Human intellect in the face of artificial intelligence: historical reflections through the lens of Thomas Aquinas

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the use of Artificial Intelligence in human formation, taking into account the intellectual condition. We identify four aspects of this issue. First, AI is examined as a product of capitalism, as something that must generate profit for its ‘creators’. Second, we analyze debates that present the use of AI in education as a positive tool, a revolution in the classroom. Third, we address positions that seek to highlight the ethical problems surrounding the use of AI in schools. Finally, we reflect on the way Thomas Aquinas presents the idea that the human being can only be understood as human insofar as the intellect is developed and exercised. Along this trajectory, we show that AI is a tool for human activities; however, one must not forget that it is a tool/commodity that, a priori, depends on human action in order to function. It does not innovate, and its results are compilations of that action. We neither praise nor condemn its use in education, but view it historically as a tool at the service of the interests of bourgeois society, without losing sight of the fact that it is the human intellect that produces, preserves, and disseminates knowledge and coordinates all planetary life. We emphasize that our perspective is possible because we follow the theoretical and methodological principles of Social History, from which we derive two key concepts: memory and the longue durée. Memory preserves the perennial understanding of the person as an intellectual being, while the longue durée makes it possible to bring theoretical formulations from other times to sit at the table and engage in dialogue with the questions of our present.