As a professional educator and student as well, I have experienced many different ways of learning and shortcuts to learning.

As young adults, we were required to do book reports.

We were supposed to read books like Mutiny on the Bounty or A Tale of Two Cities and write the obligatory book report.

The solution in those days was easy.

We would go to the store and buy a Classic Comic Book with the same title.

They started off the same as the book.

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times... But quickly turned to colorful drawings of men in three-cornered hats and sans-culottes. After spending 15-20 minutes looking at the pictures and reading the dialogue, the book report almost wrote itself.

When we got to college, we had to deal with more difficult matters in a variety of subjects.

Enter the famous CliffsNotes. You could get them for organic chemistry, French or psychology. The complaint by teachers was that it allowed students to bypass reading assignments. Of course, that was the whole point.

The real killjoy for reading assignments and library research was the internet.

This was an opportunity I took advantage of as a learner and as a human being. My first inclination when I had a pain was to consult Dr. Google. When I heard a term I didnt understand, I went to one of several search engines.

As a teacher, I didnt really know how to react to it. At first, I resented the use of laptops in class when students were checking out everything I was saying. I even banned the use of Wikipedia as a research tool.

I insisted on original sources. Of course, that was easily compromised. It wasnt long before I was teaching online and I totally gave into the internet phenomenon and the social media that followed.

I used to say that face-to-face interaction was the best form of communication and the best tool for teaching and learning.

I guess that still could be true.

However, it happens so rarely these days that alternate paths have not only emerged, they have taken over our lives. In the same way that phone conversations took over personal conversations, texting has eliminated real phone conversations. We no longer say we love each other, we trade in emojis of hearts, some pulsating. I dont know whether love has increased or become just as impersonal as saying Have a Nice Day.

After Classic Comics, CliffsNotes, the internet and social media, we are unsure who is learning or who is teaching. But wait. There is more. We now have the challenge of Artificial Intelligence. AI allows us to generate knowledge, outlines and information that seems original. I could ask for a history about Ben Blaz or for an outline for calculus in CHamoru. I did and out it came. Moreover, it did so at a speed and depth which makes all the aforementioned routes to knowledge appear passe or quaint.

The results seemed plausible.

They could make it into a student project. The only problem was that the history of Ben Blaz gave him credit for legislation I moved through Congress and the CHamoru course in calculus looked authentic but needed a lot of work.

However, it would have taken me months of work to come up with that outline. There have been lots of warnings by people about AI, many by people who are working on various AI schemes.

One that I take seriously comes from Israeli historian and public intellectual Yuval Noah Harari. In the Economist, he argues that AI may have hacked the operating system of human civilization.

Our humanity is defined by our ability to use language. When a program can replicate that more authentically than us as individual humans, maybe someone or something has really hacked into our intelligence functioning. Moreover, there is no kill switch for this.

Maybe someone will develop an anti-AI artificial intelligence program like an anti-missile missile. But who would control that? I just long for the days when children would go to the village store and look at the comics hung on clotheslines behind the counter. They would say Archie or Classic Comics put fabot.

Robert Underwood is the former president of the University of Guam and Guams former delegate in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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Underwood: From comic books to AI | Opinion | guampdn.com - Pacific Daily News