During the last week, the newspapers have taught us, on the one hand, that sorcerer’s apprentices have thought it wise to create an artificial intelligence capable of writing school work in place of students. On the other hand, we have learned that these same young people, with the help of the pandemic, are now unable to master the language, or even to develop elementary autonomy.
Some, in fact, would not be able to find the cafeteria or the bookstore, even after several weeks. Others shop on Amazon during their lessons or struggle to understand that you don’t go to school in your pajamas. On the one hand, therefore, we are boasted of machines that are more and more autonomous, while the students are becoming less and less so. Isn’t this a sign that someone is trying to impose something quite serious on us?
Stupidity and knowledge
Certainly, some enlightened techno-pedagogy propose to integrate ChatGPT as quickly as possible into the classes. But most of the professors I know are currently very concerned and are busy revising their evaluation methods to try to counter the risks of cheating or plagiarism. However, this is not the most worrying thing. A student whose work was written by a machine did not understand, in the sense of internalized, the material, but rather asked a machine to substitute for him.
We are here faced with a very worrying dynamic which we are struggling to take full measure of: the smarter the machines are, the more “dumb” we become without them, and this at the very time when we should be promoting the development of a sensitive civic conscience. to the various crises that affect both societies and nature.
From active citizen to intelligent machine
Several authors, such as Günther Anders, Michel Freitag or Bernard Stiegler, to name only those that come to mind, have identified a fundamental change between modern and postmodern societies. In modern society, the school ideal aims to form citizens that the Republic needs, capable of the public use of reason. As Victor Hugo said: “I want the ladder of science to be firmly erected by the hands of the State, placed in the shadow of the darkest and most obscure masses, and to end in the light; I want […] that the heart of the people be put in communication with the brain of France. This means that the ideal of the active, enlightened, cultured, autonomous citizen endowed with the ability to judge is at the heart of the ideal of the modern project.
In postmodern society, the regulation of societies leaves the field of politics to be delegated to systems (world market, computerized networks, algorithms), etc. These systems are increasingly called upon to decide for us in all areas. This is part of a phenomenon of externalization by which we discharge certain aptitudes and entrust them to external machines. We can think of the example of the GPS: my “smart” phone now knows the way to the chalet, but without this crutch, I might not be able to get there “by heart”. So, rather than having internalized knowledge autonomously, I must rely, heteronomously, on external systems that think for me.
The ideal of the enlightened citizen gives way to that of the techno-assisted individual, dependent on the new technical prostheses that think for him. A student can very well ask a robot to write an essay on The Republic of Plato, and thus “pass” his course. But at the end of the operation, he will not be more knowledgeable or autonomous. It will be less. Much less. We have to ask who, what class has an interest in promoting such a “teaching of ignorance” (Michea), in forming people incapable of exercising autonomy on the individual and collective level, that is to say politics, to rely instead on the automatic piloting of globalized and computerized capitalism.
Double lock yourself in the cave
According to Anders’ formula, there are no longer men surrounded by machines, but machines surrounded by men. The march of the world is increasingly entrusted, following the project of the economic and technocratic elite, to autonomous systems (those of cybernetic capitalism), while the ideal of the autonomous citizen is replaced by that of the adaptive individual. , which is driven (and entertained) from signals projected onto screens by algorithms. It seems that, rather than leaving Plato’s cave, we have collectively chosen to chain ourselves there, by making even more sophisticated the machines that produce the shadows that put us to sleep.
Hannah Arendt was asking for a very simple thing: “Nothing more than to think about what we are doing. The banality of evil indeed stems from the absence of thought. However, today’s world is heading for disaster because of capitalism and machines, but we do nothing because we watch the show, letting machines think more and more for us, even in education, where the we should, however, form active citizens.
What the ruling class is doing to the planet and to education is deeply irrational. We cannot continue to leave the running of the world to the systems of technocapitalism, nor can we leave education in the hands of robots and the technocratic elite who actively promote it. As Warren Buffett said: “There is a class struggle, of course, but it is my class, that of the rich, which makes the war. And we win. »
Clearly, we must not only resist the invasion of artificial intelligence in education, but also democratically regain control of what moves the world, which is after all too important a matter to be left in the hands of machines and of those whom Jean-Jacques Pelletier called the “managers of the apocalypse”.