Is AI Enhancing Our Understanding or Undermining Society?

What is AI. Does ai extend our ability, or does it destroy the fabric of society? We be vibin'.

Could it be both?

Probably both

I'm in a philosophy class right now that is having students use AI to understand philosophical works by Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls etc. and I'm noticing how detrimental AI can be when someone doesn't have the ability to reason and use logic. AI is of course picking up the most famous passages from the books but students are missing huge chunks of less discussed themes and ideas. It requires probing and asking questions based on what AI already told you, but students don't do that if they don't know they need to or what to ask. So while some are doing really well thanks to the quickness of AI rather than reading an entire book, some are seriously lacking. And worse, they don't even know they're lacking because they think AI gave them all of the information. Maybe the most interesting piece to this is that in class we played a role play game where each student was assigned a role (baker, thief, pacifist, shepherd etc) with the goal of forming a society. We failed do form one. Was this the fault of using AI to understand social philosophy or would we have failed if we had read all the texts ourself, idk.

Yeah Kiki +1 - You also don't remember or engage your neurons to enforce learning if you use AI.

Neurons that fire together, wire together. If you don't give your brain a chance to engage because you offload context, then you never really retain anything... It's especially dangerous when learning topics but I find I am not completely forgetting swathes of work that I'm doing. I'm old anyway (43) so there are other factors at play but I can't imagine students can learn if they are using AI to process information?