What is progress, and why does it matter for AI literacy?

I recently spent a day with a group of academic leaders in the arts and humanities talking about higher education after AI. What struck me was how uneasy many of them were with the idea of progress. When I said I felt optimistic about the future with AI, one distinguished professor replied that he could not understand such optimism. The people of the future, he said, will be so different from us that we cannot know their world or judge whether it will be better.

I could see the point. New technologies do not automatically improve life. It is not obvious that a modern urban life, dependent on complex systems, is always better than older, smaller-scale, or more traditional ways of living.

And yet I felt morally challenged by this scepticism. For those who now survive diseases that once killed, for those who have clean water where before there was none, for parents whose children live where once they would have died, progress is not an illusion. It is something real. Scientific and technological advances have reduced suffering and expanded human possibilities.

But in fact, I suspect many of those same humanities scholars would agree that education itself depends upon a real idea of progress. We educate because we believe people can become more aware, more reflective, and more capable of understanding other points of view. In my terms, that is progress through the expansion of dialogic space: the widening and deepening of the space in which different perspectives can meet, challenge one another, and generate new understanding.

The problem, perhaps, is that many people in the humanities still think of technology as something external to the human. On that view, machines may transform the world around us, and technological development may show a clear cumulative progress across history, but human understanding is seen as something different. It does not simply accumulate. It has to be renewed in each generation, and in each individual student. I think that is mistaken. Human beings have always been shaped through technology. Language is a technology. Writing is a technology. Print is a technology. And now digital networks and AI are technologies that shape how we think, remember, imagine, and communicate.

Once we see this, the contrast between human progress and technological progress begins to break down. Technologies do not just give us new tools. They change the conditions of thought itself. A modern mathematician, for example, does not think alone, but through a vast inherited structure of symbols, proofs, and concepts built up over centuries. In the same way, AI offers a new layer of support for thinking. It can help us search, compare, test, and reframe ideas. But it can also make us lazy, dependent, and passive.

That is why the question of progress is now an educational question. The issue is not whether technology is simply good or bad. The issue is what kinds of human-technology relations help us think better, and what kinds weaken judgement.

This is where I think that AI literacy becomes needed. AI literacy is not just knowing which tools exist or how to write a prompt. It is knowing how to use AI in ways that expand thought rather than replace it.

Take two students writing an essay on climate justice. One asks AI to write the essay and submits a lightly edited version. The other uses AI to test an argument, find the strongest objection, compare perspectives, and discover what they still need to understand. The technology is the same, but the educational result is very different. In the first case, thought is outsourced. In the second, thought is extended.

This is why I think we still need the idea of progress, but we need to understand it differently. Progress is not a simple story of history automatically getting better. It is not inevitable, and it is not uniform. But it is real enough to guide judgement. Progress happens when education and technology work together to expand what I call dialogic space: the space in which different perspectives can meet, challenge one another, and generate new understanding.

Technologies can help expand that space, or they can close it down. Social media can connect people across the globe, but it can also trap them in polarised loops. AI can support curiosity, reflection, and creativity, but it can also encourage imitation, dependence, and the illusion of understanding. Nothing is guaranteed.

This is why education matters more than ever. The central task is not to protect a pure humanity from technology. It is to teach people how to live and think well with technology. In the age of AI, that means learning to recognise the difference between a use of technology that expands thought and a use that replaces it. That, to my mind, is the heart of AI literacy.