Baby Boomers, GenX, Millennials and GenZ are all AI beneficiaries

Reels accessed from Facebook enable viewers, myself included, to listen to highly eloquent honor graduates deliver valedictory speeches that truly inspire and edify. They share inspiring stories on how they pulled up bootstraps as they struggled against awesome challenges — making ends meet as working students, or coping with the severe limitations imposed by the pandemic.

- SONNY COLOMA

Yet, so many of them graduated with honors. To illustrate, in last week’s University of the Philippines graduation at its main campus in Diliman, a total of 2,369 students graduated with Latin honors. This includes 241 summa cum laude graduates, 1,143 magna cum laude graduates, and 985 cum laude graduates, or a total of approximately 61 percent Latin honor graduates.

For our Baby Boomer generation, this is somewhat baffling, yet we cannot help but concede, even admire today’s youthful achievers. College education is a crucible, an experience characterized by severe trial, of a confluence of variables eventually melding and converging toward the creation of something new.

My esteemed friend and former colleague in the AIM faculty, former UP President and Trade Secretary Alfredo ‘Fred’ Pascual, suggests an empirical study on AI, which he refers to as augmented intelligence, to validate his hypothesis that the extensive use of digital tools enables higher levels of achievement by today’s college students.

Inexorably, technological advances like AI have accelerated the pace of progress exponentially and faster than aging seniors and mere mortals find difficult to comprehend. Rather than complain or disdain, would it not be more beneficial if we gladly imbibe or absorb new knowledge, and tap into these as fresh sources of creative energy?

Indeed, graduating from college is not the end-all or be-all.