Comment by rtikulit
6 hours ago
Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
Somehow, civilization has managed to survive.
And civilizations do fall. The bronze age civilizations did collapse. There was something dark about the dark ages. There is no law of nature which says that things will be okay, and plenty of examples where things have fallen apart.
Just to add to this, if AI is as epochal a change as its boosters say (and I am open to that argument), then surely it must have the potential for awful consequences, in proportion to its potential for good.
When you lower the barrier to taking the shortcut, you get more people to take it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. If cheating becomes incredibly easy, lots of students who would have otherwise been honest take the easy way out. Moral conviction gets harder to keep as doing the right thing becomes less rational.