Fear and confidence in technological progress

Pills of Thought 2: This unawareness is due to the fact that we are not giving enough significance to the thinking skills and, thus, we are losing a part of our nature.

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Perhaps we are not realizing the potential consequences and implications derived from the apparently unavoidable progress of technology and communication sciences. And perhaps this unawareness is due to the fact that we are not giving enough significance to the thinking skills and, thus, we are losing a part of our nature.

For the last few years, mainly in regards to the education system, we are convinced that to implement technological progress into the learning process is simply a must, but we can be sure that we are not properly considering the risks and dangers it entails. This mistake we are making is founded on three main misinterpretations:

Firstly, the error of considering that our young generations, mainly the people who were born in the 2000’s and onwards, are naturally determined to use technology and, therefore, they do not need any kind (or almost any kind) of training in regards to it. This is exactly the same mistake that a lot of people make about considering the underdevelopment of ancient civilizations, when, for example, some people consider Ancient Greeks or Middle Ages people as foolish individuals who needed to develop their own human nature by time and technological progress over it. But the reality is slightly different: those ancient civilizations are neither stupider than we are nor our young generations are naturally technological or more intelligent that they were. Even more, and despite the obstinacy of the tendency of our age, experience says that young students are not able to use correctly nor properly technology during their learning process, and even less without specific training on that kind of tools. The use with which they are deeply familiar is the same kind of use that everybody in every age is: the use rooted in leisure.

People, and especially young people, as animals, pursue pleasure and avoid pain, or in general, we tend to pursue the pleasant and to escape from the unpleasant. It implies that our nature forces us to use the tools that we have within our reach to get what we consider pleasant, not the correct thing, and even more if the tools to which we have access to are so fast and efficient in regards to avoiding effort on getting our ends. That is the main reason why the young generations are kind of experts using “leisure technology” but not “communication technology” or “labor technology”. Meanwhile they should be educated as critical citizens; our responsibility as an adult society should be to keep apart our young students from technology, and introduce them to it step by step, considering the potential risk to be mowed down by the idleness and the immediacy of that leisure technology. That is, in my point of view, the right way to teach in our technological era.

The second misinterpretation could be summarized by the idea that we appraised that technology implies an improvement of the results of our work and, thus, of our students’ work. The main error here is due to the fact that technology is only a tool, not a content per se, and a powerful tool at that. With the use of technology the process of working and learning is, of course, more efficient in terms of time and avoiding the error, but not in terms of content. Besides, we are losing the perspective in regards to the use that we make of technology in our daily lives, namely, linked to our nature to avoid the unpleasant, and assuming the fact that effort and work is, at least at the beginning, painful, hence it is easy to see the foundation of why the mere use of technology promotes laziness more easily than hard work, something we can see in our young ones, the concerning use of social media in their interactions and, for instance, the problems derived from ChatGPT’s use even in Universities.

This second misinterpretation leads us to the third, the danger to be tempted to replace traditional education with an education essentially based on the use of technology. This change is not only a way to subordinate our rational nature to another entity represented with the concept of technology or AI, but it is also the way to promote the culture of laziness among people and the feeling that self-cultivation of reason and knowledge is not important at all.

Indeed, what we can get from the use of AI and its technological framework is not knowledge, but immediacy and sluggishness, based on our Age’s necessity of results and numerical goals achievement. The danger of trusting technology more than we should in order to educate and form young generations consists of the loss of our own nature as human rational beings, leaving our fate in the hands of an Other that is essentially another. Because that is what technology and AI, specifically as a content and not a tool, metaphysically means: to leave our destiny as rulers of our world to another entity which we can never be sure that we shall control completely, and, in addition, to leave the development of our nature to a kind of self-imposed slavery making ourselves more happily stupid in the face of the creation of an increasingly powerful and invasive entity.