Leaning into LLM's brain-smoothing process (please stop calling it AI, it's not intelligent) is just a final act of desperation by overpriced, outmoded forms of education. Hoping that the LLM monster eats higher education last if it plays along is a horrible idea.

Instead, they should be doubling down on teaching the socratic method, critical thinking and real curiosity - stuff that LLMs will never do. The schools that do this will thrive by swimming against this idiotic tide.

And let the Higher Education Darwin Awards begin! Shame that they'll drag so many students down with them, but apparently some learn only by experience, rather than foresight and putting 2+2 together.

Colleges Have Self-Lobotomize and we are already seeing the results.

People sometimes say that we'll be jobless when we're in our 40s. Putrid, old brains. Too set in our ways. Not in demand anymore.

Bollocks.

We'll be the last generation to actually possess any knowledge and critical thinking skills. More in demand than ever before.

The problem is that graduates who know how to research and reason and write will end up working at Starbucks. Short sighted employers are going to hire people who can cut costs by doing everything with AI, not people who want to take time doing it right. It will be a business disaster in the long run, but the CEOs don't care because they will get seven figure separation payouts.

But maybe down the line the smart people will get paid to clean up the mess. Like the good programmers who are now getting paid to

Critical thinking comes from experience. From learning over decades what good looks like, what good doesn't look like, and how to extrapolate your experience to a new subject.

If you never learn how to do anything well yourself, how are you supposed to gain that experience in the first place?

I mean, learning is effort. Paper and pencil can get you a long way specially on hard topics.

Even having a laptop pc can be detrimental because it's super easy to get distracted.

give you the ability to shed critical thinking skills. Just the opposite, you need to increase critical thinking to figure out when it's lying or not.

... was against writing. Because it would degrade the memory and reasoning skills of scholars who became dependent on it.

It's not the tools on the institutional end of the educational transaction that matter. Its what the students utilize to accomplish their end.

> ... creative thinking, critical analysis, the capacity to learn new things -- are precisely those that a growing body of research suggests may be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process ...

Those are also things those in charge - financial and political - don't want the masses to be good at. Those skills help people think for themselves. For the most part, the ruling classes want docile, dependent workers that just do and believe what they're told. Here's an interesting bit from Bernie Sanders [1]Bernie Sanders Reveals Why Billionaires Are Going Crazy Over AI [youtube.com]

> Sanders: AI is going to come. You don't have to do this job. You don't have to do that job. Really, really good. Do you think that is what Mr. Musk and Mr. Bezos have in mind? Do you think that's why they're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to say, "Hey, isn't this great? We can lower the work week. We can guarantee health care, high-quality health care to everybody. We can expand life expectancy. We can solve global warming. Man, let's go do it. That's what we want to do."

> Sanders: Do you think that's what these guys have in mind?

> Questioner: Probably not.

> Sanders: Probably not.

> ...

> Sanders: They are not staying up nights worrying about working people. In my view, they want even more wealth and they want even more power. So the struggle is not whether AI is good or bad. It's who controls it and who benefits from it.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hREm05u84gU&t=260s

So they'll spend a generation becoming diploma mills, turning out Associate Robot Minders.

At which point about the time folks internalize how worthless they are, we will have choked off the supply of new professors.

Then the robot owners own both history and education.

Between COVID brain issues and now Ay-Eye dumbing down, the human race is gonna be mighty different going forward.

Hey, maybe this is how the Morlocks and Eloi came about!

When people discover that a whole class of incoming folks can't find their way to anything where the path isn't a straight line, we might see a surge in reverse ageism.

Back when I was in school, a number of students thought that they could use CliffsNotes in lieu of studying the actual material as a shortcut when handing in papers. Problem was that CliffsNotes overly summarized material, so your papers tended to be shallow or generic, which clued most teachers into your activities. I recall a few teachers keeping students after class and then pelting them with questions about the material that weren't covered by the CliffsNotes. If they stumbled, they were given a failing grade for the paper.

I see AI in much the same way. It is okay at providing generalized summaries for well covered topics, but I find that it quickly goes off into the weeds for anything more niche, complicated, or requiring nuance. More often, I find myself mining the responses for their sources. But I can often find the same sources much faster using a web search. So, what is the benefit here again?

How can you trust a source when their are posting such a polarizing headlines? This is what drives me crazy with any news source, this shows it as an opinion piece rather than news.

