We are in a different technological age dominated by the World Wide Web and Artificial Intelligence. There is no going back. We are in an era of big data and artificial intelligence.
Some people even think the end of critique is near. We should all be aware of these facts and prepare adequately to be integral to the new times. Otherwise, we shall be like pollutants of the times.
If you are interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI) or would like to develop interest in AI, here are some resources. I advise all of you to get interested because the world is fast-moving forward. Even if some people prefer ‘No Change’, that is pretence and it is temporary. They know the world is changing, and as in the past, if you resist change, change will change you.
Some are convinced AI will have great impact on the future of higher education. Recently professors at an American University were demonstrating because their students were no longer thinking and reasoning with their brains but using Artificial knowledge to do their work, think and reason for them. Therefore, artificial intelligence discourse is already influencing students’ learning environment and performance.
Some are worried about machine learning. One writer has recorded that 50 per cent of all AI researchers are worried about the impact of AI on thinking and reasoning of those using AI. Indeed, one has written about the quest to reclaim what makes us human: thinking, reasoning, values, virtues, consciousness, emotional responses, love, ethics, morality and feelings. Accordingly, we should be aware of those things computers or AI can’t do.
Some writers have suggested AI is our final invention and that it marks the end of the human era.
Universities must rethink and re-define the skills citizens will need in the future world of work and, therefore, start preparing future ready knowledge workers and professional.
We are fast-shifting from brain science to AI, but many universities in Africa seem to be more comfortable with the brain science of the past. This is dangerous. Our universities, as I wrote before will emerge as the academic and intellectual dinosaurs of the 20th century and beyond. However, there are some people who think AI is still a myth, not a reality, because without human thinking and choices it does not stand. One writer has said AI only provides the answers if you ask the right questions. That is why some see AI just as a companion to people.
Meanwhile, fundamental issues in AI remain. Some see new social relations of digital technology. Some see AI violating human rights. Others see AI as changing Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs. One writer has explained why AI fails to crack the code of human consciousness.
It is clear most of our universities are not ready for AI just as they are not ready for multicultural studies via interdisciplinarity, crossdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity and extradisciplinarity or nondisciplinarity, preferring to remain disciplinary.
It is my hope that the readings below will make you aware of what is happening in the field of AI and the challenges thereof. All who care for education must be ready for increasing impact of AI in higher education.
However, we should remember that too much of anything is always bad. Too much recourse to AI can make us non-thinking, non-reasoning beings. We cannot afford to surrender thinking and reasoning to “thinking” machines! A non-thinking, non-reasoning human being can be far more dangerous than the wildest animal in the wild: the buffalo.
For God and my country.
- A Tell report / By Oweyegha-Afunaduula / Environmental Historian and Conservationist Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA), Seeta, Mukono, Uganda.
About the Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis (CCTAA)
The CCTAA was innovated by Hyuha Mukwanason, Oweyegha-Afunaduula and Mahir Balunywa in 2019 to the rising decline in the capacity of graduates in Uganda and beyond to engage in critical thinking and reason coherently besides excellence in academics and academic production. The three scholars were convinced that after academic achievement the world outside the ivory tower needed graduates that can think critically and reason coherently towards making society and the environment better for human gratification. They reasoned between themselves and reached the conclusion that disciplinary education did not only narrow the thinking and reasoning of those exposed to it but restricted the opportunity to excel in critical thinking and reasoning, which are the ultimate aim of education. They were dismayed by the truism that the products of disciplinary education find it difficult to tick outside the boundaries of their disciplines; that when they provide solutions to problems that do not recognise the artificial boundaries between knowledges, their solutions become the new problems. They decided that the answer was a new and different medium of learning and innovating, which they characterised as “The Centre for Critical Thinking and Alternative Analysis” (CCTAA).
Further reading
Aisha Naz Ansari, Sohail Ahmad and Sadia Bhutta (2024). Philosophical discourse surrounding artificial intelligence: Extended findings of a meta-synthesis on ChatGPT. BERA, https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/philosophical-discourse-surrounding-artificial-intelligence-extended-findings-of-a-meta-synthesis-on-chatgpt Visited on 7 January 2025 at 15:25pm EAT
Alison Adam, Artificial Knowing: Gender and the Thinking Machine, London and New York: Routledge, 1998; Katz, op. cit. (7); Sanjay Seth, Beyond Reason: Postcolonial Theory and the Social Sciences, New York: Oxford University Press, 2021; Stephanie
Baiti Shauki (2023). Exploring artificial intelligence discourse on students’ learning environment and performance. Researchgate June 2023 Tuijin Jishu/Journal of Propulsion Technology 44(6):1822-182 DOI:10.52783/tjjpt.v44.i6.3483 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/376787359_ExploringI_Artificial_Intelligence_Discourse_on_Students’_Learning_Environment_and_Performance_A_Comprehensive_Review Visited on 13 January 2025 at 14:21 pm EAT
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