A class of schoolchildren here in Paris was sitting a test when a pupil dropped his phone. The kids had handed in their phones on entering the classroom, but this boy had a second one. It is claimed the supervisors let him pick it up and continue using ChatGPT to answer questions. French rules say he should have been banned from taking the baccalauréat, the final school exams. The school fears that if it did that, it would have to bar half the class. This is education in the age of artificial intelligence.
I sympathise with the child. School might be the last time he isn’t allowed to let AI do his work. Handing over to the machine will stunt his knowledge and intelligence. But then, his generation may not need much of either. Those qualities could die out painlessly as sword fighting or blacksmithery did.
AI is only the latest in a sequence of inventions that have made humanity dumber. We outsourced our maths skills to calculators, our memory to Google and navigation to Google Maps. Some time in the 1990s, the decades-long international rise in IQs began going into reverse.