In a recent “Tansei Hyōron” column (no. 1184), Ogawa Hikaru describes how generative AI (GAI) is transforming the world, particularly academic authorship. Whether painters or professors, everyone is grappling with GAI. For one thing, it epitomises the Promethean gap, which depicts our incapacity to conceive the consequences of what we construct. Furthermore, GAI is a technoscience. With its profit-driven research underwritten by the global gerontocracy of guys, the tech brosarchy enjoys unfettered freedom to manufacture their learning machines.

Ogawa’s concern raises the broader question of GAI’s threat to thinking. On campuses of concentration, the interpretive sciences specialise in the how of it. They inculcate deciphering texts and contemplating otherwise. Teaching students to create meaning initially depends on sensory memory, which intuits things immediately present. Learning subsequently requires students to demonstrate knowledge, or the what of thinking. It relies on mind memory that recalls things already past. These individual retentive capacities are notoriously porous. As animals of forgetting, we long ago became digital. We use our fingers to exteriorise our ideas in technical memory, from mulberry paper to data banks. Looping back into our embodied brains, we re-present our previously scattered thoughts as presto thinking. Teaching and learning are therefore strategic and serendipitous processes. Notwithstanding the imperialism of concepts, they spawn a subject of knowledge, which is the holy grail of GAI, and a self with agency that distinguishes me from you.

Getting GAI to comprehend for me overrides having a say in what I know and who I am. The journey becomes superfluous, nay a burden given the capacity of GAI to compute; only the destination counts. Akin to leapfrogging life at birth to get to death, differences in the know-what of each person remain, yet we become the same in our inability to knowwhy. GAI hereby makes consultants of students. Skilled in sourcing information from Cartesian clouds in space, thinkers adept in questioning their time and place become extinct. In short, by deferring to GAI we not only abdicate constituting ourselves as subjects of thinking and acting, but we also enrich its promoters and enhance the powers that support them. For these reasons, we ought to discourage students from the nihilistic gymnastics of GAI, though with Ogawa I fear the horse has already bolted for Gen Z.