The world may end not with a bang, but with a quarrel

Every generation has had its own fear of how the world might end: nuclear war, a pandemic, an environmental catastrophe or an asteroid nobody saw coming. Now there is artificial intelligence as well. These fears are frightening because they are sudden, but I have come to believe that another possibility deserves just as much thought: civilisation may not end in one spectacular event at all. It may slowly unravel because we forget how to disagree with one another.

I know how easily it happens because I have seen it close to home. Someone very dear to me and I saw a world leader’s conduct differently, and a difference that should have stayed a conversation cost us something we had spent years building. The respect is still there, but something has broken between us, and it has not been easy to mend. I don’t think either of us wanted that. It is what happens when a disagreement becomes bigger than the relationship that once allowed you to disagree.

What troubles me is not that people disagree, because people have always disagreed about politicians, religion, schools, money and almost everything else that matters to them. It is that we seem increasingly unable to hold a disagreement without making it personal. Too many of us treat a difference of opinion as a verdict on a person’s character, and the distance of a screen makes it easy to say things we would never say across a table.

What we are losing is not strength but restraint. There is nothing wrong with standing firmly for what you believe, but strength and aggression are not the same thing. Our societies have survived because human beings learned, imperfectly, to negotiate, compromise and step back from the edge. A strong person, a strong society or a strong country has the confidence to listen as well as the courage to stand firm. My worry is not any single argument but their accumulation, because once constant anger becomes normal, we begin to forget that a healthy society depends as much on our ability to live with what we cannot have as on our ability to fight for what we want.

After more than four decades in education, I have seen something in schools that gives me more hope than I expected. Students today stand up and disagree, and they do it politely but with real conviction. Thirty or forty years ago, pupils argued too, but usually with a joke and always with an eye on the teacher, because nobody wanted to push things too far or offend. Humour was how we disagreed safely.

That has changed, and I count it largely as progress. A student who can say, “I see it differently, and here is why,” is doing something many adults find much harder than any examination: disagreeing without contempt. It is a skill, and like reading, it is learned early or not at all. Schools that welcome questions rather than punish them are building a habit that too many of us, myself included, have found hard to keep, and if I am honest, the young are often better at it than their elders.

This is why we should teach children how to think, not what to think: to question what they read without becoming cynical, to disagree without being disagreeable and to accept that admitting you are wrong can be a sign of strength. Restraint can be taught, too. In a world where everyone seems certain they are right, the ability to say, “I may be wrong,” is a valuable form of intelligence.

This is where the modern world puts that skill at risk. To disagree well, you must first have a view of your own, formed by effort, reflection and experience, and that is precisely what today’s technology invites us to skip. Algorithms learn what holds our attention, and anger holds it very well, so they keep feeding us more of what we already believe until an opinion begins to feel less like an opinion and more like an unquestionable truth.

Artificial intelligence takes this a step further. It can draft an essay, summarise an argument and offer an opinion in seconds, in fluent and confident language that can make questioning it feel unnecessary. The potential is enormous, particularly in education, where AI could help teachers personalise learning and give students new ways to explore ideas, but there is another side to the convenience.

What happens when students stop learning to write because a machine can write for them, or when we depend on systems whose decisions we no longer understand? The danger may not be that machines suddenly seize control. It may be that we hand control over willingly, one convenience at a time, simply because it is easier.

If machines can supply answers instantly, the value of an education can no longer lie simply in knowing the answers. It must lie in knowing which questions to ask, whether an answer makes sense, whether it is ethical and, perhaps most important, when not to trust it. The students I have described, who stand up politely and argue their point, are exactly the ones who will question a machine’s answer, provided we keep teaching them that they have the right and the responsibility to do so. They also need to know when to put the technology aside and think for themselves.

Our world is not built only in parliaments, laboratories and universities. It is built every day, in homes, schools, offices, buses and shops, by millions of ordinary people deciding how to treat one another: keeping their word, waiting their turn, helping someone who needs help, listening before responding and respecting a rule when nobody is watching.

After a lifetime in schools, I believe these small acts matter far more than we realise. A teacher who listens to a child, a colleague who can disagree without making it personal, a parent who admits they were wrong, or a friend who chooses the relationship over winning the argument may seem like small things, but they are the habits that keep relationships, schools and communities intact.

Perhaps the world we have built will one day end with a bang, though I hope not. Perhaps it will fade with a whimper as trust, courtesy and common sense gradually disappear. Or perhaps we will build systems so powerful and so deeply woven into our lives that we forget who was supposed to be in charge.

The greatest challenge of the AI age may not be teaching machines to think like humans, but making sure that ‘humans continue to think like humans’.

Michael Guzder is Executive Vice-President, Education at GEMS