When College President Sian Leah Beilock published her splashy new think piece in The Atlantic, four people texted me the link to read it before I could find it on my own. And, although some may be surprised by this, I found myself agreeing with the general spirit of her argument.
Recently, I’ve been frustrated with an irrational sense of historical singularity clouding the worldviews of so many people I know. It seems like everybody believes that our time is uniquely terrible and that we are dealing with an exceptional set of crises. I was slipping into a similar sense of disempowerment until I watched an errant episode of “Antiques Roadshow” in which an appraiser was examining two portraits of wealthy adherents to Millerism, an immensely popular 19th century American Religious movement in which many adherents believed that the Earth would be destroyed by fire in the year 1844.
Artists and the working class vanguard made apocalyptic predictions similar to those of many AI-doomsdayers upon the introduction of the power loom. William Blake famously described the early industrial revolution as “dark, satanic mills,” and nearly 900,000 artisan jobs were lost in four decades, causing a painful spasm of violence led largely by workers afraid of what the future held.
It doesn’t take a history Ph.D. to know that most people feel as if the time in which they live is unique, important or central. “Chronocentrism” is the word that describes just this phenomenon. So, as much as I’d like to believe that artificial intelligence is the unique advancement that will cause the end of the world, I just can’t convince myself we’re that special. As long as we live under a system of global capitalism, technology that fundamentally changes the way we live will continue to spread across the world, and it’s daft to think that anyone would be successful in preventing its adoption without fundamentally changing the incentive structures that drive our society.
This is where I have to give Beilock credit — her claim that we must embrace AI runs counter to what many popular ideologues are saying, and she’s right. To survive in our modern economy with its existing incentive structures, we must embrace new technology.
This is why Beilock is correct to point to the Tuck School of Business’s integration of AI into classes with pride. This is an example of teaching students how to use AI in the context of their imminent careers. Where she goes wrong, however, is her critique of Berkeley Law School and the University of Chicago for banning technology AI from their first-year law classes and core undergraduate classes, respectively. She describes such mandates as “draconian.”
However, these are the exact mandates that should be in effect. Ask any law school professor what the point of suffering through reading a specific bit of assigned case law in the first year of law school. I can almost guarantee you that they won’t say the goal is for students to learn that specific case law — it’s to suffer through reading legal writing for the first time, and learn how to read it through struggle. The same goes for reading something by Aristotle or another classic philosopher in a core class at the University of Chicago. These classes are for learning these philosophers, sure, but they’re mainly about learning how to learn: reading something assigned by a professor for three hours and still barely understanding the point of it, reading things over and over again and discussing with peers to finally begin to gain a real understanding.
Although this difference may seem minor, Beilock loses the entire essence of learning by conflating teaching necessary AI skills with replacing the process of learning altogether. She’s right — we must learn how to use AI in the immediate contexts of our careers, and it also probably wouldn’t hurt to add some more classes at the college teaching students how to use AI at a higher level. However, as soon as the use of AI begins to impinge on the sphere of actual learning, it becomes fundamentally damaging to our goal as a college.
Although Beilock is able to publish an article in The Atlantic to get our campus attention, Dartmouth certainly won’t be the only college to embrace the use of AI in education. If Beilock is looking for ways to differentiate Dartmouth, the greatest opportunity to do so is by making the College a place where humans and AI coexist positively. We must not prepare students for careers in a system where they are required to use AI to keep up, but teach them to transcend this system and make AI work for our collective good.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
Eli Moyse ’27 is an opinion editor and columnist for The Dartmouth. He studies government and creative writing. He publishes various personal work under a pen name on Substack (https://substack.com/@wesmercer), and you can find his other work in various publications.
