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New Baseline

I was chatting with another parent with grown-up kids about how we dodged the bullet by getting kids out of college before the time of ChatGPT and the like. That conversation left me thinking about why we both felt that way - what harm can come to the process of educating a child due to AI, how much of it is the fear of unknown versus feeling inadequate about seizing the opportunity that is now available. 

Reading this excerpt about Swami Vivekananda's views on what education is and is not, helped clarify my thinking a bit. If education is the manifestation of perfection already in us, then the presence of AI should not feel threatening at all. We can perhaps enlist as one of the many tools to help manifest that perfection - maybe it even helps with doing that. Information or access to information is not education: 

“If education is identical with information, the libraries are the greatest sages in the world, and encyclopedias are the rishis.”

Access to and assimilation of information has suddenly become barrierless and frictionless. This levels the playing field for children with vastly different ability and/or interest in information gathering and reproduction. So the point of education can be honed in on the idea of perfection and what drives it. A person is probably their most perfect when they are using their talents to do the greatest good in the world. If AI can be an enabler in this process then it should be enlisted enthusiastically and not with the kind of prejudice my friend and I felt. 

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