AI and the Pedagogy of Ignorance.

As ethics teachers consider whether and how to incorporate new forms of generative artificial intelligence into their classrooms, it is important to revisit the question of what exactly it is that we aim to teach. We ought to use these technologies only if we know that they help us do better what we claim to do. To explore this question, this paper reconsiders the founding provocation of Western philosophy: Socrates's claim that true wisdom consists in knowing that one is not wise. I argue that Socrates meant that claim earnestly, and that it is a legitimate and practicable aim of ethics education. I contrast Socrates's view with that of Protagoras, the famous Greek sophist, who proposes instead that ethics education aims at teaching sound deliberation. On either view, I argue, tools like ChatGPT have little to offer ethics teachers—and on the Socratic view, nothing at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]