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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

Teachers are also heavy users of AI. Entire academic business staff is using AI.

The goals of academic assessment need to change. What are they assessing and why? Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans. Just like the school kids are now allowed to use calculators in the exam halls.

The academic industry need to redefine their purpose. Identify the human abilities that are needed for the future that is filled with AI and devices. Teach that and assess that.

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A calculator is more consistent and faster at calculating than I am, but I still need to understand how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract before I can move on to more complicated math. I need to intuitively understand when I'm getting a garbage result because I did an operation wrong, moved a decimal place by accident, or other problem.

Memorization has a place, and is a requirement for having a large enough knowledge base that you can start synthesizing from different sources and determining when one source is saying something that is contradicted by what should be common knowledge.

Unless your vision of the future is the humans in WALL-E sitting in chairs while watching screens without ever producing anything, you should care about education.

> A calculator is more consistent and faster at calculating than I am, but I still need to understand how to multiply, divide, add, and subtract..

Exactly. If the calculator knows what to do and how to do, you just need to be able to specify a high level goal, instead of worrying about whether to add or multiply.

I need to be able to tell when it's garbage in garbage out and I can't do that when I don't understand the operations in question.

Teaching is about moving our knowledge (the stuff we’ve collectively learned ourselves, from others and our parents [instead of everyone needing to find out on their own]) to the next generation. While some skills may become obsolete in some parts of professional life due to AI, the purpose of academia does not change much.

> the purpose of academia does not change much.

The purpose did change a lot. During Greeks time, purpose was pure knowledge or geometer skills. Industrial revolution and office work changed the purpose of the education to produce clerical staff. With AI, the purpose changes again. You need skills in using the AI and devices.

> "Knowledge retention skills? Knowledge correlations or knowledge expression skills? None of these going to be useful or required from humans."

I'm fascinated by these claims from some LLM advocates that people will no longer need to know things, think, or express themselves properly. What value then will such individuals bring to the table to justify their pay? Will they be like Sigourney Weaver's character in Galaxy Quest whose sole function was to repeat what the computer says verbatim? Will they be like Tom Smykowski in Office Space indignantly saying "I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that?!" Somebody, please explain.

[EDIT] The other funny aspect about these claims is, given that such an individual's skills are mainly in using an AI, that they can simply be outspent by their peers on AI usage. "Wally got the job instead of me because he paid for a premium LLM to massage his application and I could only afford the basic one because I'm short on money."

> What value then will they bring to the table to justify their pay?

They are skillful in shepherding a population of AI agents towards goals.

Merely that? A trivial skill that the well educated will do far better than those who are not?

Teachers are also heavy users of solution books, but would not give them to students for this reason.

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