They are learning how to accomplish a lot more, a lot faster, with AI.
That's a valuable skill -- one of the most valuable skills that students can learn today.
It's not the only valuable skill they should learn, but it's certainly one of the most valuable.
Educators will have to adapt.
They are copy-pasting the assignment from Blackboard to ChatGPT and vice-versa. As the article points out, they usually aren't even reading the outputs to check that the essay doesn't suddenly start bloviating about Aristotle.
And no one needs to pay a college wage premium, or any wage, for that:
> He worries about the long-term consequences of passively allowing 18-year-olds to decide whether to actively engage with their assignments. Would it accelerate the widening soft-skills gap in the workplace? If students rely on AI for their education, what skills would they even bring to the workplace? Lakshya Jain, a computer-science lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, has been using those questions in an attempt to reason with his students. “If you’re handing in AI work,” he tells them, “you’re not actually anything different than a human assistant to an artificial-intelligence engine, and that makes you very easily replaceable. Why would anyone keep you around?” That’s not theoretical: The COO of a tech research firm recently asked Jain why he needed programmers any longer.
With the advent of new technology, humanity has no choice but to move up the value chain -- in this case, from executing tasks to judging, supervising, and curating AI work.
Which shows she's not learning from the AI or even improving on it. All she's doing is filling out the 'structure and initial content' - oh, is that all???
> The kid at Columbia has already launched two startups.
Which doesn't require learning anything much from the LLMs, as he did that on his own before them (note the Leetcode). Also, considering that the second one is fraudulent and if it works, exists largely to abet fraud, this is not a ringing endorsement.
> With the advent of new technology, humanity has no choice but to move up the value chain -- in this case, from executing tasks to judging, supervising, and curating AI work.
ChatGPT couldn't written that ending any better. (I will charitably assume it did not, unless you took the trouble to replace that emdash with a double hyphen just to be cute.) It could have written it about 1000x cheaper, however.
Believe it or not, I write all my comments the old-fashioned way -- without the help of any AI!
it's really fucking hard to find competent engineers.
i've interviewed about 20 cs majors who claim to be experts at typescript and only 3 of them have been able to explain what the purpose of useState is (not trolling).
If your assignment is "program X in assembly," and you just copy/paste the prompt into ChatGPT, you aren't learning assembly, you aren't learning important concepts relevant for low-level performance optimization, etc. etc. That was the point, not to produce X.
What would be useful is specific classes with assignments that are designed to be worked on with the assistance of AI. "AI-enabled SWE" etc. Lessons on how to effectively utilize it for research and learning. But those things aren't replacing learning the fundamentals, and probably can't unless AGI is achieved and actual knowledge is just economically irrelevant.
[1]: For a lot of undergrad assignments you can probably just copy/paste the description into ChatGPT, which I don't think qualifies as being difficult enough to merit "learning" how to do).
[2]: I guess this is "fine" if you're in the "AI will imminently replace all white-collar work" camp, but then its just dumb to be enrolled in college in the first place, unless maybe you're going for free.
[3]: In some sense, fully outsourcing your thinking to AI is the same as just paying someone to do your homework, which has always been possible but less accessible.
I'm not aware of any modern engineering profession that doesn't use electronic crutches regularly. Nobody knows absolutely everything in their heads. We're paid for critical thinking , not to have everything memorized just in case the internet is out. Even before the internet, SW devs had stacks of books on their desks they'd reffer to often.
Remember when IBM wanted to pay devs per line of code written? Yeah, exactly. I see the skills being problem solving, not writing code.