Interaction
They [Miles & Clement] worry that AI is creating a generation who can produce passable work but don’t have any usable knowledge or understanding of the material. ... Socrates worried that writing would weaken people’s memories and encourage only superficial understanding: ... “Most sensible people would not go into a bar and meet somebody who says, “Hey, I’ve got this new drug. It’s really good for you - and just use it.” ... Clement says “And having knowledge is incredibly important so that when you hear something that is questionable or maybe fake, you think “Wait a minute that contradicts all the knowledge that I have that says otherwise, right?”
Sophie McBain (2025)
In such a place as this, on the spectacular edge of the Mã Pì Lèng Gorge, when humans meet, interaction seems assured. Two lives change
one another.
Contrasts the difference between two interlocutors and two children with screens.
Essentially such interactions form a spiral; the spiral of the dialectic, each step moulds the last, each person accommodating the other, so shaping two
changed experiences.
We need constant reminders of the vital part change plays in all we do
This spiral is also seen when it comes to furthering understanding.
New material
Our understandings bring explanations if we can integrate new material.
is to be integrated into pre-existing experience: absorbing it, re-configuring the whole, and so creating something new within us. First we check the new is not ‘fake’, that it might be integrated into what we already know, and does not contradict it. Failure here results in mere conveyance of information. The worry now with AI, just as it was with
writing,
While writing may aid comprehension, it may also slow aspects of our mental agility.
is that it may render us passive, and naively accepting. We become less able to interrogate new information, less able to integrate it, and accordingly less able to change. Writing and AI are most valuable tools, but mistaking conveying information for understanding, threatens understanding itself.
The article by McBain on Matt Miles and Joe Clement’s Screen Schooled (Chicargo Review Press 2017) appeared in the Guardian Weekly Vol 213 No 17 page 44 on 24 October 2025.
You don’t have to go and sit at the edge of a 2,000 ravine in the tail end of the Himalaya, where this photo was taken, but it sure helps.
Above, hovering on blue introduces a link: click to go, move away to stay.
Saturday 20th December 2025
...guide to this site