Youthink

I spent a bit of my Sunday writing a long letter to my first year students, having marked their first pieces of university writing. The key paragraph, perhaps, is this:

We are entering a period of human history in which there is going to be a massive division in humanity. On the one hand, there will be a minority, that has the skills, and power, and experience, to read carefully and understand complicated texts, to organise its own thoughts on questions, and to compose them into clear and persuasive arguments, which can know and express its conscience, and can extend what it means to be human. On the other, there will be a majority, dependent on computer mediation for thinking and feeling, feelings, unable to read anything complex, with no long experience of reading within which to contextualise what they do read, condemned to echo machines which echo a sampling of what people did in the past. This majority will be the slaves of corporations and states, who will herd them, and milk them, profiting off their spiritual passivity. It will get worse over time, as the machines echo their own voices, AI models itself on earlier AI productions, and what constitutes human culture in the digital space loses all relationship with humanity. I want you, desperately want you, to be part of that minority, that keeps and cultivates the powers of human intelligence, and passes down to future generations the capacities for critical thinking, for deep reading, for engaged and thoughtful writing, for human self-consciousness. Don't cheat yourself of the opportunity to become fully human, which is what education in the humanities is about.

Richard Drayton

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