I think people will get more utility out of education programs that allow them to be productive with AI, at the expense of foundational knowledge
Universities have a different purpose and are tone deaf to why their students use universities for the last century: which is that the corporate sector decided university degrees were necessary despite 90% of the cross disciplinary learning being irrelevant.
Its not the university’s problem and they will outlive this meme of catering to the middle class’ upwards mobility at all. They existed before and will exist after.
The university may never be the place for a human to hone the skill of being augmented with AI but a trade school or bootcamp or other structured learning environment will be, for those not self started enough to sit through youtube videos and trawl discord servers
No shit. This is anecdotal evidence, but I was recently teaching a university CS class as a guest lecturer (at a somewhat below-average university), and almost all the students were basically copy-pasting task descriptions and error messages into ChatGPT in lieu of actually programming. No one seemed to even read the output, let alone be able to explain it. "Foundational skills" were near zero, as a result.
Anyway, I strongly suspect that this report is based on careful whitewashing and would reveal 75% cheating if examined more closely. But maybe there is a bit of sampling bias at play as well -- maybe the laziest students just never bother with anything but ChatGPT and Google Colab, while students using Claude have a little more motivation to learn something.
People who spent the past two years offloading their entry-level work onto LLMs are now taking 400-level systems programming courses and running face-first into a capability wall. I try my best to help, but there's only so much I can do when basic concepts like structs and pointer manipulation get blank stares.
> "Oh, the foo field in that struct should be signed instead of unsigned."
< "Struct?"
> "Yeah, the type definition of Bar? It's right there."
< "Man, I had ChatGPT write this code."
> "..."
The clueless educational institutions will simply try to fight it, like they tried to fight copy/pasting from Google and like they probably fought calculators.
Universities aren’t here to hold your hand and give you a piece of paper. They’re here to build skills. If you cheat, you don’t build the skills, so the piece of paper is now worthless.
The only reason degrees mean anything is because the institutions behind them work very hard to make sure the people earning them know what they’re doing.
If you can’t research a write an essay and you have to “copy/paste” from google, the reality is you’re probably a shit writer and a shit researcher. So if we just give those people degrees anyway, then suddenly so-called professionals are going to flounder. And that’s not good for them, or for me, or for society as a whole.
That’s the key here that people are missing. Yeah cheating is fun and yeah it’s the future. But if you hire a programmer, and they can’t program, that’s bad!
And before I hear something about “leveling up” skills. Nuh-uh, it doesn’t work that way. Skills are built on each other. Shortcuts don’t build skills, they do the opposite.
Using chat GPT to pass your Java class isn’t going to help you become a master C++ day trading programmer. Quite the opposite! How can you expect to become that when you don’t know what the fuck a data type is?
We use calculators, sure. We use Google, sure. But we teach addition first. Using the most overpowered tool for block number 1 in the 500 foot tall jenga tower is setting yourself up for failure.