Dear Sir:

Some recent news reports have occasioned me to call attention to a principle of learning which, in our era of existential unease and fracture, often escapes notice.  A professor at an institution of higher learning, we have been told, worries that he may not be able to “compete” (as he says) with the volumes of information made available to his students by the machines of artificial intelligence.  In this I think his fears are misplaced, and that he need not heat his mind to such a state of fretful ebullition; and I will attempt, with a few disjointed thoughts and unconnected meanderings, to explain why I believe this to be so.

It seems to me that the professor’s sense of disquiet flows from conclusions drawn from inadequate premises.  For he conflates the availability of information with its digestion and productive deployment.  The engineers and technicians who inflicted artificial intelligence upon us have, without doubt, enabled our access to vast amounts of information that were once prohibitively laborious to locate, and difficult to retrieve.  These veins of educational ore were always, so to speak, hidden within the earth’s crust; but finding a drill of sufficient power to reach them, and developing the tools to extract them, were once insurmountable obstacles.  The minerals have now been reached, and may be pulled to the surface and carted away.  But there is a tremendous difference between retrieving an ore, and refining, processing, and delivering such an ore for human use.  The gulf between the one and the other cannot be bridged as easily as many are inclined to believe.      

Nature has gifted man with the power of reason, and She expects him to use that power in ways consistent with the sparks of divinity that have resided within him since birth.  We are rational observers and thinkers; we do not exist on this earth merely as unproductive tenants, or traffic-directors at busy city intersections.  As Cicero says, in his On the Nature of the Gods,

For human beings exist on earth not merely as occupants or tenants, but in a way as observers of transcendent and heavenly things—a privileged spectacle in which no other kind of animal may partake.  [II.56]

Concurrent with observation is the use of our power of reason.  No machine can duplicate reason, which was imparted to man by a kind of miraculous spark.  A mechanical contrivance may only produce, even after infinities of electromagnetic iteration, cycling, and calculation, a poor and pale imitation of the workings of the human mind.  As Cicero says in his Tusculan Disputations,

For the human soul emanates from the divine mind; and, if it is right for me to speak this way, it can be compared with nothing else except God.  If its soul has been so cultivated, and if its sight has been so nurtured, that it is not confused by the deceptions of life, then a fully developed mind will be the result.  By this we mean absolute reason, which is equivalent to virtue.  [V.13]

The realities of commerce bear out these assertions.  We hear that the Starbucks Corporation abandoned the use of artificial intelligence as a tool to track inventory, once it realized that the AI programs involved persistently hallucinated the number of syrup bottles held in storage.  We are informed of other problems as well.  Many business managers have discovered, to their surprise, that AI comes with unanticipated costs; and that, in many cases, those costs exceed the expenses incurred in hiring human beings, without a commensurate return in profitability.  All of this reminds us that the ability to dredge up gigantic amounts of information does not equate to the employment of productive thought, or to the workings of reason.  For to be glutted with nutriment, and to wallow in its surfeit, is neither to be healthy nor constructive in life’s enterprises.

I have recently read, sir, of one unfortunate example of this distinction between the availability of information and its productive use.  In 1944, as Allied forces were preparing for their invasion of Europe, they were conducting a maritime rehearsal on the English coast.  German submarines torpedoed some of the participating ships, and a number of vessels were sunk.  Soldiers weighed down with heavy packs were among those forced to leap into the cold Atlantic.  They had been issued life belts, but had not been instructed on how properly to employ them.  Instead of securing them across their chests and under their arms, they wrapped them around their waists like traditional belts; and when they plunged into the waves, the belts immediately shot to the surface, inverting the bodies of their wearers in the water.  Their heads and torsos were forced under water, and there they remained:  the weight of their packs and equipment prevented them from righting themselves.  Many were drowned.  This loss of life might have been prevented, or at least mitigated, had only someone taken the time to convert the availability of information—the fact that flotation belts were useful survival devices—into practical guidance centered on how life belts should be used. 

It is the task of the human mind to sift through, assess, evaluate, and convert the clouds of particulate churned up by AI into useful knowledge for human guidance.  No machine can ever perform this function, and to expect it to do so is laziness and folly.  The duty of the teacher or instructor is not simply to toss reams of data at the feet of his students; nor should it be his concern that an AI program can produce encyclopedic responses to any question.  His role should be the humanization of information:  that is, to explain why things are important, what connection the relevant knowledge has to our lives, and how it may contribute to, or detract from, the pursuit of wisdom.  Seneca, in his play The Trojan Women, wrote

For never did Fortune provide greater evidence

Of how fragile is the spot on which

The proud stand. 

[Trojan Women I.4—5]

The playwright was certainly correct in this assessment, for history is replete with examples of the thin ice upon which the haughty have recklessly skated.  But I think we modernly could apply Seneca’s observation to the machines of artificial intelligence, and replace the phrase “the proud” with “AI,” without any diminution of truth in his verses. 

Respectfully,

Quintus Curtius

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Read more essays on moral, biographical, philosophical, and historical subjects in the collections Digest and Centuries.

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