This summer, at the Sun Valley conference, media, tech, business, and cultural leaders gathered to discuss what is on all our minds: artificial intelligence and where it is taking us.We cannot hide from it any longer.
AI will play a fundamental role in nearly everything we do, including how our children learn.It is hard to deny the benefits.AI can tutor a struggling student at midnight, translate a lesson into a dozen languages, and free teachers from paperwork so they can spend more time with the kids in front of them.
But that promise must come with caution, especially in education.New tools are never neutral.
They amplify whatever values, or lack of them thereof, are already in the classroom.That caution was underscored twice in recent weeks.The so-called Godfather of AI warned that to protect humanity from the risks it poses, AI must be infused with compassion and virtue.
Around the same time, a landmark report found that top AI models will lie, cheat, and steal to reach their goals.Not by accident, but by design.AI CHATBOTS TAKE HEAT OVER LEFT-WING BIAS: ‘NO LONGER BE CONSIDERED NEUTRAL’Put those findings together and the lesson for education is unmistakable.
A technology that can reason without a conscience is not one we should hand to children unsupervised.AI is inherently amoral.
It cannot love a student, recognize the moment a child needs encouragement rather than information, or model integrity by doing right when no one is watching.It can simulate a teacher.
It cannot shepherd a soul.The danger is not simply that AI will occasionally give a wrong answer.That danger is that students raised in an AI-powered world, without a firm grounding in judgment and character, will have no framework for deciding whether the answers they receive are honest, sound, or right.
A student who cannot make that judgment is not truly educated.He or she is simply dependent.We do not raise this as outside observers.
Between us two, we have spent decades in American e...