AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
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AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
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Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#2It seems that the UK government is all in with ai in the class room.
here is a UK .gov study of 21 schools, colleges, academies, universites and technical colleges who have adopted ai.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-in-schools-and...
The majority of education providers have yet to adopt AI. Further research with those yet to adopt AI, and/or who are not considering using it, would help us understand better the barriers to more widespread use of AI across different types and phases of education.
For example, the assistant headteacher of one school said the top categories their teachers used in their AI tool were ‘help me write’, ‘slideshow’, ‘model a text’, ‘adapt a text’, ‘lesson plan’ and ‘resource generation’.
Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#3The situation in higher education at the moment does seem pretty dire. However, I do have some hope that a new system could emerge from this which would be better.
The purpose of higher education should be to learn things that will be useful to you (most likely in a career). However, the current purpose is to gain a piece of paper which will mean your job application doesn't get immediately thrown out.
People being willing to spend so much time and money on university only to deliberately avoid learning or thinking by using AI to cheat on everything suggests that the system itself is broken.
These students don't actually want to be in university but feel they have to in order to have a chance at success in the current job market. We are in a prisoner's dilemma where everyone is getting degrees just to be a more appealling applicant than the next person. You might have authored a very impressive opensource library but still not get the junior software dev job because HR never gave your CV to the hiring manager since you don't have a STEM degree and 50 other applicants did.
However, I don't really know how university's will evolve from this or what this new system will be. It seems hard to motivate a bunch of 18 year olds to actually want to learn stuff without dangling a piece of paper and exams at the end. Maybe that's just a symptom of all of the levels of education that come before university also dangling paper and exams. There were certainly parts of my degree I would have, at the time, liked to have skipped with AI but now (older and wiser) I'm very glad I couldn't.
Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#4> As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools, we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; social media transformed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth.
That doesn't feel right. I thought that several groups were against the popularization of writing through the times. Wasn't Socrates against writing because it would degrade your memory? Wasn't the church against the printing press because it allowed people to read in silence?
Sorry for the off-topic.
Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#5There seems to be two likely outcomes. First the value of education drops, since studying becomes much easier. Second, we will have few young genius level people, who were able to learn very quickly with help of AI.
Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#6> As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools, we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; social media transformed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth. That doesn't feel right. I thought that…
I'm not that well read on Hershock but I don't think this is a very good application of his tool-vs-tech framework. His view is that tools are localized and specific to a purpose, where technologies are social & institutional. So writing down a shopping list for yourself, the pen is a tool; using it to write a letter to a friend, the pen is one part of the letter-writing technology along with the infrastructure to deliver the letter, the cultural expectation that this is a thing you can even do, widespread literacy, etc.
Again I think this is a pretty narrow theory that Hershock gets some good mileage out of for what he's looking at but isn't a great fit for understanding this issue. The extremely naive "tools are technologies we have already accepted the changes from" has about as much explanatory power here. But also again I'm not a philosopher or a big Hershock proponent so maybe I've misread him.
Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#7This is such a naive, simplistic, distrusting and ultimately monastic perspective. An assumption here is that university students are uncritical and incapable of learning while utilizing AI as an instrument of mind. I think a much more prescient assessment would be that presence of AI demands a transformation and evolution of university curricula and assessment - and the author details early attempts at this -- but declares them failures and uncritical acquiescence. AI is literally built from staggeringly large subsets of human knowledge -- university cultures that refuse to critically participate and evolve with this development, and react by attempting to deny student access, do not deserve the title "university" -- perhaps "college", or the more fitting "monastery", would suffice. The obsession with "cheating", the fallacy that every individual needs to be assessed hermetically, has denied the reality (for centuries) that we are a collective and, now more than ever, embody a rich mass mind. Successful students will grow and flourish with these developments, and institutions of higher learning ought to as well.
Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#8The situation in higher education at the moment does seem pretty dire. However, I do have some hope that a new system could emerge from this which would be better. The purpose of higher education should be to learn things that will be useful to you (most likely in a career). However, the current purpose is to gain a piece of paper which will mean your job application doesn't get immediately thrown out. People being w…
This is simplistic and I believe wrong. People still go to university because they are passionate and want to learn things, exchange with peers, grow as a person.
Education is not just "buying" a certification to open doors. This part I'm happy to get rid off.
Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#9> As philosopher Peter Hershock observes, we don’t merely use technologies; we participate in them. With tools, we retain agency—we can choose when and how to use them. With technologies, the choice is subtler: they remake the conditions of choice itself. A pen extends communication without redefining it; social media transformed what we mean by privacy, friendship, even truth. That doesn't feel right. I thought that…
I'm not that well read on Hershock but I don't think this is a very good application of his tool-vs-tech framework. His view is that tools are localized and specific to a purpose, where technologies are social & institutional. So writing down a shopping list for yourself, the pen is a tool; using it to write a letter to a friend, the pen is one part of the letter-writing technology along with the infrastructure to de…
It's essentially Dr Ted's theory of small scale vs large scale technology
Re: AI Is Destroying the University and Learning Itself
#10Last month, I was listening to the Joe Rogan Experience episode with guest Avi Loeb, who is a theoretical physicist and professor at Harvard University. He complained about the disturbingly increasing rate at which his students are submitting academic papers referencing non-existent scientific literature that were so clearly hallucinated by Large Language Models (LLMs). They never even bothered to confirm their references and took the AI's output as gospel.
https://www.rxjourney.net/how-artificial-intelligence-ai-is-...