exam room — on a topic she didn’t care about — lacked a good sense of audience.

The outsourcing of thinking to a bot has raised the question: “Is AI Making Us Stupid?” One possible answer is available through H.G. Wells’ 1895 novel “The Time Machine.” The protagonist builds a machine that allows him to travel backward and forwards in time. Ultimately, he goes way into the future, where he finds that the people with the most advantages, the Eloi, have become soft and vulnerable, because they never have to do anything for themselves. Their minds have atrophied to the point where they are weak and helpless.

Descendants of the working class, the Morlocks, live underground and attack the Eloi at night. The Eloi, with little experience in thinking and acting in the world, are prey for the more voracious Morlocks. Ultimately, even farther into the future, the world is reduced to a hellscape dominated by mammoth crustaceans. Humanity cannot not survive its own indolence and goes extinct.

Wells referred to the novel’s central idea as “degeneration following security.” Perhaps you are thinking, “Well, sure, that’s a novel. Novels aren’t real.” But sometimes they’re pretty close. These days, George Orwell’s “1984″ comes to mind.

I am concerned about the effects of AI on people who never learn how to think and express themselves, and rely on machines to do it for them. Are they tomorrow’s Eloi, left without resources when real thinking and acting are required?

To me, that’s what schools and universities are for: to push students to develop critical ways of thinking about their chosen discipline, and much more. Without such capacities, they may be good at producing memos quickly, but not at insightful thinking and meaningful acting. Be wary of the painless life of ease in the present, one with no obstacles to overcome or problems to solve with your own mind. It may well make life much tougher down the road.

Peter Smagorinsky is a professor emeritus in the department of Language & Literacy Education at the University of Georgia.