Tobold: "If AI can do or help with everything you need to get a college degree, why wouldn't AI be as qualified as you to do the job that needs that degree?"

I think we should not forget that AI is a tool that doesn't do anything on it's own. The company won't hire a calculator or a physics text book even if those are able to solve entry level engineering calculations.
Sure, the company won't hire a person to do the calculating as the graduate is now expected to use the tool instead.

Companies will then require trained AI monkeys to shuffle slop and universities will comply and add that to the curriculum.

I think the danger is more in the gap between the AI monkey and those who are currently solving the complex engineering problems that can't be solved by AI. How is the graduate supposed to improve and move into those senior positions?

The other issue that has been going around my head is that what if I put in the time to properly write a text but the other side just reads the AI summary and then prompts for an AI reply?
What if I do the same in return? What if I lose interest in the topic and just go with whatever slop the AI produces because the other side doesn't appreciate the effort put in?
 

That is where my thoughts started that led to this post. The student uses generative AI for his creative writing assignment and justifies that decision as being “good enough”. And then he is outraged if some editor also considers the AI product for an article “good enough” and doesn’t want to hire him as a writer.

I agree that AI is just a tool. The editor isn’t hiring zero writers. But instead of hiring 5 writers, he hires just one of them, and lets that one guy produce five times the volume of writing with the help of the AI tools. That still leaves 4 college graduates in creative writing unemployed.
 

But are there that many readers who will stick around for that one guys AI slop articles?

Websites are already dying slow deaths due to internet consolidation onto social media and now search providers are stabbing them in the back by eating away at their search clicks due to AI summarizing articles at the top of the results.

Blog style websites are increasingly either relying on viewers to subsidize them through memberships or just closing down.

There are a very limited number of small websites I go to these days and I wouldn't be surprised if in the next few years that number is able to be counted on one hand.
 

You are also going a little too fast on the type of work done in college VS the one done in actual job.
The goal of college is to make you learn things. And the tests are there to check you have learn something + know how to write. As AI is very good at sharing knowledge, and excellent at writing, it can easily help pass the tests.
But actuel job are quite different than tests. And suddenly what was easy for the AI is no longer so easy when the situation is not a written question on a given well known problem.
So yes obviously some jobs will be lost, but very far from the 90% figure, even for the desk job.
 

But if the student used AI to pretend he learned stuff and knows how to write, and it enabled him to get his degree without actually knowing all that stuff and being able to handle all sorts of situation, he would still not be very good at that real job.
My point is that a college degree that can be achieved with AI doing much of the work involved ultimately isn't worth the paper it is printed on. If college prepare people to handle situations which are not written questions and well known problems, the value of the degree would be a lot higher.
 

As I see it, it's a lot more complicated that lazy students and courses that you can AI your way through being worthless. A lot of early college coursework is building very basic skills and learning the vocabulary of science. You can't very well skip that material, any more than you can do calculus without understanding arithmetic, and that's exact kind of stuff students tend to AI their way through. Those same students will really struggle in upper level courses that build on that material and ask more of them. They will also not be remotely prepared for a job that expects you to be able to think on your feet, or grad school. So in a very real way, AI is in danger of breaking our educational pipeline if we don't take control of it and teach students how to use it as a tool instead of a crutch.

Right now, the students are by and large ahead of most of the faculty, because the faculty have full time jobs that don't consist of figuring out all the ways you can use AI to try and slip through high school doing as little as work as possible. However, they are also aware of the problem and moving on their feet as quickly as they can. In the communities I am aware of, I am seeing major changes being made to courses more quickly than at any time in the past. Ten years from now many courses will be almost unrecognizable, at least with regards to methods of instruction (if not the material being presented).
 

The problem is that AI has been evolving faster than courses can change. Maybe it will soon reach a plateau as many hope. Or maybe it will keep going.