Skip to main content

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. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more