The college system is creating the zombie underclass with AI or without it. The amount of money colleges charge combined with the text book thinking shapes people into thinking there are steps to success, there are right answers, and "getting a job" is the right way to go. Colleges don't teach independent thinking and that is the exact thinking we need in the era of Youtube and AI. You don't need college to teach you how to learn text book items anymore and I think that is scary to some.

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JumpCrisscross 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> the text book thinking shapes people into thinking there are steps to success, there are right answers, and "getting a job" is the right way to go

Apart from entry-level texts, what discipline are you thinking of? Pretty much all my after-freshman-year undergrad texts contained debates.

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hansmayer 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> You don't need college to teach you how to learn text book items anymore and I think that is scary to some.

a) This is about universities, not "college" b) The University teaches you critical thinking, not how to learn "textbook items". It's not vocational training for upper middle class. It's for building and developing citizens who can think critically.

	▲	csb6 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		In the United States, "college" and "university" are generally used interchangeably. I absolutely agree with your second point and the shift has been going on so long that people are genuinely baffled by the idea that college should not just be "white-collar vocational school"

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5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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XorNot 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Ok but I need a job to live.

And if I want to do something interesting I need the skills and knowledge which are learned at a college level.

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nradov 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Most jobs, including white collar jobs, don't require the skills and knowledge learned at a college level. For employment purposes, a college degree primarily acts as a signaling and filtering mechanism. It shows employers that you can grind your way through a moderately difficult task without giving up, and it allows hiring managers to reduce the number of applicants to a manageable level. When actual labor shortages occur, employers are quick to drop the fake degree requirements in order to fill critical roles.

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mordae 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Ok but I need a job to live.

Not really, you need cooperation with other people in this complex world to live. No necessarily a job. You could be self-employed or a member of a cooperative or an elected official.

But yeah, the capitalist default is to have a job, sure.

> And if I want to do something interesting I need the skills and knowledge which are learned at a college level.

Not really, no. You need the skills and knowledge and for some professions you do need the official certificate of education and for a subset of those that's actually warranted, because you cannot get your hands on the training other ways. Doctors kinda need the official system, self-taught appendectomy would not be ideal. English literature? Not so much.

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kranke155 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You need a job to live - under the current economic system. a lot of the critiques of capitalism lead you straight into ai, and most economic critiques of AI are critiques of capitalism as it exists now.

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asdff 6 hours ago | parent [-]

You've needed a job to live for all of human history going back to whatever ancestor you like. That job is called survival. All modern life is doing is delegating that effort across many people such as to benefit from economies of scale. I don't need to fish for my sustenance because someone else is doing the fishing. I contribute in some other way that gives me credits to access the fishing take. People act like capitalism is some new evil but it is little different than the delegated labor you might find in a prehistorical tribe. The fundamental rules of this system are really the only way our species survives. The issue is sometimes compensation is uneven for the effort, but that is really it, not that the system itself is a failure. I'm not sure of any system that wouldn't be like this. What is communism but capitalism where compensation is more evenly distributed? It is still a game of delegating certain tasks to certain individuals such that one individual is not responsible for 100% of their own survival.

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kranke155 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Survival didn't involve a CS job at FAANG until very recently.

Capitalism is not a new evil, you're absolutely right. It's just the system that, according to our current framework, came after feudalism, which came after something else.

the point is that actually seeing the changes in systems as consequences of massive technological change is likely directionally correct and it is not clear whether current capitalist logic survives the AI era.

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asdff 3 hours ago | parent [-]

What is a CS job at a FAANG in practice? Many hats. For example if you work at Netflix on content delivery, you are the modern version of someone involved in the boring logistics of theaters and plays. If you work at Google on search, you are the modern version of a librarian establishing ways to catalog information. If you work at say facebook, you are the modern version of a propagandist or even town crier perhaps. In all these cases, these workers were delegating their basic survival needs to other members of society. Ancient Rome even had its own slop bowl restaurants not all that different than what you see in SF today, and many ancient romans did not cook for themselves but instead traded credits gained from labor elsewhere to eat at these establishments. No different than lunch time in SF today.

The actual tasks being done have always been done even if the technologies used to do the work have changed and the work itself looks a little different. Our base needs have not changed. We are the same apes bound by dopamine. The functionality we require is pretty old. There is probably little we experience that is truly "new" compared to what one might experience in a classical civilization.

Capitalism is far more ancient than feudalism. Phoenicians were famous capitalists, likewise most any group of people involved in trade. Trade and accumulation of capital representing labor is ancient.

	▲	kranke155 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're just confusing definitions. Capitalism as its commonly thought I would think just about what it says on the wikipedia page "Capitalism in its modern form emerged from agrarianism in England, as well as mercantilist practices by European countries between the 16th and 18th centuries. The Industrial Revolution of the 18th century established capitalism as a dominant mode of production, characterized by factory work, and a complex division of labor. "

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graceful6800 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Trade schools and apprenticeships exist.

Trades can pay very well and frequently require nothing more than on the job training.

You think you need college for the same reason you equate "job" with survival. These are not universal truths, not even in capitalist hellscape America. It might be harder but it is in no way a requirement. Anyone who tells you different is lying to you.