Can ChatGPT mark your GAMSAT essay?

Since the earliest hand-axe, humanity has been defined by a restless urge to improve upon the world it inherited. Every generation has looked at its tools and declared itself the most advanced that has ever lived. Huxley’s warning — that technological progress may merely provide “more efficient means for going backwards” — asks whether movement and progress are the same thing at all. I will argue that they are not: progress is a moral achievement rather than a technical one. Machines accelerate us; only judgement can steer.

The clearest evidence for Huxley’s anxiety is the gap between what our tools can do and what we have decided they are for. The engagement algorithm is a marvel of optimisation, yet the thing it optimises — attention — was never something its users agreed to sell. Social media has made us lonelier than any generation in history. We built systems faster than we built the norms to govern them, and the result is a culture that mistakes acceleration for direction. Skinner’s point lands precisely here: the real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. A society that automates its choices has not abolished choice; it has merely stopped noticing who is making them.

Yet to blame the machine is to mistake the mirror for its reflection. Technology has no ambitions of its own; it enlarges whatever intention we bring to it. The same protein-folding models that could, in principle, design a toxin are compressing decades of medical research into years. Wiener saw this clearly: we have modified our environment so radically that we must now modify ourselves — not our bodies, but our habits of deliberation. The demand is not to slow invention but to mature alongside it, much as medicine matured from heroic surgery to informed consent.

This is why Shaw’s formulation is the most complete of the four. Progress is impossible without change, but the change that counts is not the new device; it is the new mind that decides what the device is for. A century ago the measure of a nation was the tonnage of its steel. Today, unevenly and with reluctance, we are learning to measure welfare, attention and trust. That shift in what we count is itself progress of the deepest kind.

Humanity, then, remains defined by its urge to improve the world it inherited. But improvement is a verdict, not a velocity. The societies that deserve the word “progress” will not be those that moved fastest, but those that could still explain — in words their citizens accept — where they were going, and why the destination was worth it.