We’ve tried banning technology in education before, let’s not make the same mistake with AI

After several years during which more and more schools and colleges have moved to ban smartphones, backed by government policy and against a backdrop of social alarm over young people’s use of them, we are now seeing the same knee-jerk response to generative AI, based on a belief that students are cheating if they use it.

As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle: there is a time and place in education for smartphones, while algorithms should not be used in such a way that students see no need to bother learning anything. But when a general purpose technology emerges that rapidly becomes part of our lives whether we want it or not, we have to face reality and integrate it into the educational process, particularly if it is potentially dangerous. Prohibition is a way of eluding the responsibility of educating, and typically creates more serious problems when young people use whatever has been banned unsupervised.

In their book “Economic Transformations: General Purpose Technologies and Long-term Economic Growth”, Canadian economists Richard Lipsey, Ken Carlaw and Cliff Bekar assess 24 general purpose technologies that have emerged throughout human history, ranging from agriculture, the factory system, the development of metallurgy and materials such as bronze…