Philosophers love to dream up strange scenarios to get us thinking. They call these scenarios ‘thought experiments.’  

In 1980, philosopher John Searle published his ‘Chinese room’ thought experiment. Searle asked his readers to imagine someone who understands no Chinese sitting alone in a room with a very large book.  

The book contains instructions for manipulating Chinese symbols, to produce a plausible response to any statement or question written in Chinese.  

A Chinese speaker passes a written message into the room. The person in the room follows the instructions in the book to produce a reply, which they pass back. The Chinese speaker feels understood, even though the person inside the room understood neither the message nor the reply.  

The ‘Chinese room’ was a response to another famous thought experiment, formulated by Alan Turing, the father of digital computing. Under the ‘Turing test’ for machine intelligence, a machine is intelligent if it can converse with a human and convince them it is also human.  

Clearly, modern AI passes the Turing test with flying colours. But, according to Searle, the Turing test is flawed. Just like the person sitting in the Chinese room, AI is simply manipulating symbols without understanding. 

Turing wanted to get people thinking about machine intelligence. But I believe we urgently need to think about human intelligence. More specifically, we need a survival strategy for human intelligence in the age of AI. 

Early this year, the Higher Education Policy Institute in the UK published a survey about university students’ use of AI. About 90% reported using AI for their assessments. Most said they just use AI to help them understand concepts. Let’s be real, though. They are using AI to write their essays for them.  

There is little doubt that many students are passing courses without even trying to learn anything. Meanwhile, academics are increasingly using AI to create courses and grade assessments.  

Soon, humans will be redundant in the educational process. AI will create the courses, set the assessments, complete the assessment tasks, and grade them as well. Meanwhile, human beings will get more and more stupid. 

It will be like a whole lot of Chinese rooms talking to one another. Symbols will be passed from one AI to another, with no human understanding involved.  

In order to think, we need to know things. The real test for human intelligence will be whether we realise that in time.