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Comment by onesociety2022 | Hacker News Reader

onesociety2022

If AI can do the work, maybe the test should be more focused on what AI can’t do? This is like anyone still doing a traditional coding interview with leetcode problems just because they haven’t yet done the work to figure out what to test for in a world where Claude Code exists.

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The goal of the educational process isn't the test paper, it's the learning.

Gyms aren't redundant because tractors exist.

Gyms are a great example actually because tractors exist to do the economically useful work. You now optionally go to the gym to benefit from fake labor that used to be the side effect of useful work. The fake labor is now what colleges are trying to sell, and it's going to kill them.

Gyms predate tractors.

3,000 years ago, physical labor was a component of most jobs. Today gyms are for people who can afford to attend them and don't have a day job that naturally exercises them through labor. People exercising purely for health benefits, and not because the strength benefits them in their job and in other facets of their life, is new.

Huh? The gym analogy doesn’t even make sense. People didn’t go to gyms when they were farming with oxen. Gyms are popular now precisely because tractors exist and you don’t need manual labor to farm anymore but people still need the physical exercise for their health. Society has adapted to the arrival of new life-changing technology. Our education system needs to adapt to new technology like AI too. You can probably uplevel a lot of courses and cover a lot more interesting topics than before and teach real application of things you learned aided by AI. Just like when I was doing a CS major 20 years ago, they didn’t spend too much time teaching me assembly programming beyond 1 or 2 lectures (they let me use a compiler for programming assignments!).

Gyms predate tractors by a couple of thousand years. You should think harder about the analogy.

There are plenty of things AI can do that students still benefit from learning.

Maybe instead of trying to teach around the abacus, we need to teach the higher level things you can reach with MATLAB.

We're doing these students a major disservice making them live in the old world. It's our fault for being inflexible, but their world is going to be wholly different and we should just embrace that.

This is like saying you shouldn't learn to add because we have calculators.

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