AI Will Demolish Education

Will AI destroy the world? Make humans into idiots?

Or will it destroy education as we know it?

That’s what Tyler Cowen is predicting at The Free Press. And the expert are horrified.

This state of affairs has set off a crisis among educators, parents, and students. There has been a flurry of recent stories capturing how the cheating is done, how hard it is to catch, and how it is wrecking a lot of our educational standards.

Oh please, says Cowen. Gag me with a spoon.

These models are such great cheating aids because they are also such great teachers. Often they are better than the human teachers we put before our kids, and they are far cheaper at that. They will not unionize or attend pro-Hamas protests. But in the meantime, the doomers are right about at least one thing: It will feel very painful.

Oh No! Anyway,

Lately I have been using the o3 model from OpenAI to give my PhD students comments on their papers and dissertations. I am sufficiently modest to notice that it gives keener, smarter, and more thorough suggestions than I do.

You mean that the Herr Professor is cheating?

It’s worse than that. Cowen says that he has proposed that “we devote one-third of the college curriculum to teaching students about AI and how to use it.” But there’s a problem. Right now, students seem to know more than their professors about AI.

The fact is that the old system of teaching and learning is kaput. Oh, it probably won’t collapse tomorrow, After all, today’s colleges serve a vital role as a dating service.

[Meanwhile] students will either skip college entirely, as increasing numbers of hyperdriven achievers do, or go for fun and do their real learning from AIs, groups of sharp peers, and inspirational mentor-professors.

Meanwhile, a young acquaintance of Cowen did not go to college but has picked up jobs as a software engineer using the “o3 model from OpenAI.”

[Y]ou could say he has a self-taught PhD in multitasking, programming, and of course using AI models.

Oh no! But whatabout the perfessors?

The most ambitious professors will learn how to use the AI models themselves, and give their students the exact same quality feedback the students will be able to get for themselves. The best among the professors will learn to be inspirational mentors, coaches, and networking connectors. They will very directly help their students get somewhere in the real world. Those are some skills the AIs cannot copy, at least not anytime soon.

Isn’t that what the role of professor was supposed to be doing all along?

OK, I admit it. I rather like the idea of the education system getting a punch in the solar plexus. I have never much liked or excelled at schooling. I started work in 1968 with a class in FORTRAN and then learned everything about the the computer world by doing. When I started my first website I went on line and picked up a PHP file with a “HELLO WORLD” program and went on from there to usgovernmentspending.com and christopherchantrill.com, learning by doing.

Guess what: that’s how humans do it.

But do you think I should make Grok write my blog entries in the future? It does seem a bit low rent, but hey, wave of the future, old chap. And if J.K. Rowling can snitch Anthony Horowitz’s idea from Groosham Grange who am I to turn up my nose at LLMing my writing?