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Ryan Hrobak: The real risk of AI is the loss of working minds

Louisa Gouliamaki/Getty Images

Ryan Hrobak: The real risk of AI is the loss of working minds

Many leaders in the tech industry have signed a statement that says, “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” One tech executive indicated that the threat from AI could be “more urgent” than climate change. And, in an unusual move, another tech executive asked Congress to regulate AI.

All of this sounds bizarre, even Orwellian. Given this unique set of circumstances, we might do well to consider the impact of artificial intelligence on actual intelligence.

Into the sacred grove

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Those of us in higher education are already seeing the challenges of AI. With chatbots able to generate responses to essay prompts and quantitative problems, dishonest students can take cheating to heights previously unknown. And as freshmen arrive on campus more tech savvy, more tech dependent, and less literate than their predecessors, the temptation to copy and paste an AI-generated answer grows exponentially.

Westinghouse senior Vernon Hucks Jr., works on building a tiny house as part of the school’s CTE (career and technical education) program.
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Although the problem of plagiarism is a far cry from the “risk of extinction,” AI’s incursion into the college classroom — the sacred space in which critical thinking, analytical reasoning, and the human intellect are cultivated — should give us pause.

We should pause to remind ourselves of the classroom’s purpose. For most Americans, college is for careers. Getting an education enhances one’s earning potential and career trajectory. To the extent that any coursework or assignment does not translate directly to improving one’s career prospects or job readiness, it’s a pointless exercise.

As important to the workforce as education may be, those of us who labor at liberal arts colleges insist that education’s purpose doesn’t end there. From our perspective, the aims and purposes of academic study are more deeply rooted in our humanity.

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Education doesn’t simply help us to have better careers. More fundamentally, education helps us to become better humans.

The pursuit of knowledge and understanding is as old as human history. This pursuit unfolds less by way of answers and more by way of questions. Questions about matters such as justice, happiness, truth, and love have endured throughout the ages.

Figures like Socrates, Aristotle, Jesus, Aquinas, Nietzsche, Shakespeare, MLK, and others have interrogated them anew, each according to the vicissitudes and problems of their own times, but always with intellectual rigor and an unrelenting yearning for understanding our world more deeply and capaciously.

The real risk of AI

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In the classroom we continue to engage in and hand on this search for knowledge and understanding. Indeed, the classroom cultivates the tools necessary for this search.

The risk of our increased reliance on AI is that we will sacrifice our actual intelligence for an artificial one. We risk losing the ability to delve deeply into the timeless questions and problems and instead rely on a chatbot to parrot back answers.

The risk of dependency on AI is not so much that artificial intelligence will dominate our lives. The risk is that we will lose our capacity for real intelligence. Such a condition doesn’t really involve intelligence at all. On the contrary, it’s the absence of it.

Our ability to discern what truth is, or what morality involves, or what justice demands requires us to engage in the tried and true but difficult process of learning — reading, thinking, analyzing, discussing, and writing. It requires being attentive to the world and those around us.

It involves being mindful of ourselves and growing in self-awareness. It demands discipline rather than taking the easy way out. You can’t get this from a chatbot.

The result of committing to these tried and true methods is that we equip ourselves to become better human beings because we understand our humanity better. We can love better because we have a keener understanding of what love entails. We can be fairer to people because we know them and the dictates of justice more acutely. We can discern truth from falsehood more certainly because we have considered truth seriously.

We become better

And in doing all of these things, we become better spouses, siblings, parents, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. We become better in these regards because these relationships depend on something much deeper than being good at a particular task or having a certain skillset or earning a sum of money. They depend on our character, integrity, and most importantly our humanity.

The ancient philosophers believed that it was our ability to reason that distinguished humanity from other creatures. If we become overly-reliant on AI, we risk losing this ability and consequently something fundamental to our human flourishing. As W.E.B. DuBois eloquently put it in his classic work “The Souls of Black Folk”: “The true college will ever have one goal — not to earn meat, but to know the end and aim of that life which meat nourishes.”

Let us not lose the capacity to know that end and aim of that life.

Ryan Hrobak serves as assistant general counsel to Saint Vincent College and Archabbey, where he also teaches in the theology department. He lives in Bloomfield with his family.

First Published: January 6, 2024, 10:30 a.m.

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A statue featuring the ancient greek philosopher Socrates faces the headquarters of the Bank of Greece, in Athens, on August 20, 2018.  (Louisa Gouliamaki/Getty Images)
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