Use AI but don’t let it think for you

Chief Justice Bryan Sykes has urged past and present students of Wolmer’s Boys’ School to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to broaden access to knowledge and boost efficiency, even while warning against allowing the technology to erode human judgement, conscience and accountability. “Students must be equipped to ask whether its use is truthful, fair, and humane. The task is not to choose between tradition and innovation, it is to make tradition the foundation of intelligent innovation,” Sykes told the Wolmer’s Old Boys’ Association’s (WOBA) 120th anniversary awards banquet at Jamaica Pegasus hotel in St Andrew last Saturday night.

“Jamaica needs young people who are technically capable but morally grounded, ambitious but not arrogant, confident in competition but generous in service,” Sykes said, adding that the famous school’s students need more than nostalgia, but additionally “they need the organised commitment of the Old Boys’ Association”. Arguing that the education students receive in this current AI revolution must remain anchored in discipline, intellectual honesty, courage, courtesy, resilience, and service, Sykes said: “It must also provide digital fluency, creativity, global awareness, and confidence to solve problems that earlier generations did not face”. The chief justice stated that the judiciary, similar to Wolmer’s, is an institution whose authority must outlast the personalities who serve within it, alluding to the fact that the school was founded in 1729 and that while many principals and administrators have come and gone, the school as an institution nevertheless stands firm.

“The judiciary is a constitutional safeguard, an independent forum in which the citizen may have rights determined. When we speak of judicial independence it is not a privilege for judges, it is a protection for the citizen. It means that the person who enters a court — whether powerful or powerless — should be heard by a tribunal guided by the law and the evidence, not by fear, favour, political direction, private influence, malice or ill will.

That independence must be joined with public confidence. “Confidence is earned by fairness, courtesy, reasoned decisions, integrity, efficiency, and accountability. It is sustained when the public can see that cases are administered seriously and every person is treated with dignity.

The judiciary must therefore preserve…