OPINION:
This past week, a student called me to request an interview for an assignment. The topic was artificial intelligence and its effect on the ivory tower. My interviewer’s question was frankly quite simple: Is AI good or bad? Does it help or hinder education?
My answer was equally brief and straightforward. “You’re asking the wrong question,” I said. “AI is not about education at all. It’s about information. And there’s a huge difference.”
For over a thousand years, classical education was assumed to be about much more than just accumulating data. The explicit mission of the ivory tower was to foster a society with a healthy heart and not just one with more information in its head. From Oxford to Dartmouth, from Princeton to Yale, a liberally educated person over the millenniums understood the purpose of education was to pursue the truth and understand the difference between it and lies.
History, until about five seconds ago, assumed that truth was an objective reality and that it transcended our feelings and emotions. Truth was considered self-evident. It stood the test of time. It was immutable and didn’t bend with political power or cultural fads. Down through the ages, the educated person knew we don’t create truth. We pursue it, find it, submit to it, and learn from it. We don’t change the truth. Truth changes us.
The consequences of abandoning truth have had a devastating effect on our culture and on the way we live our daily lives. Our nation’s schools are falling further and further behind other countries on nearly every measure and every scorecard. Women have lost their privacy, dignity, and even their identity at the hands of those who deny the truth of what it means to be female. Children have lost their innocence. Freedom of speech is mocked. Religious freedom is no more. Socialism is on the rise while constitutional liberty is maligned. It seems the list is nearly endless.
This freefall of common sense and civil cohesion highlights that truth is more than just a collection of X’s and O’s. Simply acquiring more and more information does not make you an educated person. The endless volumes of data now available to us on our smartphones or even through the promises of AI have done nothing to help our culture understand the difference between good and evil, beautiful and ugly, and what is true and false. The bottom line is this: Truth doesn’t care about the quantity of information. Truth cares about veritas. Truth cares about what is true.
And therein lies the difference between more information and the classical ivory tower. Western civilization is anchored in the assumption that truth is a revelation of a real God and not simply the download of a bunch of stuff from a god that is digital. Truth is not a construct of a computer. Truth is revealed from above. It is not merely a regurgitation of a bunch of “facts” from Google.
In the early 1900s, G.K. Chesterton spoke of the unavoidable consequences of denying God as our Creator and worshipping human knowledge over and above the truth. Observing that the elites of his day were only too willing to turn information into a new religion, Chesterton said: “I never said a word against eminent men of science. What I complain of is a vague, popular philosophy which supposes itself to be scientific when it is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one.”
Chesterton knew that more information might answer some questions about mathematics and maybe even medicine; at the same time, however, it had nothing to say about meaning and morality. He warned that such progress was dangerous when unrestrained by sacred principles. He said the information explosion might be an “interesting academic discussion when applied to a vegetable, an animal, or a mineral,” but when practiced on people, its consequences are nothing short of horrifying.
C.S. Lewis also spoke forthrightly of Western society’s diminishment of God while elevating information to fill the void. Predicting the rise of a digital god, when information would be uncritically elevated above revealed truth, Lewis warned of a dystopia where public policy and even moral and religious beliefs would be dictated by professors and politicians only too eager to assume the role of our new cultural high priests. In his novel “That Hideous Strength,” Lewis asked the reader to consider an obvious question: After two world wars in which the guardians of information brought us the “advancements” of eugenics and the mass slaughter of millions of people, how is our new man-made god working for us?
Is AI good for education? Is it good for human beings? To answer the question, look no further than Hitler, Pol Pot and Robespierre. Most of the despots of history had lots of information at their disposal, yet they had no soul.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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