Back to papers.

Some days ago I read an article in the newspaper that described how professors and teachers in colleges and universities worldwide were going back to giving exams and essays again in the handwritten format; to be turned in on paper rather than by email or in digital format, to combat the rising use of AI (Artificial Intelligence) tools being used by students to write their papers for them.

This strongly reminded of the short story titled “The Feeling of Power”, penned by Isaac Asimov in the late 1950s, which as the days go by seems to grow more and more pertinent to the discourse centered on AI. To give some context on how the news article and story are related it is necessary to paraphrase the plot of the story which is as follows.

In the future, computers have been developed to such an extent and become so ubiquitous that people have forgotten how to carry out basic arithmetic or compute simple problems, all such tasks being handled by personal computers. Mankind is at war but neither side can prevail over the other as both are equally matched and as warfare is carried out with the aid of computers, no party can develop computers which can give one the edge over the other. A lowly technician in one computing facility, as a hobby, rediscovers the technique to carry out simple arithmetic using pen and paper. It comes to the notice of the higher ups who are amazed and see in it a way to cheaply prosecute the war using ‘human computers’. The ability to compute without a computer imparted a feeling of power to the people as evinced by the thoughts of one of the chief programmer “Nine times seven, thought Shuman with deep satisfaction, is sixty-three, and I don’t need a computer to tell me so. The computer is in my own head.”

In our own present day workplace and daily life we all are using AI tools in one way or the other, be it using speech-to-text tools, e-commerce websites or generative AI tools. As our school curriculum and education system changes to accommodate this new frontier of technology, I am forced to wonder if there is possibility that in the future the children may not be taught simple arithmetic, writing and other skills because they may be considered trivial; to be done by computers at a fraction of the time it takes a human to do the same. Already we can see around us the reducing attention span the of both children and adults alike, owing to the use of smartphones and constant influx of data in our life, some of which is meaningless drivel generated by gargantuan corporations to keep people engaged to drive up their profits.

Are humans destined to be reduced to simple beings in the future; breathing, eating, sleeping and reproducing like others animals by outsourcing our ability to think and to create to computers and algorithms; for the computers to create art, to write stories, to discover theorems, to form conjectures and to either prove or disprove them, to compose soaring choruses while we humans consume the same just for the sake of consumption. Or will we push back like the teachers are doing to preserve the nucleus of intelligence in our life, to nurture that spark of creativity and curiosity in us that allowed us to tame fire, to rationally prove the irrationality of the square root of two, to create intelligence in silicon based chips, only time will tell.

As Asimov himself wrote, “For the human mind, … … , only manipulates facts. It doesn’t matter whether the human mind or a machine does it. They are just tools”. It is up to us to decide as a collective whether we keep our tools sharp or let them grow dull with the passage of time.

I strongly suggest you to check out the story “The Feeling of Power” by Isaac Asimov. It is available just a search away in the internet.