Adopting Generative AI to Amplify Your Critical Thinking

[rohitbubna]

In today's rapidly evolving technological landscape, mastering critical thinking is essential for navigating complexities and unlocking innovation. As we witness groundbreaking advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), it becomes increasingly pertinent to harness its capabilities effectively.

Recently, I completed a thought-provoking course from LinkedIn Learning titled Amplify Your Critical Thinking with Generative AI , which provides invaluable insights into amplifying critical thinking with generative AI. Through this 3-part blog, I would like to share some learnings and excerpts from this course.

A. What is Critical Thinking?

Critical thinking is the process of objectively analyzing and evaluating information to form a reasoned judgment or decision. It involves actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information gathered from observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication. Critical thinking is crucial from academic, professional, social, and personal perspectives as it fosters intellectual growth, problem-solving skills, informed citizenship, and personal development. By cultivating critical thinking skills, individuals can navigate complexity, make sound decisions, and contribute positively to their communities and the world at large.

B. How can GenAI be adopted to amplify Critical Thinking?

Generative AI tools serve as powerful aids in amplifying critical thinking by stimulating creativity, uncovering insights, facilitating scenario exploration, providing personalized recommendations, fostering collaboration, automating routine tasks, and promoting ethical decision-making. By harnessing the capabilities of AI, individuals can enhance their cognitive abilities, make more informed decisions, and drive innovation in a rapidly changing world. 

A very interesting framework called PIQPACC can be utilized to adopt the usage of Gen AI :

1. Purpose : 
Purpose provides clarity, motivation, and direction in critical decision-making, guiding choices toward meaningful outcomes, fostering resilience in the face of challenges, and aligning actions with values and long-term objectives.

Let's understand this using an example:

Suppose you are part of a board which is meeting for the first time to set up a new non-profit school in India for underprivileged and orphaned kids. Since the board members are very passionate about this topic, you want to drive a very objective discussion which could help define the 'Purpose' of the board. Here, you can use a GenAI tool like ChatGPT to identify the right questions which could help achieve your first goal.
You could provide the following input to ChatGPT :

 In return, ChatGPT provides you meaningful questions to help finalize the Purpose.

 One can observe that ChatGPT has suggested multiple dimensions to consider when defining the Purpose for the board which is very helpful. Once the purpose statement is defined, one can also use ChatGPT to get the purpose statement grammatically structured and fine-tuned. 

In the following blog series, we will go through the rest of the parts of the PIQPACC framework.