At all levels, educators are under pressure to “keep up with” Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI). In Medium, the self-described “home for human stories and ideas,” the University of London’s Professor Michael Bueler provides a weekly news round up that “curates articles, scientific studies, and expert reports exploring how generative AI is transforming the core dimensions of education.” While a laudatory effort on Dr Bueler’s part, it makes me wonder if we risk “keeping up” with the breath-taking pace of this evolving technology feels a bit like swimming against a rip tide and of the GAI tail wagging the dog of education.
Ethical worries about GAI abound but tend to center on a panoply of pressing problems such as plagiarism, perpetuation of biases , access and infrastructure differences, privacy, and calamitous environmental degradation. While these concerns are valid, a deeper and perhaps more sinister underpinning is also at play.
In this brief presentation, I position the use of GAI in health sciences education through the lens of the ethical concept of “expediency.” Expediency has long been at odds with ethics and human flourishing since at least Aristotle (384-322 bce). In particular, postmodern thought has rejected “expediency” as a value in the 21st century capitalist environment as a threat to human life based on its rhetorical usage in Nazi Germany. Yet, when skeptics raise concerns about GAI, they are often met with the argument of expediency as a practical value.
