Abstract

Some important warnings about how we use technology in the philosophies of Plato, Martin Heidegger, Zhuangzi, and C. S. Lewis are relevant to the use of AI in education. Plato cautions us concerning what is lost when we let technology replace some of our own thinking processes. Far from making us more intelligent, the use of AI in writing falls into the mistakes Plato warns us against: We get lazy with learning and remembering, and we substitute a bundle of information for the wisdom and comprehension that constitute genuine knowledge. Heidegger advises against using technology to create more of a product and reducing the role of humanity to merely a part of the system of production. When writing with AI, we abandon our responsibility to shepherd our own work, and we become tools in the machinery of creating a written product, even letting the software guide us rather than the other way around. Zhuangzi teaches us not to follow the patterns set by social convention. Material written by AI is a distillation of conventional word-patterns. Lewis warns us that we abolish part of humanity when we use technology to get what we want without first learning to love what is good. Using AI to get our writing done means sacrificing the essential human love for finding and understanding the truth, instead allowing our own words to be conditioned by unknown authors of algorithms. In this article I explain these matters and close with some helpful suggestions for how we might use AI more constructively—assuming we are going to use it at all.