I Know You Are, But What Am I?

Cogito, ergo sum. So said René Descartes. For the few of us who don’t speak Latin, that usually translates as I think therefore I am. Eminem updated Decartes slightly in the year 2000 when he philosophized, Sum quidquid dicis me esse (or I am whatever you say I am). Modern humans are faced with another twist to philosophical conundrum of how to define existence. If I let ChatGPT think for me, then what am I? Professor Brian Klaas recently reflected on what his students are becoming in an era when the student essay has been effectively murdered. “Every piece of technology can either make us more human or less human. It can liberate us from the mundane to unleash creativity and connection, or it can shackle us to mindless robotic drudgery of isolated meaninglessness … When artificial intelligence is used to diagnose cancer or automate soul-crushing tasks that require vapid toiling, it makes us more human and should be celebrated. But when it sucks out the core process of advanced cognition, cutting-edge tools can become an existential peril. In the formative stages of education, we are now at risk of stripping away the core competency that makes our species thrive: learning not what to think, but how to think.” The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition. “Artificial intelligence is already killing off important parts of the human experience. But one of its most consequential murders—so far—is the demise of a longstanding rite of passage for students worldwide: an attempt to synthesize complex information and condense it into compelling analytical prose. It’s a training ground for the most quintessentially human aptitudes, combining how to think with how to use language to communicate.” (I synthesize the entire internet down to a few pithy blurbs every day. Until AI rips this laptop from my cold, dead heads, I’ll continue to define myself as I always have: I Yam What I Yam and Dats All What I Yam!. Or, roughly, Sum quod sum, et id est totum quod sum!)