Reply To: ChatGPT et al

[Darryl Toerien Keymaster]

Thank you, Elizabeth et al – very interesting, and I know that Jenny has some thoughts to contribute.

I have made some practical progress towards our academic integrity policy, which I will share later. However, I came across the following in Bertrand Russell’s, The Impact of Science on Society (first published 1952):

Broadly speaking, we are in the middle of a race between human skill as to means and human folly as to ends. Given sufficient folly as to ends, every increase in the skill required to achieve them is to the bad. The human race has survived hitherto owing to ignorance and incompetence, but, given knowledge and competence combined with folly, there can be no certainty of survival. Knowledge is power, but it is power for evil just as much as for good. It follows that, unless men increase in wisdom as much as in knowledge, increase of knowledge will be increase of sorrow. (1976, p. 110)

This brings to mind H.G. Wells in The Outline of History:

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe (1920, Volume 2, Chapter 41, Section 4).

However, education can only avert catastrophe if it does not confuse means for ends, and, given that even educational ends are contested, its end is “transcendent and honorable,” for without such an end, “schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it the better” – with such an end, however, “schooling becomes the central institution through which the young may find reasons for continuing to educate themselves” (Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, 1995).