Socrates, Tell Me How Generative AI Can Help Us Improve Learning
By Vjekoslave Hlede, PhD, Column Editor and Author
At the recent CMEpalooza Fall 2023 Conference, Andy Crim and Brian McGowan presented the Top 10 Best Practices in GenAI Prompt Engineering. This handy guide helps us better chat with AI and generate responses that can improve our learning and understanding. You can download the guide here.
AI is an important new tool in our toolset. As with many information technologies, the utilization of AI is associated with socio-cultural change. It changes how we, as individuals and as a society, work, collaborate, and learn. To put that in perspective, let us reflect on Socrates’s example and how he would use AI.
Resisting technology. Socrates, one of the best-known ancient philosophers, was a vivid critic of the most revolutionary information technology of that time – writing. In 5 BC, he presented many disadvantages of writing. The use of text can erode understanding and minimize our capacity to memorize. Text can help us look wise but not be wise – as it provides easy access to data but with no understanding. Ultimately, Socrates argued that written text is not a good tool for questioning or dialog needed for learning and creating knowledge.
Known because of technology. Socrates did not document his teachings. Nowadays, we know about Socratic dialogue, the Socratic method, Socrates, and his teaching because many of his students (Plato and Xenophon, for example) documented them. Fortunately, they did not follow all of Socrates’ teachings.
Evolution of text. In Socrates’s time, text was quite a time-consuming and static tool. You write it and after that, it is hard to change it or share it. So, the argument that oral dialog is better than text was compelling. However, in the last 25 centuries, text and technologies we use to handle text underwent transformative changes. With the technologies we have avaliable, we were able to transform text into a tool for dialogue and continuous knowledge creation. Whether talking about discussion boards, text messaging, scientific journals, articles like this one, or chats with AI tools, we use text to create dialogue (direct or indirect) and build a network of connections.
Full circle -back to the dialogue. The interactive and communicative nature of the modern text can address many challenges Socrates assigned to text. Therefore, if Socrates is asked how generative artificial intelligence can help us improve learning and understanding, I believe he would encourage us to utilize the dialogical nature of AI chatbots – curiously and cautiously. Socrates’s teaching says we should focus on human reasoning, introspection, and critical thinking. Dialogues with AI tools can help us, the people, improve our learning and understanding and help us connect with a broader knowledge network. Yet, we are responsible for owning that process, asking good questions, and learning.
It is all about questioning and dialogue, Socrates said.
