ai, ai, ai: critical thinking and literacy won’t save you

Here’s the underlying problem. We have an operating image of thought, an understanding of what thought is and how to make thought productive of knowledge and truth through the use of various methods. This image and its methods are, of course, products of human history. They change over time, in different cultures, and so on. American university concepts of critical thinking and literacy are largely a product of the twentieth century. The methods of critical thought, while based on received traditions, were conditioned by the material circumstances of the time.

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I think AI presents us with a more interesting problem, which is that we don’t have a good, working understanding of the relationship between human experiences of conscious thought, thinking/intelligence beyond human experience (as in AI), communicating, and information/knowledge. And the common mis/understanding at work in academia is crap. No one is going to acquire “digital literacy” by taking a course. —Alex Reid