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| Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of AI Created by Google Gemini in imitation of Rembrandt |
A friend emailed me a blog post from tech CEO Matt Shumer titled "Something Big Is Happening." If more than 82 million views on X means that something has gone viral, then this post has gone viral. Based on the recent ability of artificial intelligence to write its own code, in other words, for AI to start producing AI, Shumer argues that a seismic shift in how humans work is coming sooner rather than later, and he is not talking about getting ChatGPT to write your history paper. He outlines fundamental shifts in the fields of law, medicine, and more. You really should read his post. In this post, however, I want to share what I replied to my friend and go a bit further. To my friend, I wrote,
What I want to say is that we must resist this at all costs, but that is ridiculous. The horse is already out of the barn. We have given birth to this, just as we did to writing, electronics, and atomic energy. We have to learn what do with it. We must learn from our mistakes with many of our past advancements, among which is not to use faith and philosophy, history and literature and music and art to grapple with ethical issues. Perhaps the most important acknowledgment by Jonathan Haidt in his book The Anxious Generation was that we sallied forth into smartphones and social media with not a care in the world. We simply never took the time to consider the effects on children, including their social and emotional development, their patterns of behavior, their intellectual development, and more. Can we learn from the disaster that is the current intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual landscape of far too many of our young people? This is a time for philosophers and psychologists and sociologists. It is a time for theologians. It is a time for church leaders. We need deep thinkers now as never before. We need the age of when the university was a branch of the Church, when theology was called the queen of the sciences. We need a Plato, an Aristotle, an Augustine, and an Aquinas as never before. Let this article be inspiration for churches and schools, especially those schools grounded in the liberal arts and Classical learning, to equip those new thinkers that God even now is raising up among us.
I have used AI, even for the creative acts that I so often say are the special province of the human heart and mind. For example, I have begun using Suno to create the music for song lyrics I have written. Would I prefer to be in band or at least to run in the circles of musicians who could record my songs? I most certainly would, but that is not my world at the moment, and I am, perhaps naively, convinced that my songs can touch people and encourage them in their faith. And so I have resorted to AI for the music.
What I want to start here is a different conversation. I can envision a course for high school students in which they read selections from Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Montaigne, along with works by Homer, Vergil, Dante, and Milton. It would be a course that would involve Michelangelo and Mozart, and of course, all these names are but a start, an indication of what the foundation for such a course would be. And the bedrock of that foundation would be the Bible, the printed word God has graciously given the world. From their reading and engagement with such authors and works, the students would explore how to think about what should and should not be in the worlds of technology, including but not limited to AI, medicine, government, economics, education, and more. It would be a course first to introduce young minds to the idea that there are various ways to consider what should and should not be and how to develop and use the things that should. It would help them explore the best, the time-tested and proven, approaches that we have used throughout the centuries. It would give them a chance to begin applying those approaches as well as their own based upon and drawn from those lines of thinking to contemporary issues.
There is much talk by parents, educators, and legislators about personal devices and the use of AI in schools, but we are at a wonderful moment in history when can go beyond that discussion. With carefully considered intention and purpose, we can take seriously the admonition to "train up a child in the way he should go" (Proverbs 22:6, KJV) and help produce not employees or those whose aim is a fulfilling and high-paying job, but the great and deep thinkers that we need. Perhaps the next Aristotle is a student in a school near you.
