By Mark MacInnes
Los Alamos
By Socrates, in the fifth century BC, engaged Athens’ young intellectuals in the agora, the public square, with provocative ‘little questions’ like: ‘What is truth?’ When questioned in this manner, some influential critics, including city leaders, were distressed by the rhetoric, which ultimately led to Socrates’s trial and execution. He died defending the principle of free inquiry into any idea, regardless of how sacred it may seem.
Plato, one of Socrates’ students, preserved some of Socrates’ dialogues not because they reached conclusions about profound questions, but because he valued the ‘state of mind’ they produced. The Socratic dialogues offered riveting debate and often fiery public protests, but his little questions were catalysts beyond public theater. Socratic questions became sparks for powerful dialogues: Socrates’ lifelong pursuit of ‘fundamental truths’. Prof. Ward Farnsworth recently wrote in The Socratic Method, ‘Internal [Socratic] dialog rearranges one’s relationship to your opinions!’ This op-ed proposes simple methods for engaging in mini-Socratic dialogues (virtually) on any subject, with the goal of fostering deeper thinking.
A groundbreaking new technology: large language AI models offer what appears to be super-sized ‘intelligence’. Are they becoming the ultimate Oracles, echoing back to Socrates’ era? A person can ask anything of AI, and its fluent answers create an illusion of truth-telling rather than genuine understanding. No thinking required. This digital Oracle can certainly hold back thought, but at their core, LLMs offer an entirely new form of reasoning: the digital agora (a virtual dialog).
In a virtual dialogue with AI, teachers can explore a range of engaging topics and develop one or more of them with their AI interlocutor. They can ask the AI to generate possible student activities for Socratic dialog and develop realistic scenarios from the AI’s provisional answers. Teachers can now create AI-augmented classroom activities on any subject while remaining aligned with the academic curriculum. Recently, I have enjoyed using AI to explore the origins of the American Revolution, as I was not ‘taught it’ in Middle School: I was living in Canada at the time. What I did learn above the border was a distinctly British/Canadian perspective on the ‘foment’ below the border.
Fast forward to 2026: an American history class is celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. To augment the curriculum materials, the teacher uses his personal AI create engaging, puzzling, and provocative ‘spark stories’ about the many causes of the American Revolution. We might call one example: ‘Tea with a Bitter Twist’.
Briefly, the story depicts two colonial economies in 1773. The colonists loved their ‘English’ tea. Enterprising tea merchants also supported an illicit black-market tea trade, with Dutch free traders who undercut the Crown’s tea prices (after taxes and tariffs) by 2 to 3 times, thereby more than offsetting the costs and risks of smuggling. This black market was rampant in Britain as well! The British ‘Tea Act of 1773’, a colony-targeted measure, subsidized the dumping of excess tea from the British East India Company, imported directly to loyalist merchants. The revamped British monopoly cleverly threatened to crush the tea smugglers. What happened next?
The students are assigned to read a more in-depth Spark Story and answer one or two questions, with examples: What surprising results did this teapot trade war produce? Do high import tariffs or monopolies always produce black markets? The students’ answers require three Socratic mini-dialog steps: 1. A claim about the question, 2. The most interesting reason chosen from several, for making this claim, and 3. What further evidence might modify this claim (reflection)?
The magic happens when the teacher (and his AI) sort through the anonymous student answers, a few of which are discussed in class over the next day or two. Students are encouraged to use an AI chatbot to further develop their own mini-Socratic dialogues. As they reflect on their virtual dialogues, a few students might find further research on this and other sparks of the Revolutionary War rewarding.
Teachers and students in Los Alamos, please relate your educational AI-augmented explorations and experiences. The Daily Post would love to hear from you! “We’re keenest when we work on a question, not after it is answered,” is an apt quote from ‘The Socratic Method,’ 2021, by Ward Farnsworth, Godine.
I acknowledge the use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-5, which I prompted for many spark stories examined during research for this Op-Ed. The writing and any mistakes are my own.
Editor’s note: Mark MacInnes writes about AI and society. This is his second Op-Ed published in the Los Alamos Daily Post on the subject. He is retired from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.