Late last month, I got an email alert. The alert informed me that a paper entitled, "Hannah Arendt And Politics" was available for download. I did download that document, forthwith. It was authored by Maria Robaszkiewicz and Michael D. Weinman.
As those who are familiar with my blog postings know, I am rather preoccupied with "politics," and I think that Hannah Arendt had a number of profoundly important insights about that topic. I didn't know anything about the authors of the article, but I wanted to find out what they had to say.
The download was free, and when I clicked on it, as a PDF file, the following advisory popped right up, right at the top:
This appears to be a long document. Save time by reading a summary using AI Assistant.
How thoughtful, right? I am always happy to discover ways to save time, so I checked how long that document was. Not that long, actually! The PDF that the AI Assistant wanted to summarize for me was only eight pages long. Really, it was only seven pages long, with a very short part of the final paragraph showing up on page eight.
As it turns out, the PDF was the "Introduction" to the book whose cover is shown above, and the whole book is, indeed, a "long document." But I was being solicited to let an AI agent summarize an eight-page summary, and having now read the eight-page summary, I don't think that any further summarizing by some AI agent would have benefitted me at all. Quite the opposite!
I have never used AI, at least to date, and I probably never will. The incident just recounted, with an AI agent offering to summarize a short summary, on the basis that I shouldn't have to read a "long" (eight page) document, is an example of why I am not an AI fan and am not an AI user. My entire purpose in writing this daily blog is to let the research and writing that goes into each blog posting help me "think about" things that I have some reason to believe are probably worth the effort. My writing is intended to make me think, not to provide me with a way to avoid doing my own thinking. If I permit an AI agent to provide me with ideas or insights that might have come from my own thinking, had I actually done that thinking myself, that's not a "plus." It's a "minus."
Why do we think? Among other reasons, to help transform ourselves. At least, that's my belief. That's why I do it, and no shortcuts are possible! A person can't actually "think," themself, if the person involved is asking some agent of Artificial Intelligence to do that thinking for them.
Trying to let some agent of Artificial Intelligence think for us will transform us; I have no doubt about that. I do think that's true. But trying to get the benefit of "thinking," without actually doing any thinking ourselves, is not going to transform us in any good way!
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The beauty and art of the Socratic method is too often overlooked or minimized as one of the many useful features of AI. AI, used properly, enhances the thinking process and the critical thinking process as well in my humble opinion. Put another way, that’s what I think. Does a pen and pad help one think? Surely. So too does AI.
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