Nuno Antunes, a professor at Iscte Executive Education and Iscte Business School, with more than 25 years of experience in advertising, alerts to a growing problem in the era of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Many people are stopping learning because they believe that knowing how to ask good questions to a chatbot is enough to obtain instant solutions. The author argues that the ease with which we can obtain answers today is creating the illusion that producing an answer is the same as knowing, which represents one of the greatest challenges that education faces.
The article cites the OECD's Digital Education Outlook, which states that the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence can improve performance on a task without necessarily producing learning. Antunes highlights the paradox that the smarter machines become, the more important human intelligence becomes. Not the intelligence to memorize, which is lost to machines, but rather the capacity for critical thinking, making judgments, interpreting contexts, recognizing contradictions, and making decisions.
The author defends that the role of school and university must evolve from transmitting answers to teaching how to think, question, relate, and decide. In executive training, this is particularly relevant, as an executive needs knowledge, experience, and the ability to challenge mental models. An in-person classroom offers confrontation of ideas, discussion of concrete cases, and the obligation to explain one's own thinking, something that is difficult to obtain only in front of a screen.
Antunes concludes that Artificial Intelligence should enter the classroom and be used, but that it does not replace knowledge. The tool increases the capacity of those who already have knowledge to use it. The real problem begins when we cease to be curious enough to ask, so learning is not about accumulating answers, but rather about increasing the capacity to think.
