You can be very AI-skeptic in various ways and still think that this is a fair take. I teach and supervise students as master's level courses, and about 15% of them have intrinsic motivation to learn. These students have set up their own AI tutors with prompts and know way more than me in certain areas of the field, they are extremely ahead of their class.

The issue in my country is that you equate education with getting a safe job. 20 years ago, you needed a high-school degree in social science to get a government job. 10 years ago you needed a bachelor in social sciences to get the same job. 5 years ago you needed a bachelor in economy/engineering to get the same job. Now, because of recessions this is stretching to masters degrees.

You can't expect people who just want a job and a comfortable life and NEED to go to uni for this to want to be curious and want to learn.

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Ekaros a day ago | parent | next [-]

And on other side education attainment has become metric for governments. More degrees and higher the degrees are better it will be for the economy somehow. Where there is likely quite a lot of jobs that don't actually need the degree.

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utopiah a day ago | parent | prev [-]

> about 15% of them have intrinsic motivation to learn [...] they are extremely ahead of their class.

Feels like whatever tool they'd be given, they'd be ahead anyway. What's more worrying IMHO is, are the remaining 85% faring even worst than they would have before because they are learning even less, not just slower than the 15% learning faster. Namely is the gain for the few a loss for the majority?

	▲	augment_me a day ago \| parent [-]
		You are right on both counts. I do think that it's however different on the first concept. Before, they would be ahead but still capped by their university. If you come from a uni in a 100k person city, you probably would not have the material nor the best teachers. Now you can have literal Stanford quality education (by accessing Stanford's open source lectures) as well as the collective aggregated knowledge of humanity in the chat interface. The curiosity/intrinsic motivation is the only limit except for perhaps compute. As for the other question, its mixed. I think about 20% of students understand that they are fucked if they just delegate it all to LLMs, they still go through the ropes and show up to class but do the minimum. However most are down the deep end in various degrees. I have seen students with 5 different 3000-line files for 5 questions for the same lab where each file has 3 lines of code different. This never happened even when the students cheated by accessing old labs online or plagiarizing before. I believe that what will happen (because universities move really slow on policy and education on LLM use), is that pre-LLM, the university had a normal distribution of skills upon graduation. A company could trust that someone with a degree knew X and Y. With this however, you have more of a bimodal distribution, some know nothing and some know it all, so then the trust in universities deteriorates. I think we will see much more IQ-test/practical tests in hiring processes as the trust falters for that a degree equals something.