It was one of those little videos that loop on my Facebook: we saw the sun propelling itself into the expansion of the universe and its planets oscillating not around it, but in a whirlwind behind the star . A trail of swirling planets which, although they can return to the same position as they circle around the sun, never end up quite in the same place in space-time.
In 1996. I was in secondary five. There were two classes of students in the humanities concentration and four classes in the natural sciences. Among the two humanities classes, one was made up of future students who would later be accepted into law faculties, while the other was made up of students whose grades, in secondary four, had not been high enough. strong enough for them to be admitted to one of the four natural science classes.
I was part of this second group.
In my secondary five history class, the end-of-year assessment consisted of a ten-page research paper that we had to do at home and hand in typed. I was not yet familiar with computers and I had submitted my work “Canada: federation or confederation” written by hand, in attached letters, with a few corrections to the Liquid PaperTM. I had been the only student not to follow the directive and to submit nothing more or less than a manuscript.
One of the last days of school, Mr. Lousteau, our history teacher, had passed between the rows of desks to hand in the corrected copies: “Mr. Faulkner Leroux, I had to take five points away from you because you have submitted a handwritten version of your work. Without it, you would have gotten the best grade in the class. Congratulations. »
I was probably the last student in my school to hand in a handwritten end-of-year paper. Today, things have changed and, I assure you, I am able to use a keyboard.
That said, I still know how to write not only by hand, but also in attached letters. However, in recent years, this teaching had been completely abandoned in Ontario and also in Quebec: technology has become democratized, has penetrated everywhere, and no one needs to write by hand anymore, so what’s the point? ?
And then, in recent months, the advent of text-generating artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived. The answers generated by the AI are not only credible, but they have been judged good enough to pass entrance exams for the most demanding professions: the AI would thus be a student admitted without embarrassment to the Bar of several states and would also succeed the Royal College exams: if it weren’t for the fact that he lacks hands, ial — I claim the use of ial to refer to artificial intelligence — could be a doctor.
Without the slightest effort and without having to understand anything, students can now bring home scholarly end-of-term papers written by ial.
Solution: Return to writing exams in class.
You still need to know how to write. It’s long, writing ten pages in capital letters…
Somewhere in the universe, we are back in the same place we were 40 years ago, but just a little further away in space-time.
Last Saturday, December 30 marked the last “paper” publication of the newspapers The right, The Nouvelliste, The Daily, The sun, The gallery And The Voice of the East. A final press tour for the National Coop independent information. For a variety of reasons, printed versions are no longer considered relevant today.
Who knows, however, if, in 30 or 40 years, we will not change our minds or, worse, if, in an attempt at ultimate resistance, we will once again be forced to attach letters and sheets to exchange small pamphlets between humans and thus escape an omniscient and omnipotent AI…
It may be cliché, but history has often shown us that we sometimes have to take a step back before taking a big leap forward (echoing the economic policy of Mao Zedong, implemented in China from 1958 to 1960, which nevertheless turned out to be disastrous. Possibly the only reference I have left from my fifth-grade history class).