It's ok to blame the Universities for preparing to self lobotomize, but students are also to blame. You have personal accountability, and if you decide to turn off your brain and live on autopilot, you won't succeed in the real world regardless of AI. I would argue social media and smartphones ruined a generation of kids, and AI will just add to this problem. It's hard for young people not to give into these tempting shortcuts, but unfortunately legal guardians will need to do a better job protecting thei

Is right wing governments directly interfering with colleges for political reasons.

Critical thinking and right-wing politics do not mix. The core fundamentals of right wing politics are trickle down economics and a blind faith in authority. Hierarchy basically. The idea that there is a natural order with some people at the top, some people in the middle and some people in the bottom.

I can see why this theology would be appealing to some people. It implies that there is an order to the universe and that you have a place in that order. Although I never seem to meet any right wingers who believe their place is at the bottom..

The problem is that in the real world it doesn't work. Trickle down economics is pretty obviously bad news. But granting absolute power to a handful of individuals is equally bad. You would think people who grew up being told about checks and balances would understand that but well, here we are. We still lionize Kings.

Because of that it is absolutely essential that anyone who wants to climb the ranks in the right wing undermines public education. You can't have people getting well educated because they're going to start asking the kind of questions well educated people do. Like, why is America bombing boats in Venezuela or why does the United Kingdom use child protection laws to go after pro Palestinian groups... Oops I just triggered somebody.

I have conversations with bots about topics I'm curious about or have trouble with frequently. I've never allowed it to write for me, because my writing is better. People don't learn when they use AI because they didn't want to learn that shit in the first place. They are going through school because they live in a system that requires credentials to even plausibly pretend they can achieve a stable livelihood. They're giving that the effort it deserves. Good. Hope it all burns to the ground.

Back in the days the excitement around the atom bomb was huge, and the public perceive a newness of atomic technology and radioactivity. So we had not just radium on our wrist watches, but people also adding uranium, polonium, and thorium to products. With Firestone spark plugs, and Tho-Radia face cream being examples of the latter.

AI hype is the same thing. We're going to allow a lot of dangerous stuff enter into our society and when a bunch of people get hurt, we'll back off. But we can expect a lost gene

I have taught C++ and other computer science classes at a community college for the past 9 years. I started out only using paper exams, and students had to print their code for homeworks and projects. Then during the pandemic we moved online, and other than a couple of semesters, my classes have stayed online. Virtually all of the community college CS courses, for the entire state system, are online. I lecture virtually instead of in person and all assignments and exams are done through Blackboard.

Now with AI, I cannot distinguish between what a student wrote vs what AI wrote. It's absolutely impossible to tell the difference. Before AI, I could often tell when someone got help (if you submit code that doesn't match your skill level on the exams) or copied someone else's assignment (if you hand in the same code with the variable names changed...). Again, now I can't tell at all.

At the community college level, the deans are stuck with a problem: fewer students are enrolling, and those students want to learn about AI because they see it as the next job skill you need to have. At the state university level, the CS dept has gone the other direction: exams are on paper and homework is now 5% of the final grade instead of 50%

I tell my students at the beginning of the semester "You are paying tuition to learn the material in the course. Using AI to do your classwork is like going to the gym and having a robot lift the weights for you. Don't use AI"

When I was a computer science and engineering undergrad 25 years ago, there was talk of creating a licensing process for software engineers, similar to civil engineers. It was a terrific idea and I hope it got traction. But AI has turned software engineering into a mess. Software is every bit as critical to the safety of humans as civil engineering, but you would never trust AI to create buildings. The software engineering students of today are absolutely ill-equipped to write the vital software that is used today.

[1]https://bgsp.edu/app/uploads/2... [bgsp.edu]

[1] https://bgsp.edu/app/uploads/2014/12/Carr-N-Is-Google-Making-Us-Stupid-The-Atlantic.pdf

The article says "it would integrate AI education into every undergraduate program, and the University of Florida and the University of Michigan are rolling out similar initiatives", then people go on to make all kinds of assumptions about what it means to educate about AI, and then make assumptions - such as the Institution is Turning Over All Teaching and Content To AI! - about what that will mean for these programs and students.

When, in reality, this is not what UF, UM, etc. are doing when they say "in

The computer is perfect and can do no wrong. Beep.

There is no evidence that using AI to teach has any effect on the students cognition much less that the effect is negative. The argument that students produce poorer results using AI will resolve itself if true when those students get lower grades. What's interesting is no one seems to be trying to persuade students of that. Probably because it isn't true. Instead they try to punish it as cheating because it gives the student an advantage.