opinion

Shawna Dolansky is an associate professor in the Bachelor of Humanities (Great Books) program at Carleton University.

Dear students:

You are entering university at an extraordinary moment. For the first time in history, machines can write essays, analyze literature, and engage in philosophical discussions. So you might reasonably wonder: If artificial intelligence can do these things, why should you spend four years learning to do them yourself?

Here’s the truth: You need to learn these things precisely because machines can now do them. Your ability to think for yourself has become more precious than ever.

We live in a world in which human experience has been flattened into neat categories of black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. Complex cultural realities

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