AI and Professional Judgment: The Quest for Being There

BONUS: Discussion questions for use in professional development at the end.

Martin Buber illuminated how our experience of being-with humans arises in dialogue, not in prefabricated spaces we enter and exit, rsvp, party favors, like motorized puppets. Dialogue itself as the source of being-with reorients our understanding of human encounters. We're not predetermined entities who occasionally bump into meaningful contact—rather, we are continuously being shaped by and through our dialogical engagement with the world and others. Remember this when someone tries to tell you teaching our children and training an AI are comparable.

Think about how a child learns language—not by entering and exiting designated "language learning zones" down the being-with corridor. In the give and take of continuous dialogical immersion—from the giggles to the wailing—the capacity for expression and understanding emerges. The same principle extends throughout life: We don't enter dialogue as fully formed beings with fully formed language. We crave being-with in part because it helps us fully form our selves and our language. That infants quickly are-with us from the moment of APGAR is logical proof that being-with is not language-dependent, but language-enhanced.

The I-Thou and I-It relations are not separate modes we take on and off like our clothes, like shedding our skin. I-It isn’t the right or the wrong relationship, the best or the worst. I-It involves dialogue. A surgeon focusing on precise technical movements during an operation is engaged in “dialogue” with the scalpel. Insisting that this dialogue is in any way commensurate with human dialogue, of course, trivializes Buber’s argument. The scalpel cannot authentically respond as a human.

However, the surgeon's technical focus doesn't preclude human dialogue. It’s just that the dialogue is with the patient as a whole being, even in moments of necessary instrumental focus. Infants as they sleep are-with parents who use an audio monitor during the night. The technical precision itself exists within a broader context of care for and responsibility to another human being. The surgeon must necessarily engage in what we might call "I-It" attention to perform the surgery safely. The surgeon may treat specific tissues and processes as objects of technical manipulation while simultaneously holding awareness of the patient's full humanity. This is a living heart I hold in my hands.

In one of the most pivotal scenes in Jean Paul Sartre’s existential novel Nausea, Roquentin encounters a chestnut tree in a public park. This moment crystallizes his confrontation with pure existence, the brute, contingent, overwhelming "thereness" of being that exists prior to and independent of our human categories and meanings. What's fascinating in light of Buber is how this scene represents almost the inverse of an I-Thou encounter.

Rather than experiencing genuine meeting or dialogue, Roquentin is struck by the alienness and meaninglessness of existence. The tree's roots appear to him in their brute factuality, black, knotty, obscene in their bare existence. This triggers his nausea, his visceral recognition that existence precedes essence, that things simply are, in all their contingent superfluity, before we layer meaning onto them. I am; therefore, I think. For Sartre, it’s a lot more pleasant being-with than hooking up with a tree. But being-with may be an illusion.

Unlike Buber's leaving open the possibility of a genuine meeting even with a chestnut tree, sort of like a scalpel becoming alive in the sensitive hands of a surgeon, Sartre's Roquentin experiences the radical absence of such possibility. He sees through the comfortable illusions of meaning we normally use to domesticate raw existence, sweeping the bloody teeth and nails under carpets. The chestnut tree isn't available for dialogue. It exists, absurdly, unnecessarily, purposelessly, in its absolute otherness.

This contrast between what a Buber tree might look like and Sartre's chestnut tree raises questions about the nature of meaning, relation, and existence itself that have fascinated me for many years. Sartre's chestnut tree confronts Roquentin in a world stripped of human meaning-making—a gratuitous "thereness" that is sickening. How am I any different from a chestnut tree? It's not so much that the tree is meaningless; rather, the tree’s existence in the park precedes and overwhelms any meaning we might try to impose. Trees are always already there. Existence as a condition is alien to our drive for meaning and purpose.

Buber's tree, by contrast, at least as I see it, opens to the possibility of genuine meeting precisely because Buber doesn't seek to reduce a tree to either existence or utility. Buber’s tree isn't just a collection of brute facts in existence (Sartre’s ominous Chestnut tree), but a presence in human existence that can be encountered in its fullness for what it is. Like the surgeon’s scalpel that could kill in the hands of the murderer, the meaning of Buber’s tree is contingent on the I-Thou relations in which it is planted. Buber’s tree grows inside us, not in a park. Buber doesn't deny its otherness. Rather, Buber suggests that otherness isn’t helpful to the human drive to be-with, not to be-alone. Otherness isn’t what humans need to thrive in this void.

