Abstract
To know that you are not knowledgeable in certain areas was seen by Plato as being a marker of wisdom and understanding. Socrates revealed that people who thought they were intelligent— who thought they knew what certain concepts meant— had never actually thought about them and, as such, didn’t really know anything about them. AI has a similar sort of problem— primarily because machines are taught by humans. But, this engages us in circular reasoning— where intelligence examines intelligence (or reasoning undermines reasoning). Specifically, the problem is that what makes us human has to do with human intelligence, but human intelligence has shaped artificial intelligence (this is akin to a dog chasing its own tail). In practice this means that our educators and their students will continue to be expected to behave like machines—reducing thinking, reasoning, teaching, and learning to the mechanical sums of physical processes of “stochastic parrots,” similar to the “artificial idiocy” of the way robots, automata, androids, and other forms of artificial intelligence “think.” To know that one is not knowledgeable in certain areas requires critical thinking. Accordingly, critical thinking (asking how (an analysis) and why (an evaluation)) is an aspect of human intelligence that is missed by artificial intelligence. The question to ask, then, is whether an emphasis on artificial intelligence promotes or impedes the development of critical thinking, or at least whether an emphasis on artificial intelligence has a negative effect on the development of critical thinking.
Presenters
Isidoro TalaveraPhilosophy Professor and Lead Faculty, College of Arts and Sciences, Franklin University, Ohio, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, CRITICAL THINKING, TEACHING, LEARNING, WISDOM, EDUCATION
