Ethologists usually differentiate genetic inheritance from cultural inheritance, understood as the accumulation of knowledge and habits transmitted by other members of the species, generally belonging to the previous generation. The ability to operate with numerical symbols and letters is the result of genetic-cultural co-evolution. Hence the concern that in many children and adolescents both the ability to read and to perform arithmetic calculations is weakened. If the calculator immediately tells us the result of the square root of 3600, why bother having in your head the rule that allows us to account for such a result? And the thing does not only concern schoolchildren... thank goodness there is no Pisa report for the less young!
At the same time, and in addition, we are witnessing great discussions about our future being dictated by Artificial Intelligence, in the management of which everyone would become capable. There is something paradoxical here: arithmetic and reading comprehension seem difficult and discouraging tasks, however, doing work in which the border between knowledge and the rehashing of information is blurred, cleverly circumventing academic controls, falsifying a face or a pictorial work and even usurping identities will be skills within the reach of the vast majority. To refer to these skills, not even the word technique is appropriate, since the ability to use an instrument for a purpose can be acquired by maintaining the most absolute indifference both with respect to what makes the instrument itself possible and to the reason for the result.
In any case, while interest in navigating the meanderings of digital life increases, interest in numbers and letters weakens, sources of those two modalities of the symbolic that are the mathematical formula and the poetic metaphor. Both are expressions of our know-how that, after The Divine Comedy or quantum theory, has come to imagine the existence of an intelligence comparable to that which humans possess. The very idea of competition between artificial entities and human intelligence was from the outset a thought experiment of the human mind itself. However, today such competition can become real and… lost. Not so much, perhaps, because an artifact reaches the symbolization capabilities of the human being, but because we progressively renounce using the faculties that single us out, and in the end we are only able to function with the crutch of the algorithm.
Therefore, it is key not to make mistakes in educational priorities and the way to focus them. The learning and teaching of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division in the youngest children must be monopolized by paper and pencil and follow the guidelines of intelligible rules. This direct immersion will enliven the amazement that the discovery of the power of arithmetic and geometric entities provokes in the human mind and will ensure that when the teacher explains Galileo's thesis that nature is written in mathematical language, the thing will not sound abstract to student's ears. In parallel, we must let that astonishment unfold upon discovering that the letter leads to the word and this to the calculation, but also to the myth, in which Aristotle saw the matrix of children's desire to know: “the lover of myth ( philómythos) is in his own way a lover of knowledge (philósophós), since he compiles myth from things that leave one stupefied.”
In the history of humanity there has been an invisible continuous line between teachers and their disciples. Pulling the thread of imagination, one could speak of the existence of a first alpha-numeric teacher, from whom came the desire to teach and who spread the pleasure of learning among humans. But today sophisticated artifacts suggest that they could become the new masters. This is a debate of great magnitude and illustrative of the distance that human beings are capable of maintaining with respect to themselves, now emphasizing their exceptional condition as a being of reason, now opening to the idea that they could allow themselves to be guided by beings created by the same. Well, the balance can tip in favor of the algorithmic master due to the weight of a third variable.
If, as we are told, artificial intelligence becomes available to all of humanity and if its progress makes artificial “friends of man” surpass us in capacity for practical tasks, then when choosing, the criteria will be important. energetic. Here the numbers intervene relentlessly. What is already happening in other sectors will begin to happen in teaching. The energy investment will be globally lower in algorithmic teachers than in human teachers, and their performance from a strictly practical point of view can be very high. Adhering only to the economic-energy criterion, even in the name of climate change, it is possible that a majority of public opinion leans towards the digital friend in the educational support of young people and adults. In the fundamental field of the transmission of knowledge, that emergence in evolutionary history that represented the appearance of the human being would in fact be subordinated to that moment in human history that is algorithmic intelligence. It is not certain that the ideologies of the Enlightenment are compatible with such a reversal of hierarchy.
