Outsourcing Humanity? ChatGPT, Critical Thinking, and the Crisis in Higher Education

Abstract

This article analyses ChatGPT from the perspective of the philosophy of education. It explores ChatGPT’s implications for universities, focussing on the intertwined concepts of critical thinking, the crisis of higher education, and humanity. Does ChatGPT sound the death knell for critical thinking and, thus, exacerbate the oft-diagnosed ‘crisis in education’? And is ChatGPT really a convenient, but dangerous, tool to outsource humanity to machines?. In addressing these questions, the article’s two main arguments offer an alternative to both triumphalist and overly pessimistic narratives: first, ChatGPT can lead to a revitalisation of critical thinking in higher education. However, it arrives at this conclusion not from the triumphalist viewpoint that celebrates ChatGPT’s (allegedly) limitless potential, but from the more sober perspective that ChatGPT combines remarkable strengths with considerable weaknesses and built-in limitations. Secondly, ChatGPT can prompt a return to the qualities that distinguish humans from calculating machines and (re)instate critical thinking as the pivotal virtue of higher education. The article arrives at this conclusion by rejecting the overly pessimistic concern with ‘outsourcing humanity’ and endorsing the idea that ChatGPT lays bare a ‘crisis in education’ that constitutes, simultaneously, a precious opportunity. Finally, the article stresses that this opportunity inevitably comes at a price. There will be winners and losers of the ChatGPT revolution and there is a danger that ChatGPT reintroduces elitism through the back door. One urgent task of the near future, therefore, will be to keep this danger in check.