Thanks, Gus Skorburg for this great sketch of a new philosophy course that teaches students how to use AI responsibly.

Putting my oar in here: I teach writing. Today is the first day of class. I actually teach Rhetorical awareness, which is really situational awareness, which is inseparable from social awareness and self-understanding. (And insofar as we are becoming more self-aware, more other-aware, and engaging in big questions about the relationships between us, we are doing philosophy. Add in cultural sensitivity, and fascination with the varieties of ways human beings make sense of the world, and we’re doing the kind of comparative world philosophy I love.)

I’m saying all this because I see this as the real point, where AI can only help so much…. Which also points to broader failures in our broader, educational framing of ”learning”…

Talking to an AI about improving our capacities for relationship building and conversation, for networking, for understanding other real human beings, who are messy and imperfect — This can only be so helpful. It’s like learning how to swim from reading a book about swimming. At some point, you’ve got to get into the water. And if your use of AI is preventing you from getting in the pool of the interpersonal relationship-relationships that are crucial to understanding who we are and what we might do together… and how to make rhetorical choices based on the nuanced context of a very particular hiring manager, for example.