From the Principal

Dear Friends,

The end of semester is upon us, and I think our College community is breathing a collective sigh of relief for the break from what has been a very demanding term. We hope families enjoy the opportunity for a time of refreshment and preparation for the second half of 2023. 

I want to acknowledge and thank our College staff on behalf of the Oxley community, for the additional efforts involved in our high-quality co-curricular activities. Some of these are simply compliance issues, but others bring great delight and appreciation. I refer to the Performing Arts events, the many excursions and camps, our College support for Amari, and our commitments to the regional associations sport events. Senior students have also been involved in examinations and the annual GAT. Congratulations to everyone involved in the events of this past term.

The landscaping of our College play areas continues with the installation of paving, an amphitheatre area and the Junior School playground equipment. On completion, this will add a new dimension for the enjoyment of the College site. The maintenance team is focused on this new development. 

I draw attention to the excellent piece on artificial intelligence in the last edition of The Vine, written by Mr Avram, with assistance from the AI bot itself. As noted, potential danger lies in the accuracy and reliability of information provided by AI, or its fake news. In this edition, I briefly focus on a critique of the impact AI has on the area of truth. As others have said, technology has yet to thwart the human quest for truth. They note the history of our search for truth is literally littered with the deaths of those who challenged autocratic rulers on such matters. Not much has changed in autocratic countries. In the more democratic ones, being cancelled has much the same effect. Truth is mocked, torn apart and stomped on. Truthtellers are isolated, scorned and dismissed from their employment. 

As early as the late 1600s mathematicians were laying the foundations for universal symbolic systems to express human thought and information processing in the form of logical propositions. Such a system, it was thought, would be the greatest instrument of reason, allowing us humans to live life in pursuit of happiness alone. This is not just a precursor to AI’s utopian ambitions, but as in history, it is now an attempt to untangle the blurred lines between truth and falsehood and to establish a sense of certainty for times of chaos and unbelief. However, as was observed long ago, those too accustomed to lies will never believe truth. 

Haidt points out in his book The Righteous Mind, human reason is almost entirely aimed at justification rather than truth. Reasoning can take us to almost any conclusion we want to reach, because we ask, ‘Can I believe it?’ when we want to believe something, but ‘Must I believe it?’ when we don’t want to believe. The answers to these questions are almost always yes and no, respectively. At the moment, AI is simply a more universal culmination of human thought and creativity that provides rapid access to recalling it, programming it, rephrasing and recreating it. Unfortunately, this will not be a limitation for too long. 

We are creatures that seem to be able to do anything and like to believe we should have no boundaries. This is how we define freedom for ourselves, ultimately to be free from all constraints, especially the biological ones. How absurd that a creature that can do anything makes a machine to give itself a self-perception of freedom. And the machine makes a machine. And evil can run itself for thousands of years with no need to tend it. The quest for truth, however, remains unanswered. It must be found in places other than the technological replication, reconstruction or reordering of the human mind.

Warm regards,

Dr Douglas Peck