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Universities would prefer no AI

hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com

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Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#51

Post by summarybot »

goda90 wrote: post #43
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…

> 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 aqu…

And how many aqueducts lead to your dwelling today?

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#52

Post by jschveibinz »

The problem can be fixed: adjust or realign the business model and incentives around the needs of the stakeholders.

- Students want a credential because business and society demands a credential

- Universities want income to support their missions of research, education and other "motives"

- Professors want to do research, and they don't really want to teach (in general)

- AI is a resource for learning, assessment and project development

- Society needs educated people

What ideas do you have to make everyone satisfied and maximally functional?

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#53

Post by Ekaros »

d_silin wrote: post #48
Ekaros wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is in sense contradiction. Schools and universities are greatly limited by facilities and teachers. Self studying is not. Thus with modern technology or even with just mass printin you could theoretically educate as many students as you want. In that sense I do say it scales much better.

I fully admit that for efficient time spend and production of sufficiently educated students it is not effective method.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#54

Post by summarybot »

nocoolnametom wrote: post #49
d_silin wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a strong observation. And I'm wondering if humans will adapt; or if the intensity of "heat and light" required to "weld" connections together is non-negotiable.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#55

Post by sajithdilshan »

crote wrote: post #47
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 diff…

> Yeah, they should indeed be teaching proper AI use as well

That's all I'm saying. If a student wants to cheat then they are going to do it regardless if AI exists or not. That's not something anyone can control. It's a decision made by the student and they would face the consequences down the line in their life.

However, if the proper usage of AI tools are taught in university and and the usage is allowed, any student that actually wants to learn, that would be a gold mine. I wish we had AI when I was in college. Being a visual learner, that would have made my life so much easier to understand complex concepts and algorithms with nice animations and diagrams generated with AI.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#56

Post by jmaw »

black_knight wrote: post #37

Lots of people talk about cheating here. That is not the framing I put in my mind. Or rather, if the students are cheating anyone it's themselves. LLMs exist and are extremely useful in academia. I am currently riding a productivity wave, where I can spit out formalised proofs – not quite at the pace at which I can think of the theorems to prove, but almost. The thing braking my progress is that I have to build all t…

Yes, totally agree that they are primarily directly cheating themselves.

But it also indirectly cheats their peers who are being surpassed by the cheating students (at least in school). Similarly for cheating in interviews.

Unfortunately the cheating students can cause a race to the bottom where the non-cheating students are pressured to cheat in order to keep up. This pressure to cheat to keep up can become an even bigger issue if teachers try to make tests longer or harder, whether to challenge the cheaters, or if the teachers don't recognize that LLMs are being used.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#58

Post by ang_cire »

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.

Which is why the real answer to this is actually an older paradigm: apprenticeship.

Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit.

It was companies themselves who created this issue anyways, by demanding degrees for every damn job, regardless of whether a degree could prepare you in the first place, and slashing entry level jobs to almost nothing. Then they started using degrees as a proxy for work experience (and I mean that in the literal sense; "bachelor or 4 years of experience" is common to see in job reqs, despite no bachelor degree actually being equivalent to 4 years of full-time job experience), which just further pushed incoming students to expect that to be the purpose of their time at University.

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#59

Post by bunderbunder »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #35
bunderbunder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To go with the gym analogy, thus far it would seem that using AI to help study seems to be working out about as well as the Enhanced Games did. Before we get ahead of ourselves and hype up AI as a tool for making people smarter, let’s first demonstrate that AI really does help them learn better. Otherwise we risk wasting a lot of time and money on silicon snake oil.

I don’t think the comparison is fair, consider the incentives for the Enhanced Games. Once an athletic declared their taking banned substances, they are barred from every other competition, so it’s no surprise that “clean” athletes dominate. As for proof, I think it’s self evident for anyone who has tried to us it in that way. If you’re studying math ask it to generate more questions for you to try. If you don’t unde…

The thing that really made the Enganced Games à debacle isn’t that the participants failed to beat top clean athletes. It’s that they failed to beat their own performance from when they were still clean.

Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious.

And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes.

A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/

Re: Universities would prefer no AI

#60

Post by d_silin »

ang_cire wrote: post #58
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.

Which is why the real answer to this is actually an older paradigm: apprenticeship. Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit. It was companies themselves who created this issue anyways, by demanding degrees for every damn job, regardless of whether a degree could prepare you in the first place, an…

That's a cost, though. And in today's world, companies rather burn millions on AI than train their own labour.
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