Artificial Intelligence at ISA - Head of School Coffee, Next Friday from 8.30am
Plato was the first great writer in the Western Tradition. He was also the first known, and certainly greatest, critic of literacy.
Ironically, two and half thousand years later, we can still connect with Plato’s arguments because he wrote them down. In Phaedrus he creates a dialogue between the Egyptian God Theuth, the inventor of writing, and King Thamus, whom Theuth is trying to persuade to take it up. He claims writing will improve memory and wisdom; Thamus counters by saying that writing is in fact a tool for reminders and not true memory; because we don’t internalise the knowledge, we will have the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom.
Phaedrus is, like Plato’s other works, a dialogue - writing that imitated an oral form. No wonder Plato worried that writing was a technology which threatened to diminish a human process (spoken language). Curiously, he still couldn’t resist the allure of this new technology, and wrote an awful lot.
As did his most famous pupil, Aristotle. However, Aristotle did different things with this new form. He ditched dialogues, and used his writing for extended examinations of subjects. He could do with writing something not possible with oracy: developing arguments in a linear, logical form - reflecting on the exact words of earlier passages to polish and improve his ideas. Mathematics which does a similar thing but with abstract symbols, emerged from this newly literate culture.
When a new technology first emerges we can see it in terms of a replacement of what went before: a threat to well established capacities. However, sometimes the most long-lasting and impactful technologies are not the replacers but the extenders - gateways to entirely new possibilities. LIke the aeroplane - not just a faster way to travel, but a new perspective on the world.
Plato was right in his concerns: there is a price for literacy - few of us have ten of thousands of lines of memorised poetry to hand, as Plato’s educated contemporaries did. We don’t engage deeply with limited knowledge, but think more generally across a far vaster range. The literate brain is not as effective at certain things (such as facial recognition) as brains nurtured within oral cultures.
The book has been the preeminent technology of the classroom for many years. But in the last 50 years, rivals have appeared: first the calculator and the word processor, then the internet and now Artificial Intelligence (AI). Whether schools adapt them or not, we live in a world in which they are an everyday reality. Like Plato we should consider what capacities they may replace and thus diminish us, but like Aristotle also be alive to how we might be enhanced and extended by new possibilities.
These are considerations worthy of a dialogue between a god and a king. At ISA, we will have to make do with parents and teachers. In next Friday’s head of school coffee (online and in person from 8.30) we will discuss the new technology of AI. Gayle Veitch, our head of IT, will join us to describe what we do at ISA before we talk through the implications of what this means for our children’s education.
Grade 6 outside developing human skills. Always a priority
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