What we typically frame as "objective" experience—the realm of measurement, categorization, and use—arises from a particular quality of engagement, not a separate sphere of reality. There is no objective or subjective apart from human meaning. Similarly, what we might call I-Thou describes not a special category of interaction but rather moments when we allow relation itself to teach us how to be present in human solidarity.

Consider a teacher using an AI writing assistant to help grade student essays. The "objective" aspect is the AI analyzing syntax, flagging errors, and generating rubric-based scores. But this technical application will come under Buber’s tree or Sartre’s tree, depending on what the teacher makes of the data. In an I-Thou relation, the humans are teacher and student, and the It—the scalpel, the shovel, baby monitor— is AI.

If the surgeon chose to attend to the surgery as a technical sequence of complex moves and nothing more, that surgeon would exclude the living I-Thou dialogue inherent in the case of a human being entrusting their life to a doctor. Such a surgeon would be like an engineer seeking a mechanical solution, blind to the sacred trust and human vulnerability at the heart of the healing relationship. The technical aspects of surgery, while crucial, must be integrated with an understanding of the patient as a whole person who has placed their wellbeing, hopes, and fears in the surgeon's hands. To reduce this profound human encounter to mere biomechanics is to miss the essence of medicine itself.

Similarly, if a teacher approaches AI-assisted grading as a sequence of automated checks fulfilling an instructional requirement, they miss the deeper being-with dialogue enhanced by AI. The AI's identification of a repeated grammatical error across papers might open a window into a students’ thought process. A teacher might use the AI's analysis while remaining open to what each student's writing reveals about their unique voice and development. The technology becomes not just a tool for measurement but part of a larger dialogue about growth and understanding. The same essay, the same AI tool, can be approached either as pure data for processing or as one thread in an ongoing conversation about learning.

Similarly, when students interact with AI tutoring systems they might engage purely instrumentally: input question → receive answer. Or they might discover moments where the interaction itself reveals something about their own thinking process. The same technical exchange can either remain at the level of utility or blossom into genuine human learning moments, learners joining the ongoing conversation about math or history or science. The key insight is that these aren't two separate types of interactions but different qualities of attention and presence coexisting.

A student struggling with geometry might use an AI visualization tool "objectively" to get through an assignment, but within that same interaction, moments of genuine mathematical insight and wonder can emerge. At first glance, this might appear instrumental. Input numbers, watch the circle change, record results. But consider two ways this same interaction might play out.

In one instance, the student mechanically adjusts values, treating the tool as a black box, a new-fangled calculator, that generates answers to plug into their worksheet. This student is so happy now with the bot because the amount of time wasted doing homework is less. Same student, same tool, different moment. They notice how doubling the radius more than doubles the area of a circle. They pause. "Wait, that's weird..." They play with the values again, this time with curiosity. The tool hasn't changed, but the nature and quality of attention has shifted. This student is simulating an I-Thou experience with a machine. One might argue that authentic learning is possible only in I-Thou relations. A genuine human-mathematical encounter happens.

This isn't about moving from an "I-It" technical interaction to an "I-Thou" moment of insight. The technical interaction is what it is. Rather, it reveals how the same technological engagement holds both possibilities simultaneously. The student's sudden recognition of the non-linear relationship isn't separate from their technical manipulation of the tool. It emerges through it, when their attention shifts from just completing steps to being present to what the mathematics is showing them.

This lens helps us see that implementing AI in education isn't about choosing between efficient processing and human connection, but about recognizing how efficient processing can amplify human connection—when learners engage with an I-Thou mindset. Technical competence and human meaning can interweave in each moment of learning. This distinction serves not to divide our experience, not to say one side is wrong, but to say both sides are right.

AI can be used in an I-It style primarily, a monitor to manage agricultural irrigation, a tool to predict the weather. But natural language capabilities have improved the tool’s adjustment features. We shape our ways of attending to AI and the possibility of human dialogue. The wisdom lies in recognizing that every AI-human nteraction holds both the necessity of structured engagement and the possibility of genuine meeting—not as separate modes but as an interweaving of aspects of algorithmic processing with the existential drive of being-with.

