Ethics and humanism in the age of artificial intelligence: challenges for education and critical thinking XI Taller Internacional “La transformación digital y las tecnologías de avanzada en la Educación Superior”

Abstract

This study analyzed the ethical and humanistic challenges that artificial intelligence (AI) poses to contemporary education, taking as its starting point the profound transformation that this technology introduces to autonomy, critical thinking, and moral subjectivity. The central problem lies in the fact that AI not only acts as a technical tool but also as an epistemic agent capable of mediating perception, learning, and decision-making, thus reconfiguring the role of human beings in educational processes and threatening to automate judgment and reflection. The theoretical framework was structured around humanism as an ethical horizon, ethics in the face of the automation of reason, and the relationship between technology and conscience. Authors such as Floridi, Morin, Dussel, Fromm, Haraway, Searle, and Habermas allow for the interpretation of AI as a technological, cultural, and ontological phenomenon that redefines the notions of intelligence, subjectivity, and moral responsibility. This study was developed using a qualitative approach and a hermeneutic-critical paradigm, employing a process of documentary review, interpretive analysis, and argumentative synthesis to understand the ethical, epistemological, and pedagogical effects of AI. The findings showed that AI can erode autonomy, exacerbate inequality, weaken moral development, and promote a technocratic model that displaces critical reflection. At the same time, the study concluded that humanistic education remains essential for orienting technology toward life, strengthening critical thinking, reducing the digital divide, and ensuring that AI functions as a complementary tool, never as a substitute for human judgment.