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EL ESPECTADOR

Disconnection Effect, Paradoxes Of Our Social Network World

The unpredictable consequences of technology on relationships
The unpredictable consequences of technology on relationships
Santiago Montenegro

-OpEd-

BOGOTA — Once upon a time our cities had physical spaces and institutions that allowed people of different social groups to mix and interact, at least to a degree.

Downtown cafés attracted politicians, intellectuals, traders and students. Churches — back when people still attended mass in significant numbers — were another place where people could meet and converse.

Before the mass diffusion of the private car, parks, tramways and then buses were also, for better or worse, spaces in which people of different backgrounds converged. Public universities too, though they admitted relatively few people, allowed provincial students to interact with professors and students from wealthier families from the capital.

But in time, these meeting spaces and institutions, which permitted a rapprochement of the social classes, came to disappear or radically change. Downtown cafés vanished or stopped being places where people actually sat around and talked. Gradually they gave way to gourmet-type or highly stratified eateries. Parks have had to compete with shopping centers. Private universities have fragmented the university population. Hardly anyone goes to church anymore. And the proliferation of car use prompted many students from comfortable backgrounds to stop using public transport.

Liquid Modernity

Only one institution, the family, had some success resisting the modern world's assault. Until the arrival of the radio, then television, the family was the best place for people to gather and interact. People shared meals. Most importantly they spoke, listened, and looked each other in the eyes. Even after the arrival of television, which began in a way to undermine this basic school of socialization, interactions continued, for better or worse, and conversation remained a possibility.

But with the arrival of social networking on the Internet, tablets and mobile phones, the family is losing its role as the shaper of conversational beings. Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says we now live in a state of "liquid modernity," whereby the family no longer prays, eats or even watches television together.

The new technology has changed social dynamics outside the family as well. In parks, shopping malls or busses, the places, in other words, where people could theoretically still interact, they don't. Instead they're like zombies, with their ears plugged up by earphones and their eyes fixed on some smartphone or tablet.

The social and political consequences of all these technologies are unpredictable. Perhaps of greatest concern is that dialogue is disappearing, both between and inside the social strata — and with it, age-old forms of solidarity, interaction and mutual defense on which civil society has forever depended. In our new hyper atomized society, will we be more exposed to new forms of domination, especially that of the state itself?

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Future

AI Is Good For Education — And Bad For Teachers Who Teach Like Machines

Despite fears of AI upending the education and the teaching profession, artificial education will be an extremely valuable tool to free up teachers from rote exercises to focus on the uniquely humanistic part of learning.

Journalism teacher and his students in University of Barcelona.

Journalism students at the Blanquerna University of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

© Sergi Reboredo via ZUMA press
Julián de Zubiría Samper

-Analysis-

BOGOTÁ - Early in 2023, Microsoft tycoon Bill Gates included teaching among the professions most threatened by Artificial Intelligence (AI), arguing that a robot could, in principle, instruct as well as any school-teacher. While Gates is an undoubted expert in his field, one wonders how much he knows about teaching.

As an avowed believer in using technology to improve student results, Gates has argued for teachers to use more tech in classrooms, and to cut class sizes. But schools and countries that have followed his advice, pumping money into technology at school, or students who completed secondary schooling with the backing of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have not attained the superlative results expected of the Gates recipe.

Thankfully, he had enough sense to add some nuance to his views, instead suggesting changes to teacher training that he believes could improve school results.

I agree with his view that AI can be a big and positive contributor to schooling. Certainly, technological changes prompt unease and today, something tremendous must be afoot if a leading AI developer, Geoffrey Hinton, has warned of its threat to people and society.

But this isn't the first innovation to upset people. Over 2,000 years ago, the philosopher Socrates wondered, in the Platonic dialogue Phaedrus, whether reading and writing wouldn't curb people's ability to reflect and remember. Writing might lead them to despise memory, he observed. In the 18th and 19th centuries, English craftsmen feared the machines of the Industrial Revolution would destroy their professions, producing lesser-quality items faster, and cheaper.

Their fears were not entirely unfounded, but it did not happen quite as they predicted. Many jobs disappeared, but others emerged and the majority of jobs evolved. Machines caused a fundamental restructuring of labor at the time, and today, AI will likely do the same with the modern workplace.

Many predicted that television, computers and online teaching would replace teachers, which has yet to happen. In recent decades, teachers have banned students from using calculators to do sums, insisting on teaching arithmetic the old way. It is the same dry and mechanical approach to teaching which now wants to keep AI out of the classroom.

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