Our students have to think for themselves
The implications and ramifications for this application are serious, and need to be addressed to determine how it can best be utilized within our society and culture.
As a retired educator, I know students need to be able to learn to think for themselves and create essays that promote their thought process, not that of artificial intelligence. Becoming a critical thinker is the highest level in Bloom’s Taxonomy, whereby students of all ages take in information and are able to disseminate it and apply it to all areas of life. Lacking this ability to do so waters down human intelligence once again. Thinking is hard work and critical thinking takes time and practice, pulling from all experiences to formulate hypotheses, ideas and decisions. Providing yet another tool in which a few words can be typed into a bar resulting in an answer to a test or a speech is giving away both our freedom to think and students’ ability to learn to think for themselves. This is a very dangerous place to go.
Technology is here to stay, and it is always changing. This much we know. But there needs to be intelligent discussion and commonsense decisions on how to best use this new technology responsibly to enhance our way of life, not lessen it. There is something to be said for learning how to think and formulating concepts on our own. Without it, we lose that part of humanity that makes us human. We must protect our ability to understand how to say what we want to say in order to get the message or idea across. We won’t be able to do that if we hand off that part of us to artificial intelligence.
There is much work to be done in this area and so much more to be studied. There needs to be reasonable application for all people in all walks of life, and there needs to be the necessary time taken to ensure that using an app of this magnitude will enhance our future, not destroy it in order to “lessen the load.” Any launch of a new idea needs the necessary rigors to study extensively the positives and negatives. Any new idea needs the proper leadership to find a balanced and regulated approach to such new technology, while maintaining the integrity of such an application.
I wonder if this can ever be achieved in a society and culture that insists upon immediate gratification without the effort it requires?
Donna M. Tabone, Escondido