The richness of Buber's insight lies precisely in how attending itself becomes transformative without requiring a metaphysical leap. We don’t need to hyperventilate about AI possibly becoming human. We don’t need spiritual interventions. We need only what we already have. How we hold ourselves in relation shapes the possibility of what can emerge between us and our tools. It’s not about achieving special hyper human states. It’s about recognizing how presence unfolds through the natural grammar of human encounters using the best tools available.

When we fully grasp this, we see that structured engagement, what looks naively like taking advantage of a sophisticated answering machine, an 8 ball, isn't an obstacle to genuine meeting. On the contrary, AI can be the alt chestnut tree, brute roots and bark, through which deeper meaning can arise. Consider how a musician's technical mastery doesn't oppose but enables spontaneous expression, or how a deep friendship builds on, rather than transcends, the practical demands of shared life.

This interweaving manifests in most human educational exchanges: in teaching, where technical instruction and genuine pedagogical practice come together; in exploratory conversations, where social conventions and authentic presence are partners; in scientific observation, where rigorous methodology and and human curiosity coexist. The structure doesn't dissolve. The I-It exists under the umbrella of I-Thou.

The crux of it, then, isn't about escaping structure and mechanics (banning AI) for some purified or ideal realm of human relation, but about discovering how moments of structured engagement with AI already contain the seeds of genuine being-with others. Our task in integrating AI into classrooms isn't to achieve a special state with guard rails protecting learners from encounters with ugly chestnut trees, but to cultivate the kind of presence and attention that can recognize and respond to the real work of being-with our cohort of fellow humans as they naturally arise within the fabric of ordinary exchange.

BONUS FOR THOSE INTERESTED IN MATERIAL TO SPARK LOCAL DISCUSSIONS. PLEASE HELP ME ACHIEVE MY MISSION BY PUTTING THIS TEXT TO USE AS YOU CAN.

QUESTION SET FOR READER-BASED DISCUSSION:

1. Think of a specific instance where you observed or suspected a student using AI in your course. What behaviors or signs made you aware of this? What do you think was going through the student's mind in choosing to use AI in this way?

2. Describe a time when a student openly discussed their use of AI with you. What did they reveal about their reasoning, their process, or their feelings about using AI tools? What surprised you about their perspective?

3. The essay describes a student using an AI visualization tool who moves from mechanical use to genuine curiosity ("Wait, that's weird..."). Have you witnessed similar moments of transition in your students' engagement with AI? What seemed to trigger these shifts?

4. When your students resist using AI tools that you've incorporated into your course, what reasons do they give? Conversely, when they embrace these tools enthusiastically, what motivates their enthusiasm?

5. The essay suggests that the same AI tool can be used either superficially or meaningfully depending on the quality of attention brought to it. Think of a specific assignment where students used AI. What differences did you notice in how various students approached the same tool?

6. In your experience, how do students' attitudes toward AI differ between required uses (like an AI-powered homework system you've assigned) and voluntary uses (like ChatGPT for brainstorming)? What might these differences tell us about student motivation and learning?

7. The essay uses the metaphor of a surgeon maintaining both technical precision and human awareness. In your teaching, when have you observed students successfully balancing AI assistance with their own critical thinking and creativity? What enabled this balance?

QUESTION SET FOR TEXT-BASED DISCUSSION

1. The essay presents Sartre's nausea-inducing chestnut tree as revealing "the raw, contingent, overwhelming 'thereness' of being," while Buber's tree opens the possibility of "genuine meeting." Think about a time when you've encountered a new technology: Have you experienced both these types of moments—one where the technology felt alien and meaninglessly "there," and another where genuine connection emerged through it? What shifted between these experiences?

2. Looking closely at the text's description of the surgeon holding "awareness of the patient's full humanity" while performing technical procedures, how does this help us understand the difference between Buber's and Sartre's trees? Does this surgical metaphor change how you think about balancing technical and human elements in your teaching?

3. The essay suggests that Sartre's tree represents existence stripped of human meaning-making, while Buber's tree represents the possibility of genuine meeting "precisely because he doesn't try to reduce it to either pure existence or mere utility." As educators increasingly working with AI, how do we avoid both traps—neither reducing our teaching to pure utility by using AI to replicate skill-and-drill work (a high-class flash card machine) nor becoming overwhelmed by technology's alien presence? Where are you on this question? What specific strategies or approaches have you found helpful?