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Intelligence, use it or lose it?

As I was going through school, affordable four-function calculators became a thing.

I still recall marvelling at the tiny red digits that would instantly display the results of even the most complex long-division or multiplication with just the press of a few buttoms.

Those little seven-segment LEDs were so tiny that each one had its own small magnifying bubble of plastic to make them large enough to actually read.

Suddenly, the need to actually sit down with pen and paper to figure out multi-digit calculations was over -- unless you were a student like I was.

Despite having this powerful tool at our disposal, our teachers still made us tediously work out these long division and multi-digit multiplications on a regular basis in our maths class.

Apparently, even though we could simply grab a calculator, we still had to know how to do this stuff the old fashioned way.

It reminded me of the situation a few years earlier when the ball-point pen was still pretty new but we were not allowed to use them in primary school. Instead we were forced to use evil fountain or nib pens that left your fingers with nasty blue stains by the end of the day. Yes, I really am that old!

Both these situations seem to be a case of those doing the teaching preferring to hold onto their own values in the face of changing technology -- rather than embracing the change and harnessing it to make our lives easier and more productive.

So is this the case with AI?

Is there any point in forcing our students to think for themselves when, instead, they could simply jump onto their favourite AI LLM and just type a few queries to get anything they want in almost any format they want?

There are some cynics who would say that social media has already dumbed down your average school student to the point where intelligent thinking is beyond them but I'm not one of them. However, I must again show my age by suggesting that our brains are like muscles and we need to keep them well exercised if we want to make the most of them.

With this in mind, should we be worried by the contents of this survey out of the UK?

Just over 1,000 undergrad students were surveyed on their use of AI as part of their studies.

Not surprisingly, around 92 percent of those surveyed admitted to using some form of generative AI in the course of their studies with 18 percent conceding that they'd used it to complete or assist in the completion of assignments.

I can imagine my high-school math teacher screaming at me if I'd dared to use a calculator in class so I wonder what university lecturers and professors are thinking of this survey's results.

The reality of the situation is that we need a balance, just as we did with the old four-function calculator.

AI exists and it can be a fantastic aid to "getting the job done". For that reason, students should not only be taught how to accomplish a task themselves but also how to use the tools that can make that job so much easier. Learning to use AI must be an essential part of schooling and tertiary education if we are to progress at the fastest pace we can.

However, it would likely be a dangerous mistake to become too reliant on AI.

I recall a shop assistant struggling to calculate my change just a few short years ago during a power outage. It was a simple transaction -- I'd bought several items that I'd added up the total for in my head (roughly $18) and I handed over a $20 note. The poor girl was lost -- she didn't know how to work out how much money to give me back.

I guess years of simply relying on a point of sale unit to do all the hard work had robbed her of the ability to do basic mental arithmetic. She'd never needed to add up numbers and perform simple subtraction in her head since her school days so when called on to do so she was lost.

How dangerous would it be if, as a species, we did the same with AI -- relying solely on it to do the deductive reasoning so essential to our lives. Even things like composing music and writing prose are already being handed over to AI at a commercial level now so might we see a dulling of our creative abilities as well?

What will happen will happen, either way but what really concerns me right now is that we simply don't seem to be doing any planning. There's no roadmap to follow and we are totally lacking in direction when it comes to the judicious and prudent use of AI -- as opposed to simply using AI for anything and everything we can.

Worrying times ahead?

Carpe Diem folks!

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