Today’s New Verse News: ART OF THE QUESTION
by Dick Altman
Art created by Shutterstock AI image generator in response to "Art of the Question."
Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach: With the rise of the popular new chatbot ChatGPT, colleges are restructuring some courses and taking preventive measures. —The New York Times, January 16, 2023
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Disclaimer: ChatGPT inspired but did not write this poem. And what if it did? What, at bottom, are we afraid of—that a machine might outthink us? From childhood, I thrilled to science fiction evolving into science fact. Bring on the machines! If Socrates were alive today, I can hear him ask, “Why spend life trying to find answers, when life’s key may lie in finding the right questions?” The best leaders, I often think, posit the best questions. Ask the right question, I’d tell my peers, and you may find exactly the answer we’ve all been probing/struggling for. As AI’s narrative powers grow, exponentially/computationally, we need to learn how best to feed its appetite. Think about your day and mine— think about the river of questions that ebb and flow through life’s continuum. Rarely do we ponder the process that instinctively—or so it seems— lets us arrive at decisions that guide home/work/play/passion. One could argue—and I’d agree— all conscious life thrives, or fails, on the quality of its questions. Perhaps we have reached the age to turn education on its head— to teach our young "The Art of the Question". So that apps like ChatGPT can learn, in turn, to grind out answers worthy of our curiosity and explorations. Think of it as a new educational dawn. I say let’s welcome, not fear, the rising binary sun of a Socratic Age reborn. Or as Hamlet might have prophetically put it: To ask... To answer... That is the question
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Dick Altman writes in the high, thin, magical air of Santa Fe, NM, where, at 7,000 feet, reality and imagination often blur. He is published in Santa Fe Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, riverSedge, Fredericksburg Literary Review, Foliate Oak, Blue Line, THE Magazine, Humana obscura, The Offbeat, Haunted Waters Press, Split Rock Review, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, The New Verse News, Sky Island Journal, and others here and abroad. A poetry winner of Santa Fe New Mexican’s annual literary competition, he has in progress two collections of some 100 published poems. His work has been selected for the forthcoming first volume of The New Mexico Anthology of Poetry to be published by the New Mexico Museum Press.