For me, AI has been an incredible tool for learning. It has been incredibly effectively used in some schools. But it is a new paradigm. You can’t look at it the same way. I have implemented cutting edge software all my life. The hardest thing is to get folks to stop doing things the same way and use the tools. So, for instance I implemented global systems to run the whole company (SAP). Everyone wants to input the same data in a screen that look the same instead of standing back and let the system do it and just deal with exceptions.
With AI, it is being used incredibly effectively in education. But letting it assess the levels of kids and then customize a learning program in terms they are interested in to teach them.
A student at MIT, input all her class notes and sample test and had AI teach her all the underlying principles and keep quizzing her until she understood them.
AI enables one to learn much faster... to explore the world of knowledge... kind of like streaming opens up the world of music if you choose to use it.
It requires new approaches... not just doing the same old thing.
I agree that AI touches language, which means it touches the bios–logos relation itself.
Also that this is different from steam engines and telegraphs and that if captured by oligarchic interests, AI becomes a meaning-extraction machine, and society fragments.
But it does not follow that: “AI inevitably severs human agency.”
The decisive variable is: Whether humans continue to own the interpretive act. Meaning is not produced by symbols. Meaning is produced by embodied beings who care. A prompt does not make one an artist. But neither does a paintbrush.
The question is whether the human intention remains primary. If we lose that, yes—Titanic analogy holds. If we keep it, AI becomes more like a prosthesis of imagination.
A Closing Line Back to Your Groucho Marx Quote
…“A metaphor is a phone call between two objects.”
Yes… and the real question is not whether the phone exists.