Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

crookedtimber.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 92 posts

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#21

Post by brookst »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #13
GenerocUsername wrote: post #11

Books allowed us to store data indefinitely. However, they required lots of effort to read, understand and synthesize knowledge. This new generation of AI is going to remove the slow to synthesize part

It's a huge mistake. The point of life is the synthesis and growth through working through things. We are moving towards a completely meaningless but instant world.

If you get meaning from using slide rules and riding horses, computers and cars really do strip the world of meaning.

Many people find meaning from other things, like personal connections, that are removed from work that can be accelerated with tools.

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#22

Post by peteradio »

kristianc wrote: post #15
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge mistake. The point of life is the synthesis and growth through working through things. We are moving towards a completely meaningless but instant world.

In fairness, they’ve been saying this exact same thing since about 1800.

Perhaps we should give credit to what they were seeing then rather than remove credit to what we see today.

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#23

Post by brookst »

wyre wrote: post #19
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge mistake. The point of life is the synthesis and growth through working through things. We are moving towards a completely meaningless but instant world.

Meaning is ambiguous and finding it is intrinsic to the human condition. Meaning is getting harder to find, certainly, but it can still be found. What we are moving towards is a deterioration of fulfilling experiences as our social world is corroded by the modern internet.

I was fully expecting the last two words to be “printing press”.

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#24

Post by nkrisc »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #13
GenerocUsername wrote: post #11

Books allowed us to store data indefinitely. However, they required lots of effort to read, understand and synthesize knowledge. This new generation of AI is going to remove the slow to synthesize part

It's a huge mistake. The point of life is the synthesis and growth through working through things. We are moving towards a completely meaningless but instant world.

Don’t look now, but the world only ever had the meaning you gave it.

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#25

Post by distortionfield »

kristianc wrote: post #15
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge mistake. The point of life is the synthesis and growth through working through things. We are moving towards a completely meaningless but instant world.

In fairness, they’ve been saying this exact same thing since about 1800.

Even further back. Since at least the time of Greek philosophers.

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#27

Post by Der_Einzige »

Men are mass opting out of universities. Universities are seeing record low enrollment and it's only going to get worse.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-...

I predict the death of the university in our life times.

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#28

Post by sebzim4500 »

aogaili wrote: post #18

Most people can't think, but they can parrot and bullshit so ChatGPT is getting very close to the average human level intelligence...

In fact, when you view ChatGPT purely as a machine to parrot and bullshit then it is already superhuman. (Moreso with the parroting than the bullshitting)

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#29

Post by bordercases »

brookst wrote: post #21
ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a huge mistake. The point of life is the synthesis and growth through working through things. We are moving towards a completely meaningless but instant world.

If you get meaning from using slide rules and riding horses, computers and cars really do strip the world of meaning. Many people find meaning from other things, like personal connections, that are removed from work that can be accelerated with tools.

[dead]

Re: What ChatGPT reveals about the collapse of support for higher education

#30

Post by luma »

sampo wrote: post #3

> when I asked it who was “President in 2022,” it responded (inter alia) with “My training data only goes up until 2021, so I am not able to provide information about events that have not yet occurred.” > Notice that it goes off the rails in its answer because it wrote me that in 2023! This is not a mistake. If the bot is trained with data only up to 2021, then for the bot 2022 is in the future, no matter when you as…

The entire article is positively dripping with the sort of self-important puffery so often shown by academics. He's clearly looking for gotchas in a system that he absolutely doesn't understand and of course he also doesn't miss an opportunity to take a dig at educators in America and their sub-standard institutions.

Maybe a doctorate in PoliSci doesn't really translate to a deep understanding of AI. I'll take the author's opinions on technology with the same gravitas in which they might take my own political opinions.

Post reply on HN