Bruno Selun @bselun - Twitter Profile

bselun retweeted

4 months ago

One of the things I loved about Oxford as an undergraduate was just this feeling, that the tutors were never there to provide answers, but to challenge you to think more deeply about what were the right questions. I think in my entire degree I never wrote an essay to a prompt, but always followed my nose (including doing some digital humanities work [in 2001-2] almost before it was technically feasible to do so... AI would have been useful for *that*). I attended three lectures total; I didn't even have my allotted weekly meetings with tutors. I'd disappear for a couple of weeks, resurface with a paper, and talk about it for a couple of hours with a world-famous expert in the field. It was such a blast. The temptation to outsource one's thinking and to treat university as an answer machine, is a real challenge for us, now. But in another sense I think the challenge will be quite surmountable, and it points to the enduring value that universities can provide. It's surely clear to any motivated student, now, that allowing AI to write your outputs deprives you of almost everything that matters. There can *definitely* be ways in which AI can help as a research tool, and as an interlocutor, but writing is where you really wrestle with the problem, where you discover (especially in philosophy) the hidden premises in your half-articulated thoughts, which now require defence. If I'd done that as an undegrad, the tutorial would have been a walk of shame (and if my tutor outsourced grading to the AI, they'd have been equally embarrassed—though some had a higher toleration for that than others...) More generally, the central challenge that we're seeing with the ability to get AI agents to produce research outputs of many different kinds is that there's no plug in the back of our heads that allows us to just do a Neo in 'The Matrix' and instantly cognise all that information and analysis that has been generated. In 'Accelerando' the protagonist can fork his identity into an AI agent, send it off to do something, and then merge the branch back in with his principal cognition. But that isn't possible for us (whether it would be a good thing if it ever was is an interesting question). If you're in a domain where all you care about is the product (some forms of software writing, for example), then that might be fine. But anybody who wants to be a thinker is going to know that that isn't something that can be outsourced. And there will always be people who want to be thinkers (after all, Aristotle wasn't completely off the mark when he described it as one of the central elements in the good life). And society will continue to need institutions whose primary function is to teach young people how to think.

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Bruno Selun

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