The Cyborg Has Entered the Classroom

A.I. and the Future of Education

By: David Lane

Narrated by: Paul Metcalfe

Length: 55 mins

Publisher's summary

This audiobook focuses on how artificial intelligence can actually help education in the long run. Instead of censoring ChatGPT and DALLE-2, we should instead incorporate such in our high school and college courses.

Excerpt:

"No, let’s be clear. We are not foregoing our tools, and we are certainly not going to retreat into some hippie off-the-grid commune because we have delusions that killer robots, mimicking Terminator-like clones, are out to kill all of humanity. A.I., like it or not, is here to stay. We are not going back to typewriters (Tom Hanks be damned!), because we miss correcting our mistakes with liquid white-out. Word processing was and is a game-changer, just as having a search engine like Google has opened up vast forms of information that we hitherto inaccessible. Right now, as I write these words, I read that 'New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat. According to the city's education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York's public schools.' Some educators are applauding the move, out of fear that students won’t write original essays and simply rely on A.I. systems like ChatGPT to do their homework. But this, I suggest, is myopic to the extreme. Are we going to now ban spell check on Word? Ban Grammarly? Ban Wikipedia? Ban Google Scholar? And the list goes on, if we are truly worried about A.I. obviating student learning.

No, the Pandora’s Box of artificial intelligence has already been opened, and there is no closing it now. Instead, we should embrace such innovations and let them improve how we learn, not shut the door to them in our public schools, only to have students access them freely at home. It is a stupid game we are playing. Students should be encouraged to play with ChatGPT and DALLE-2 and any other up-and-coming iterations of machine learning. Suppressing such creative tools is backwards, especially since we can learn much more by augmenting our own intelligence with their surprising capabilities."

©2023 David Christopher Lane (P)2023 David Christopher Lane