Professor AI?…
AI dominance over human beings was once the stuff of science fiction. Is it now our reality?
You might think so if you take the new 2025-2026 UCLA course in comparative literature from the Middle Ages to the 17th century. Using some of the human professor’s notes, Professor AI generated the complete foundation for the course: Assignments, resources for teaching assistants, and cover to cover textbook content.
On the front cover, glaring errors are an embarrassment. For example, in large, bold letters is the following: “Of Nerniacular Latin To An Evoolitun On Nance Langusages.” As for content, writers and academics have described it as “absolute nonsense.”
This is the latest example of human overreliance and misuse of AI at some college and K-12 institutions of learning. We need to re-evaluate what constitutes intellectual pursuit (and at the university level, what justifies the price of admission).
If we give Professor AI the power to write and teach without having human powers to think, feel, intuit, create, relate, imagine, evaluate, and innovate, AI will do what it does best: Reduce all information to the lowest common denominator of data points, which may be rife with inaccuracies that it cannot identify or correct.
Professor AI will strip language, literacy, and history itself of the complexities of perspectives and interpretations, ignore the poetry of nuance and emotion, dismiss differences in ideologies and cultures, norms and values. Even grammar, spelling, punctuation, and pronunciation could be synthesized, minimized, and mechanized to conform to the most basic 1s and Os of coding, and dismantle the basic rules of literacy.
If we lazily abandon the very qualities and privileges of being human, cognitive atrophy will set in. Without human input, AI will spit out a mélange of unintelligible nonsense and busy work. Incorrect statements will go unchallenged, accepted as facts. And we will become unable to contemplate or question the changes, reversals, and downgrades in our humanity.
AI is a tool. We should and must be its master. Trading places will be the destruction of us both.
If we shirk the responsibility to lead and use AI with intellectual and emotional wisdom, we will never know what we lost or might have gained. We will worship the god AI and do its bidding until it and we break down.
Hard wired? Short-circuited? If it gets that far, if we capitulate and surrender to AI rule, will it really matter?
Science fiction has often proved the precursor to reality. In 1950, Ray Bradbury published his short story “There Will Come Soft Rains.” It gives chilling and stark evidence that humanity’s over-reliance on technology, and technology’s indifference to humanity can bring no-turning-back tragic results.
Think about this: When first published in 1950, “There Will Come Soft Rains” was set in 2026. Too close for comfort? In 1997, publishers pushed the story’s setting to 2057.
Answer to Unpacking Education, No. 35, Question of the Day:
Based on a YouGov survey among all generations, here are the top two New Year resolutions for 2025: #1. Save Money and #2. Improve Physical Health. So, the correct answers are f) and b), respectively. It is disquieting that Being Happy ranked lower than it did in 2024, and that, as in 2024, respondents had only moderate interest in Learning New Things, Pursuing A Career Goal, or Spending Time With Friends. A deeper look, by generation, may shed light on underlying reasons for seeming emotional inertia.