A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
⭕ Study groups are disappearing.
⭕ Office hours are emptying out.
⭕ Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum.
⭕ Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The committee warns MIT professors against replacing undergraduate research assistants with AI agents just because they’re cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
This will not change. This will continue because every one of those things hold short term benefits for individuals, long term be damned.
No study groups? Students will see that as a win.
No office hours? More convenient for students. Professors / admin save time or money.
Homework and tests No longer work means Students and professors wont have to do them, or no longer spend much time on them.
Students lose mastery and confidence means more reliant on AI, and there is no way this is lost on tech bros as a selling point.
The free market WILL NOT solve this problem. These are classic externalities and capitalism DGAF about problems that don’t show up on the cost ledger.
This has been going on for a while. Even before llms. When I was younger, I was actually educated as in trying new things and learning about them. Then came the proficiency test focus of leave every child behind. Then came in gutting classes and programs to only focus on tests and sports. Then came the charging money for sports. Then when I worked in education; it got worse. You would have kids that are 14 that can’t write two sentences; can’t write an email without auto-correct; struggled to read, it looked like someone smacked a keyboard to try and write something. And so on; it’s just the next level of going downwards.
It was sad to see that students with so much access to tech became so … I don’t even know.
When I was thirteen I was writing programs, using pretty much any multimedia software, beta testing games (how to get free games for 500), tweaking the lawnmower engine (to mow the lawn faster, that pesky governor lol), and so on.
So you’re right, this won’t change, maybe when it backfires it might. But this is creating a huge void, not even a brain drain anymore. There’s going to be a general malfunction to society. I mean it’s sad
Tech became too easy to use. In the 00s, you’d need to have an understanding of file paths. You’d need to know where a programmes files were located, to fix whatever broke
Eventually “auto repair” became the standard, then we moved onto handheld consoles (smartphones and tablets). Which relied on app stores, that already confirmed the app wouldn’t destroy anything. So all these annoying to deal with issues just… Vanished. But so did skill, because you never needed the skill to solve a problem in the first place
The skills simply change over time. It’s great that you could muck about and maybe fix something back in the day, but does that same skill apply to modern architecture? No. The true skill you learned what your ability to be curious, to constantly learn and improve, and use those skills across a wide variety of problems, not just simple tech issues. Those are the skills we should be teaching the next and future generation, rather than what the classic education paradigm has been, which is memorization and how to show up on time, to make good factory workers, which are existing less and less in the modern world. Does AI help or harm that? It’s just another tool that can be used in good or bad ways, just like the calculator.
Swathes of the world are going full cyberpunk, for sure.
Oh I might be as well. I already have a partially titanium and bone leg. IM rod. And to lessen the pain; I’m thinking of getting something that’s like a Sandevistan. As in strands implanted in my spine with an electronic controller … that well I plan to hack. Who knows how that will work out but I’m also pretty dumb.
I am afraid that will be as proprietary as a HP printer cartridge.
…Not that it wouldn’t be fun to try the hack.
It’s not like I haven’t reverse engineered stuff before lol. I would share it. The only scary part is that well it’s modding your body. Kinda like the old school EEG stuff you can build at home, could kill you if you made a mistake.