Imagine that you're working a part-time job at Burger Queen to pay your way through college. At BQ, there's a keyboard replete with pictures of all the items on the menu. Your job is to listen to customers' requests, and then correlate their verbal expressions with the keys on the menu. When they say "I'd like a double cheese burger," you push the key on the keyboard that has on it a picture of two slabs of hamburger meat with two slabs of cheese dispersed atop the former, topped and bottomed by a bun. Pretty simple. Once they complete their order, the device likewise computes their total expenditure, and you announce to them that their double cheeseburger, fries, and large soft drink add up to thirteen dollars and seventy-nine cents. The customer declares wanting to pay with cash, and hands you a twenty dollar bill. You enter 20.00 into the register, and the register informs you that you owe the customer six dollars and twenty-one cents.
I once worked at a college that had a three unit analytical skills requirement built into the curriculum of every student who wanted to earn a degree. A typing instructor argued that their typing course should be counted among the courses which fulfilled this requirement. "Each time a student presses a key on the typewriter, she has to perform an analysis of whether or not the key she intends to press corresponds to the key that will produce a representation that accurately reflects the spelling of the word she intends to spell." On this account, both your work as a register clerk at Burger Queen, and the motions performed by the student who successfully spells words using a keyboard, are examples of analytical work. Matching two representations that are in fact similar, is sufficient to count as having completed an analysis. On this understanding of analyticity, we are all engaged in analyses from a very early age. So much so, in fact, that it would seem absurd to require in a college curriculum a course that develops analyticity.
Or perhaps there is more to critical thinking -- and learning generally -- than the above examples suggest. Perhaps genuine learning, and the skills that enable learning regardless of the tasks one performs, requires more.
If you were born in this millennium, it is likely that much of your life has been spent looking at screens and pushing buttons, and that you have learned to associate the manipulation of the buttons with various types of rewards to your nervous system. Even on those occasions when the combinations of buttons you push lead to discomfort, you have discovered how to manipulate the buttons further in such a way that they serve you as a gateway to yet further button manipulation that eventually leads to reward. The buttons you select may cause you pain or pleasure in varying degrees, but it is also the buttons themselves that require further skilled manipulation if you are to restore balance or heighten pleasure. This may explain why the devices are so frequently relied upon, and this may in fact go quite a way in explaining addiction.
So-called "generative AI," or now more commonly just referred to as "AI," mimics the patterns of the Burger Queen register; of the typewriter; of the button-pushing and screen-watching. It is but a slight pain to copy-and-paste an essay question into Chat GPT-4, or Claude, but the result, which can then be pasted into an online course essay question prompt, as "the answer," produces a neurotransmitter uptick that far surpasses the discomfort of having typed in the question.
Just as you may not have actually known that $20.00 - $13.79 = $6.21, so likewise when confronted with the math, you may not even have realized that this is the math equation you need to use in determining how much change your customer was owed. If the customer, unable to see your register's representations, were to inform you, "Oh, I'm really looking forward to having that five dollar bill and that one dollar bill and those two dimes and a penny in my pocket once you give me my change," you may think the customer a wizard, a math prodigy, or a frequent customer who always orders the same items, always pays with a twenty dollar bill, and has memorized the amount he is given in change.
You don't actually know how much change was due the customer, but may think that telling the customer that he is owed $6.21, and giving him that amount, is enough to count as knowledge. If you didn't have the machine, you literally would not know what to do, as far as the instructions go that you have received from your Burger Queen supervisor. You don't know the internal process that determines the amount of change he is to receive. For that you rely upon the machine and the representations it produces. Since the register is usually working, you do what the representation informs you to do, and for your accuracy in doing what the register indicates, you are commended and are paid a non-living wage. If you learn anything, it is that your obedience is rewarded, and since you haven't been put in an employment position that rewards anything other than obedience, you are unlikely to associate employment with anything other than just such transactional states-of-affairs.
Using generative AI to produce college essays, or to automatically correct your spelling and grammar, pays you a similar disservice, but it is almost infinitely worse, because unlike the narrow boundaries of the register or typewriter, the options for what it has generated and for what it suggests you do next ("copy and paste this into your essay prompt") are almost infinitely variegated. However, as with the register and the typewriter, you don't see the options it has ruled out by presenting you with the essay it has. You might understandably assume that the essay is, "the right answer," and then you present it to your instructor in much the same way that you may present your customer with his $6.21. You bypass the operations that led to that conclusion, possibly having no idea what the operations even are, and think you have no resources available to you for what to do if the instructor informs you that the answer doesn't even address the essay question prompt. You assumed the register calculated the right change; you assumed Chat GPT-4 generated "the right essay."
But you do have the resources that only appear to be lacking. The problem is that the buttons and screens bypass learning, education. Just as it might be said that you didn't calculate the customer's change, likewise it can rightly be said that you didn't write the essay. At your Burger Queen job, you're given a measurable, monetary reward for pushing the right buttons, and perhaps too for smiling as you accurately distribute currency. This has become so habitual that you may think your critical thinking teacher should likewise be pleased and reward you for accurately typing out that pesky essay question, and then accurately copying-and-pasting it back into the essay reply box.
Doing this latter is a lot like pulling a lever on a slot machine. There, you make a payment, read a few instructions (or not), and then, yes, you actually push a button or pull a lever. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. It's a game of chance.
Education -- genuine learning -- is in part the process through which you acquire the skills that enable you to control your choices in light of the actual complexities out of which life in this world is composed. It involves learning math and how to apply it in your life. It involves reading so that you can learn how to write. It involves questioning, and assessing the validity, soundness, or cogency of various types of arguments--both the arguments of others, and the arguments that you yourself author and present. It involves learning how to write essays like this one.
No matter what your college major, and no matter what shifts occur in the job market that may render your major seemingly obsolete there, you’ll be ready. Your skills will make you resilient. Your job will not be boring, because you’ll be a life-long learner with the necessary skills to adapt. You’ll be the shot-caller; the designer; the reasoner. And while you may return to Burger Queen as a customer, you’ll know how much change you should receive, and why. Perhaps most importantly, your valuable and irreplaceable time on Earth will not be spent matching somebody’s, or something else’s, images.