And for the good reason. I have yet to see 1 (one) reason how giving infinite cheat machine to students is of any benefit to them.
The secret to mastery remained unchanged for a thousand years: books, lectures and homework. All of this can be done with pen and paper level of technology.
Which is why the real answer to this is actually an older paradigm: apprenticeship.
Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit.
It was companies themselves who created this issue anyways, by demanding degrees for every damn job, regardless of whether a degree could prepare you in the first place, and slashing entry level jobs to almost nothing. Then they started using degrees as a proxy for work experience (and I mean that in the literal sense; "bachelor or 4 years of experience" is common to see in job reqs, despite no bachelor degree actually being equivalent to 4 years of full-time job experience), which just further pushed incoming students to expect that to be the purpose of their time at University.
> Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit.
This would be great of course, but the reason that 'what actually happens' is so different than 'what should happen' are the usual economic incentives. How can we change the financial calculations to separate formal education from job training in a way that drives the ship in the better direction.
One way could be to regulate degree requirements to only jobs that really require them like engineering, nursing, etc. Another might be allow student loan bankruptcy if certain criteria are met such such as x number of years below y income.
We (meaning the US) won't ever fix this ourselves, because we systematically refuse to hold businesses to any kind of standards.
Make it illegal to discriminate based on degree status in hiring (it's not like anyone is hiring an SWE without doing technical interviews anyways, so if you prove out their skills why does the paper matter?), and you remove both the backdoor socioeconomic discrimination route (which is itself a backdoor route to discriminate against protected attributes), and solve the degree 'inflation' incentive.
Yes, but that's not something universities can solve.
Universities predate capitalism (despite the author's absurd assertion that they were founded to serve the interests of businesses), and will exist after it, if any humans survive it.
It does scale even better than anything else. Majority of students are just not very good at it. And proving that they have learned sufficiently is hard. Thus schools and universities.
I sense a certain contradiction? If majority of students are just not very good at self-studying methods, then they don't scale well.
Mediocre student that sits through lectures, does the homework and submits assignment on due dates will get a good level of mastery in the subject. The very same student would be totally lost relying only on self-studying - he would not even know what he doesn't know.
It is in sense contradiction. Schools and universities are greatly limited by facilities and teachers. Self studying is not. Thus with modern technology or even with just mass printin you could theoretically educate as many students as you want. In that sense I do say it scales much better.
I fully admit that for efficient time spend and production of sufficiently educated students it is not effective method.
The definition of mastery in your comment sounds like nonreliance on technology to accomplish [something]. Technologyless Mastery was a natural result from: reliance and overreliance on technology being stuttery, unpredictable, inadventitious and costly.
In other words, it made more sense to 'frontload' hardthought and pondering so one was prepared [for whatever may come].
People also thought aqueducts were the best way to move water for thousands of years.
> People also thought aqueducts were the best way to move water for thousands of years.
They still do because they still are? I'm hard pressed to think of a better way to move water than creating a gently sloped channel(this includes any pipelines that don't use pumps, by the way) for it to follow from where it is to where you need it. Many places that don't have sufficient local groundwater are still supplied by aqueducts to this day. If you have to pump it, then you're paying for the channel and the energy, which is worse than just using gravity.
I live someplace with abundant groundwater so my water comes from a well less than a mile away. But millions of people have aqueducts leading to their city providing a significant portion of their water supply.
I'm fairly certain that you do in fact have a duct that moves aqua (water) into your house, bro.
And gravity-feed systems are the best way to move large amounts of water. That's even how nature works, and nature moves much more water than humans do.
You miss the point entirely little bro. Modern water-moving infrastructure is qualitatively different than two thousand years ago. Why would modern education be exempt from a similar transformation?
I can teach symbolic math effectively using clay tablet and reed pen today.
Numerical methods, however, would require at least minimal computing hardware.
I think there should be a guiding principle of using the least amount of tech in teaching any subject, just like principle of least privilege in cybersecurity.
You hit on the head something that I've been trying to put into words for a while now: it seems that the benefit of technology to increase learning appears to be a bell-shaped graph where for each combination of subject matter there is a sweet spot where the level of technological assistance becomes helpful but after which it replaces too much of your own internal neuron-connecting processes and inhibits learning.
That's a strong observation. And I'm wondering if humans will adapt; or if the intensity of "heat and light" required to "weld" connections together is non-negotiable.
A home can also be built of mud bricks and heated by dung.
The issue you’re describing is a mindset/cultural one, not a technological one.
The same cheating machine can be used as a tutor. Those same cheating students understand, that at the gym, they themselves have to lift the weights to get strong, but that mindset doesn’t carry over to their classes.
LLMs are like anabolic steroids for the brain. Surely you can do more with them, but you are better without them. Access to them should be restricted, especially for untrained minds.
As all the cheating comments are referencing, the students don't necessarily want to get strong (that is a lot of work), but to get the qualification which unlocks the good jobs.
We haven't yet got to the downstream question of what white collar jobs are going to look like in the AI era.
To go with the gym analogy, thus far it would seem that using AI to help study seems to be working out about as well as the Enhanced Games did.
Before we get ahead of ourselves and hype up AI as a tool for making people smarter, let’s first demonstrate that AI really does help them learn better. Otherwise we risk wasting a lot of time and money on silicon snake oil.
I don’t think the comparison is fair, consider the incentives for the Enhanced Games. Once an athletic declared their taking banned substances, they are barred from every other competition, so it’s no surprise that “clean” athletes dominate.
As for proof, I think it’s self evident for anyone who has tried to us it in that way.
If you’re studying math ask it to generate more questions for you to try. If you don’t understand a concept, have it use the Socratic method on you. Learning a language, talk back and forth with it over voice. Writing an essay, have it mark and proofread it and provide feedback based on known good criteria.
The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean.
Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious.
And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes.
A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/
This is the most profound comment I’ve ever read on this website. How do we do push the culture in a direction such that productive intellectual pursuits will actually be intrinsically desirable in the AI era?
The secret to mastery remained unchanged for a thousand years: books, lectures and homework. All of this can be done with pen and paper level of technology.