From Disposable Education to Acting in the World as a Human in the Time of AI

Abstract

This contribution presents two perspectives: one based on AI expertise and the other on the importance of knowledge as human knowledge. The later focuses on the purpose of education by revisiting Alexander von Humboldt’s concept of Bildung as the main purpose of education. Resisting the shifting to radically pragmatic models of education, without Bildung, in recent decades, in the Global North which develops a system of disposable education that focuses on training a workforce for the market. Concerned by the production of disposable knowledge and assessments, with the sole goal of achieving good grades and securing employment, we see Generative AI, as mirroring this functionalist and economist vision of society, revealing strongly the limits of this paradigm. This article first explains how automatic learning, the foundation of generative AI, works. Second, we shall discuss human deep learning, as opposed to surface learning showing how it is required to develop as a person in the Bildung perspective. Third, we highlight this first intuition that AI reveals the functioning of our societies and move beyond, with an art of questioning in philosophy.