AI in education: Let us exercise the caution we reserve for drugs

It's altering the human ability to think and children must be shielded from this before it gets too late

- ANURAG BEHAR

Artificial intelligence (AI) is extinguishing the core of what makes us human—the capacity to think.

AI will destroy jobs; truth and reality will become indistinguishable from the false and the fake; in the hands of rogue actors, it could spark uncontainable violence; and worse is likely to unfold. Much of all this is already beginning to happen. All these streams make for a torrent that gives us some version of Hollywood's 'Skynet controlling the world'—an existential threat to humankind. Arguably, the most lethal is an undercurrent beneath all these streams, that of AI's hollowing of humanity by sucking out our capacity to think.

AI does bring benefits and can be useful in some ways, but I am not willing to cede even a nano-inch to arguments of “let's see things in balance.” AI must be stopped and contained in a cage, like nuclear energy, and then used with even greater care. If you want a visceral conviction of this, spend some time in an educational institution; the more elite the institution, with better access to all kinds of AI stuff, the quicker will be your conversion.