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

Universities would prefer no AI

hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 82 posts

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#41

Post by d_silin »

zurfer wrote: post #36
d_silin wrote: post #7

And for the good reason. I have yet to see 1 (one) reason how giving infinite cheat machine to students is of any benefit to them. The secret to mastery remained unchanged for a thousand years: books, lectures and homework. All of this can be done with pen and paper level of technology.

Zooming out you see that books, pen and paper are all technology. Like even school and language is technology. Given that AI exist maybe we can roll back some of the school/university and just let people do the work and learn while doing? Yes not for a 7yo but with 18 you could just work and learn what is required or what you find exciting.

Self-directed studying doesn't scale. To produce thousands of new graduates per year you need industrial-scale methods - schools and colleges.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#42

Post by pjc50 »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #12
d_silin wrote: post #7

And for the good reason. I have yet to see 1 (one) reason how giving infinite cheat machine to students is of any benefit to them. The secret to mastery remained unchanged for a thousand years: books, lectures and homework. All of this can be done with pen and paper level of technology.

A home can also be built of mud bricks and heated by dung. The issue you’re describing is a mindset/cultural one, not a technological one. The same cheating machine can be used as a tutor. Those same cheating students understand, that at the gym, they themselves have to lift the weights to get strong, but that mindset doesn’t carry over to their classes.

As all the cheating comments are referencing, the students don't necessarily want to get strong (that is a lot of work), but to get the qualification which unlocks the good jobs.

We haven't yet got to the downstream question of what white collar jobs are going to look like in the AI era.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#43

Post by goda90 »

summarybot wrote: post #27
d_silin wrote: post #7

And for the good reason. I have yet to see 1 (one) reason how giving infinite cheat machine to students is of any benefit to them. The secret to mastery remained unchanged for a thousand years: books, lectures and homework. All of this can be done with pen and paper level of technology.

The definition of mastery in your comment sounds like nonreliance on technology to accomplish [something]. Technologyless Mastery was a natural result from: reliance and overreliance on technology being stuttery, unpredictable, inadventitious and costly. In other words, it made more sense to 'frontload' hardthought and pondering so one was prepared [for whatever may come]. People also thought aqueducts were the best…

> People also thought aqueducts were the best way to move water for thousands of years.

They still do because they still are? I'm hard pressed to think of a better way to move water than creating a gently sloped channel(this includes any pipelines that don't use pumps, by the way) for it to follow from where it is to where you need it. Many places that don't have sufficient local groundwater are still supplied by aqueducts to this day. If you have to pump it, then you're paying for the channel and the energy, which is worse than just using gravity.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#45

Post by empressplay »

The issue is more one of current passive, abstract forms of assessment. This is laziness on the part of instructors. They will simply have to move to more complex, project-based assessments and accompanying interviews, which is more time consuming but will be far more accurate than the more traditional system of assessment was anyway. On sum it will be better for everyone.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#46

Post by Ekaros »

d_silin wrote: post #41
zurfer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zooming out you see that books, pen and paper are all technology. Like even school and language is technology. Given that AI exist maybe we can roll back some of the school/university and just let people do the work and learn while doing? Yes not for a 7yo but with 18 you could just work and learn what is required or what you find exciting.

Self-directed studying doesn't scale. To produce thousands of new graduates per year you need industrial-scale methods - schools and colleges.

It does scale even better than anything else. Majority of students are just not very good at it. And proving that they have learned sufficiently is hard. Thus schools and universities.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#47

Post by crote »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #13

The primary use case of universities are to produce a generation that can contribute to the society in a meaningful and positive manner. Nowadays in-order to do that, AI literacy is a must for graduates just like it was 15 years ago when it was a must to have computer literacy. AI is a tool like internet was and it's the responsibility of the curriculum to teach proper usage of that tool rather than fighting against…

We still teach primary school children how to do addition, despite the fact that during their working life they'll have access to a calculator virtually all of the time. A decade ago posting your CS assignment on StackOverflow and handing in the top answer was considered cheating, despite professional software developers doing pretty much that any time they ran into something unusually tricky. Why teach students differentiation when they can just put "derivative of x^2" in WolframAlpha?

Universities are supposed to primarily teach understanding, not basic tool use. Yes, tool use should be part of your education as well, but that's only a small fraction of it. A single "prompting AI to do X" course is probably more than enough. But if you completely skip the fundamentals and make the students fully dependent on the tools, how could they possibly contribute to building the next generation of tools, verify the output of the tools, or transcend the tools?

Yeah, they should indeed be teaching proper AI use as well, but in practice the easy access to AI is making it virtually impossible to teach the fundamentals, and that's the real problem here.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#48

Post by d_silin »

Ekaros wrote: post #46
d_silin wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-directed studying doesn't scale. To produce thousands of new graduates per year you need industrial-scale methods - schools and colleges.

It does scale even better than anything else. Majority of students are just not very good at it. And proving that they have learned sufficiently is hard. Thus schools and universities.

I sense a certain contradiction? If majority of students are just not very good at self-studying methods, then they don't scale well.

Mediocre student that sits through lectures, does the homework and submits assignment on due dates will get a good level of mastery in the subject. The very same student would be totally lost relying only on self-studying - he would not even know what he doesn't know.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#49

Post by nocoolnametom »

d_silin wrote: post #33
summarybot wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The definition of mastery in your comment sounds like nonreliance on technology to accomplish [something]. Technologyless Mastery was a natural result from: reliance and overreliance on technology being stuttery, unpredictable, inadventitious and costly. In other words, it made more sense to 'frontload' hardthought and pondering so one was prepared [for whatever may come]. People also thought aqueducts were the best…

I can teach symbolic math effectively using clay tablet and reed pen today . Numerical methods, however, would require at least minimal computing hardware. I think there should be a guiding principle of using the least amount of tech in teaching any subject, just like principle of least privilege in cybersecurity.

You hit on the head something that I've been trying to put into words for a while now: it seems that the benefit of technology to increase learning appears to be a bell-shaped graph where for each combination of subject matter there is a sweet spot where the level of technological assistance becomes helpful but after which it replaces too much of your own internal neuron-connecting processes and inhibits learning.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#50

Post by jasperry »

sajithdilshan wrote: post #13

The primary use case of universities are to produce a generation that can contribute to the society in a meaningful and positive manner. Nowadays in-order to do that, AI literacy is a must for graduates just like it was 15 years ago when it was a must to have computer literacy. AI is a tool like internet was and it's the responsibility of the curriculum to teach proper usage of that tool rather than fighting against…

The analogies to prior technologies aren't insightful. The advent of LLMs has some similarities to the appearance of the internet, and very significant differences. Calling it a "tool" is also far too reductive. What kind of tool that existed before just writes everything for you? Is that the same kind of tool as a nailgun or a text editor? The "proper usage" that has to be learned is to learn to think for yourself before you get used to the word-bot doing all the thinking for you.
Post reply on HN