BGGS Annual Review 2024

Principal’s Address Thursday 14 November 2024

Ms Jacinda Euler Welsh Principal

Ms Jacinda Euler Welsh, Principal, delivered the following address at the School’s Annual Speech Day and Distribution of Prizes 2024.

Our response

Julie McKay, Chair of the Board; Trustees— past and present; Honoured guests— including Past Chairs, Dr Cherrell Hirst and Elizabeth Jameson; Councillor Vicki Howard; Guest Speaker, Helen Penrose; President of the P&F, Kerrin Petersen; Julie Caton, President of the Old Girls Association; Teachers and staff; parents; Grammar girls (our students) and most particularly the young women of Year 12. Artificial intelligence has been with us for a long time and yet suddenly, it seems, there’s been exponential growth and impact. But amidst the wonders of AI and amazing world-changing possibilities what is it that is making people uncomfortable and uneasy? What is at stake? Does it threaten authenticity, our humanness? Do we worry we will lose, surrender, handover essential human capabilities—the ability to discern, create, empathise and connect? As humans we have a fundamental need for attachment and authenticity. The need for attachment—connection and closeness with another person for the sake of being taken care of, that fundamental need for dependence—is essential to our survival. We also have the need to be authentic— knowing what we feel, being able to express, and to act on who we, truly, are. What is our School’s role as we face these new horizons? Attachment, Authenticity, Anxiety and AI

If attachment is the bond of humanity, one of the most important things we seek to create is a sense of belonging—to the institution, its community, our teachers and one another. As the girls understand … Together strong, in blue we belong. At the same time, our School, I hope, supports girls to be authentic, uniquely themselves … while understanding we are all a part of a bigger entity—our School, our society, our shared humanity. Tyler Austin Harper writing in The Atlantic (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/ archive/2024/05/ai-dating-algorithms relationships/678422/) has said the new AI products infiltrating seemingly all domains of life are ‘gate-crashing spheres of activity that were previously the sole province of human beings’. Want to avoid the hassle of dating and all its messy inconvenience? A dating bot concierge will do it for you. Need a poem to propose to a loved one—that most intimate human moment? Firing up ChatGPT will get you something more eloquent perhaps than your ‘roses are red’ attempt. In the back of our mind, though, we have a sneaky suspicion it all came a little too easily. That we’ve cheated somehow. Not when you use it to create an Agenda, gather some background information quickly. And certainly not when using AI to detect fraud in finance, using virtual assistants, carers even pets for the elderly and lonely. Or in healthcare, improving diagnostics, drug discovery and personalised treatment plans—analysing vast amounts of medical data to detect disease early.

Our response therefore can’t simply be that AI is ‘bad’. A more ‘sophisticated approach’ requires us to distinguish, Harper says, between the ‘uses of AI that legitimately empower’ us and ‘those …. that wrest core human activities from human control’. But to determine which is which means we have to define them. Because as Harper asks, ‘what (are the) activities (that) belong to the jurisdiction of our species, not to be usurped by machines’ in order ‘to pin down why some uses of artificial intelligence delight and excite, while others leave many of us feeling queasy.’ In a time when there is great emphasis on our difference, when we appear to be moving away from a shared understanding of what is common to us all, what are those innately, uniquely, human capabilities? Philosopher, Martha Nussbaum, offers a way forward, perhaps, with the ‘so-called capability approach to human flourishing’, so aligned with our purpose as educators. She argues that there are universal ‘basic human capabilities’ we should be able to develop. ‘Being able to imagine, to think, and to reason’ .. ‘engage in … familial and social interaction’. A good society she says ‘is one in which human beings are not just theoretically free to engage in these basic human endeavours, but are actually capable ’ (Robeyns, Ingrid and Morten Fibieger Byskov. Summer 2023 ed. The Capability Approach. The Stanford A way forward

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Annual Review 2024

Brisbane Girls Grammar School