Practical vs. Artificial Intelligence
The short - 26,800 kids over 30 months using AI for homework. Results - homework scores go up 18%, homework time reduces by 30%. Closed book exam results down by 20%.
So homework’s not the problem?
One study might not represent all learning, or all types of learning, but it is something to think about. Or graph if you’re that way inclined.
Look at me being hypocritical!
Exam results as a metric, Tatey? You don't see standardised testing as any indicator of deep learning anyway. True, but AI dumped this study into my social feed right after it was suggested I should explain my stance on AI, so all omens and portents told me to share it.
I think this is the quantitative vs qualitative argument manifest. The comedian Jimmy Carr said AI is brilliant at finding all the data and doing complicated things, but it doesn't do complex things. It is great at superficial, but it sucks at depth – emotion, aesthetics, wisdom.
AI use impacts depth of learning.
Some could argue the depth is created within the individual, but is it? Because gathering and analysing data has now been commercialised, the individual is overwhelmed with it. A diet of superficiality has the same effect on the soul as poor food on the body. As the stoic Epictetus said, “What we give our attention to we become”.
What is missing is the practice of quality.
When life is reduced to data sets, everything exists in a quantifiable, conceptual and ultimately, an intellectual framework. When some bright spark commodified that framework, everything – literally every thing and every concept – was organised into an economy. The focus of an economy is the most for least. Quality is sacrificed because it costs more.
Quality is the time it takes to not only absorb information but translate it into experience; to make sense of it and what it means in relation to the individual’s context. It is wisdom rather than simply knowledge. Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing it doesn’t belong in fruit salad. Wit is knowing tomato fruit salad is salsa.
Quality is more than a higher order in Bloom’s Taxonomy, it is the taxonomy as a process. Quality is the synthesis, trail-error-retrial methodology of applying the conceptual to the contextual i.e. giving it a crack in your life and seeing what you make of it. Apply, practice, refine, develop. This is how we learn and this is how we live.
I believe life and learning are synonymous. Restricting either to a simple, quantifiable, intellectual perspective is to blinker the horse so it won’t be distracted from its work. Completely aware of my own hypocrisy charging money for teaching, I don’t believe they have a place in an economy. That’s the same as treating people like things.
Some believe all of reality is consciousness, and consciousness is more than our intellectual understanding, more than our physical and metaphysical selves, but the synergy of these different aspects in the moment as we experience. Being conscious is a qualitative effort, an engagement on all these levels, but without practice, it is difficult to maintain.
This is the individual’s responsibility that the collective society and its representative, bureaucracy, would prefer to relinquish. The cost of being conscious in life rather than merely thinking about it as it parades by is taking responsibility for the quality of engagement with every possible element of it.
By delegating the responsibility, we lose the fundamental quality of experiencing life.
Now, for those that are about to ask me if I'm going to go hunt and gather my food so I can experience the fundamental quality of life, you'll have to excuse me as I use AI to create some more images that I can't draw.
