I do not believe Chinese universities teach their students how to think. I'm willing to hear otherwise, but that's the general impression I have based on what I hear.

> Let's create institutions designed to develop the minds of young adults and teach them how to think and then turn around and use a technology that does just the opposite. This ranks up there with people who try to gamble their way out of debt or who tell themselves they'll only smoke a little bit of crack.

China is just doing the same thing the west is doing. We currently have the "leadership", which consists of business leaders and government, convincing the entire school system that the best thing we can do is have teachers use AI to develop lesson plans, students use AI to complete their assignments, and teachers use AI to grade those assignments. Why? Because the leaders want AI to take over what schools in the west have been used to prepare students for for the last few generations: a life as a cog in th

Is the only real problem with crack its prohibition?

These are not the schools where the children of the party leadership go. So learning how to implement other people's idea are all these people really need to know.

The school's where the party leadership's children go will continue to teach how to learn and come up with new ideas. The latter a skill "commoners" do not need.

You're right that it is probably akin to wanting folks to know how to do math while knowing how to use a calculator to do math as well.

Reasonable people understand that AI is a very powerful tool for a wide number of tasks that will substantially improve personal productivity. Reasonable people also know it's not taking anyone's job any time soon.

Reasonable people are not driving any of the conversations around AI right now.

> Are there any more important skills for someone university-aged, than AI leverage and AI literacy, in terms of influence on their future productivity?

Productivity is worse than worthless if it results in more work having to be done later because the work is garbage, and that's what using AI without knowing enough to evaluate its output causes. So yes, there are more important skills, and they include actually knowing things. If you blindly trust AI the highest level you can achieve is "fuckup".

> If used to augment human thinking, rather than replace it, AI is a colossally effective tool.

So you answered your own question, knowing how to think is more important. But then you failed to think before writing the rest of the comment, which shows us you

The thing is the LLMs don't really demand a great deal of 'literacy', so it's a bit silly to devote a lot of cycles to teaching literacy. It's kind of like back in the day when you had a whole course devoted to learning Microsoft Word, that was ridiculous.

One of the biggest areas for getting used to LLMs is also one that academic settings are the least well equipped to handle. How incorrect results manifest. Academic fodder tends to play to LLMs strengths, and trying to find counter-examples to illustrate

First you need to learn enough to understand if what the AI generated is correct or not. Which means you still need to know everything we learned.

AI is the new wikipedia. It may be great as a starting point but anyone relying simply on that source shouldn't be taken seriously.

I've seen some cool things produced by AI, including helping put some data into a user friendly format. However unless I can verify the calculations myself I would never ever pass it off as a legitimate analysis.

I think AI can replace the old google search for "how can I make X do Y" but I don't trust it to go beyond that.

What happens when AI teaches Chinese students that democracy is better than the CCP?

Part of the issue, though, is that unlike 'being good at using a calculator or computer' the LLMs are increasing in usability rapidly enough that the skills won't be useful e.g. being good at prompt engineering will be like being good with a nailgun but then it turns out everyone is 3d printing houses instead of using nailguns or hammers.

> AI clearly has its flaws, but they aren't going to prevent its adoption. China is preparing tor that future.

indeed. ai is a tool, and a quite disruptive at that, but the cat is already out of the bag and all considering that's probably a good thing. learning to master it and use it well is crucial. it all depends on how well one goes about that.

> We are in denial because it is a threat to the power of the current elite.

that's interesting. the western post-post-colonial elite is indeed facing serious threats to their current dominance (which explains most of current instability and weirdness) but those are mostly self-inflicted and have been growing for a while, long before llm were inven

> AI clearly has its flaws, but they aren't going to prevent its adoption.

That is what is commonly known as a "guess". There has been tons of tech that was somewhat usable, but its border conditions made it die or go niche. And there is even mainstream hype tech that did it now several times. VR, flying cars, home-robots, etc, just to name a few.

Well, they elected themselves an emperor and now they are degrading their educational system. I guess this is not going to be the "Chinese Century". As the "American Century" is clearly over, things might get interesting.