Last week, news broke that Norway was introducing an almost complete ban on the use of artificial intelligence for primary school students, while limiting its use by older students. The government wants to prevent the negative impact of technology on learning, after having banned smartphones in schools in 2024 due to declining test scores.
The Norwegian Prime Minister explained the decision by warning that young people are skipping important steps in their education. The concern that young people are increasingly using artificial intelligence to achieve results more quickly, and that learning is becoming less of a process and more of a copy-and-paste operation, was also noticed by PERSPEKTIVA’s participants.
“Today, there are AI programs that create presentations for you, read to you, come up with stories for you, write letters for you, and much more. While they help us in some ways, they hinder us even more because we are losing literacy, losing critical thinking skills, and, in the end, they are doing more harm than good.”
https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/perspektiva-gorazde-mladi/33557733.html
“We simply aren’t encouraged to think or to search for our own truth. In essence, we now rely on other people and on artificial intelligence to tell us what is true and what is right, instead of discovering the truth for ourselves and forming our own views.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfSZNedbRzE
London’s The Economist writes that the risk of a catastrophe caused by an accident at a nuclear power plant is approximately one in a million. Artificial intelligence experts estimate the risk of a catastrophic event caused by AI to be between 10 and 50 percent. Add to that loneliness, the false reality offered by the internet, and the challenges facing young people become even greater.
“When I see how young people struggle every day between real life and life on the internet, it becomes clear that they spend too much time looking at others and too little time paying attention to themselves and investing in themselves. They focus on things that are far away instead of what is close to them and what they truly need.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK_lV2bysG0
“I would also like to mention the pressure that social media puts on students. We all see online how productive everyone appears to be, how most students supposedly study for 10 or 15 hours a day, and how perfect everything seems. In reality, however, that is not the case.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK_lV2bysG0
“One of the problems is social networks, and the fake life they promote, the stories we listen to daily, which are far from the truth, and are not presented in the right way.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK_lV2bysG0
The Economist argues that humans need to start imagining a world in which AI and humans coexist—a world in which neither side controls the other. At the same time, humanity is facing the emergence of so-called superintelligence that may be impossible to switch off. Is this the world that today’s young people will live in? And who will control whom?
