AI not only helps us think, it thinks instead of us: what that means for the learning process

Deep in Book VII of Plato’s Republic, Socrates describes prisoners chained in a cave who mistake the shadows cast by firelight on a wall for reality itself. They name the shadows, discuss them and develop specialist knowledge about them. The prisoners are completely and sincerely wrong and have no idea. The cave is not a place of stupidity, but a place of convincing, well-organized illusion.

But Plato’s real interest was not in the cave; Periagogue – a Greek word that means the turning away of the soul from the shadow and towards the light. For Plato, this was education itself: not the filling of an empty vessel with facts, but a fundamental reorientation of the way a person deals with the truth and how he comes to know that truth.

The shadows remain, but today they are no longer cast by firelight but rather created by machines. Large Language Models (LLMs), image creation, and AI-powered search produce fluid, secure, and immediate results.

But here’s the important thing…