Capitalism went so hard it fucked up its future workforce
It's Breathtaking How Fast AI Is Screwing Up the Education System
Submitted 10 months ago by youradhere@feddit.org to technology@lemmy.world
https://gizmodo.com/its-breathtaking-how-fast-ai-is-screwing-up-the-education-system-2000603100
Comments
tehciolo@lemm.ee 10 months ago
FreeWilliam@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
I can confirm this is not just in the land of burgers. Back in the war from October to December, I fleed to Germany and went to school there, and the stuff I saw where absolutely disgusting: kids were using ipads (ibads) given to them by the school, the computers ran windows on them, and every time even a single task came up, they would directly resort to artificial unintelligence. When the “ceasefire” started and I finally went back to Lebanon, most of the kids were using Artificial unintelligence to write their essays as well. I don’t blame these kids, they don’t know better, they don’t know how artificial unintelligence is trained from the stolen work of the people, they don’t know what non-free software is, and they don’t know how these devices/software are tracking their every move. It’s up to the school’s to teach them such and schools are doing a terrible job both in America and internationally.
Chessmasterrex@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Prelude to the society Vonnegut wrote about in ‘Player Piano’ and Bradbury in ‘Farenheit 451’
ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
And Isaac Asimov’s The Feeling of Power, a short story about a man who can do mathematics in his head, a skill long forgotten after computers do all calculations for humanity.
Ledericas@lemm.ee 10 months ago
basically idiocracy, in idiocracy, it was the AI supercomputer that was running the whole society for the 500years, it was assigning jobs, or removing jobs, or doing other stuff.
drunkpostdisaster@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AI is probably the worst invention sense the atom bomb.
boughtmysoul@lemmy.world 10 months ago
When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”
Yikes.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 months ago
Where are these kids getting these ideas?
That only works if you’re already fantastically wealthy.
theblips@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Honestly, just erase all graded homework, papers included. All of it. It wasn’t even good at anything to begin with and we would just cheat off each other, but now it’s even worse.
JeremyHuntQW12@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Essays and projects were of marginal educational value in grade school and won’t be missed. They were always just a cop out for lazy teachers.
Until the 1990s, 100% of the university grade was based on examinations, so AI would have been irrelevant, that was watered down to save costs.
Epic@lemm.ee 10 months ago
lol , piret getting robbed kind of situation we are in
canajac@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
AI is not your enemy. It IS the future whether you like it or not. Your kids will benefit from AI in ways you cannot even imagine.
theblips@lemm.ee 10 months ago
True but a downvote magnet on Lemmy. But I would dispute the “benefit” part… What exactly is the benefit in not having to learn anything? Why would I even want to exist if not to be good at something and create something? It just seems like we’re building towards stuff that’s better than us at doing what WE want to do as a society. Thinking about chess here: why would I care about the best Stockfish moves in every line of my favorite opening if no one will ever be able to explain them?
OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
Yes, but like mental math, it didn’t go away when we introduced calculators, and there’s a correlation between people who have those skills and income levels (which I’m using as a proxy for “usefulness”). The education system needs to adapt to assignments that students can’t just paste into ChatGPT and call it a day- students need to keep spending effort learning.
Zink@programming.dev 10 months ago
Of course AI isn’t the enemy. The enemy is their corporate ownership.
But no doubt AI will be huge in the future, in the sense that “AI” basically means “much better computing capabilities than we have now.”
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 10 months ago
We’ve been needing to rework education for years now anyway. At least this will force the teachers to change & adapt, whether they like it or not.
Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
What teachers?
multifariace@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Teachers are generally quite adaptable. We have asjustes for AI in our classrooms. We have adjuated to not teaching up to standards because we would be fined by our states for pushing some imaginary agenda. We have changed our entire curriculum the week before classes start because the County curriculum specialist had a bright idea.
The reality is that we have to navigate arbitrary law, we have to not do what’s best for our classroom and teaching style because someone who hardly spent any time in a classroom thinks they know better. We have to do all this while being blamed for the behavior of students when their parents block the school phone numbers.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m not saying there aren’t great teachers, but I have family in education and know a lot of teachers, and I would not describe most of them as adaptable.
DrollerCoaster@lemm.ee 10 months ago
The key concern with reforming social programs like public education is that they are ongoing concerns with impacts that extend decades into the future. “Creative destruction” in public education is liable to cause far more harm than good if the transition is not handled with knowledge and care.
surph_ninja@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I think doing nothing, while this emerging tech obliterates the functioning of existing methods, is much more dangerous.
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ah yes, goal misalignment at its finest.
The students need high grades to get a job, so they focus on ensuring that happens (AI use being the easy path).
The teachers have progression targets to meet, so they focus on ensuring this happens (keep the AI vulnerable assessments).
If you want to change a module as a teacher, good luck getting that work loaded when you should be implementing AI in your curriculum ^_^
moseschrute@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s kinda funny cause usually isn’t it the AI agent that has a misaligned goal? Like when I say don’t die, and it discovers that pausing Tetris technical means you never die. Now it’s students that have been given the wrong goal: pass the test by whatever means (e.g. use AI).
HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s the real joke behind it all, the use of AI is such a problem because we’re turning education into a stamp dispenser - everyone needs an A* to get anywhere.
AI has given every student a path to this - however if industry stopped demanding that universities train their damn staff for them, and instead insist we teach their future staff how to be trained (as well as giving them subject specific knowledge), then we’d see the misalignment vanish. Once the need for an A* to land a good job is gone, then so is the misalignment.
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AI is bullshit and has no place in a school curriculum outside of computer science. Keep that shit away from children if you want them to have any critical thinking skills.
InputZero@lemmy.world 10 months ago
In practice you’re right, and I’m not going to even try to argue the real life consequences AI has caused. However I disagree that AI doesn’t have any place in the education system. Used on the appropriate problems, AI is a tool that makes a few things which were challenging to compute much easier. One example is large AI models folding proteins for medical research. A problem that took a computer a day or more to solve can be solved in hours on the same equipment using AI software. That’s just one application that admittedly isn’t useful to school aged children but it’s still one useful example of AI. There are others. Students should be taught how to use AI properly, and part of that is teaching them what it’s good at and what it’ll never be able to do.
The part I get am angry about is disgusting Tech Bro Billionaires trying to show AI into every piece of software they can. Just like the block chain they’re over promising and there’s a bubble. Unlike block chain technology AI actually has a few useful applications and because of that it’ll take a lot longer that BitCoin to finally level out.
Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If success is determined by a metric, the metric will go up. Any relation to actual increase in value is coincidental. Lol. Long ago someone tried to incentivize programers by giving abonus per bug fixed. Didn’t last long before they blew through the bonus budget and realized the programers were putting in bugs so they could fix them. (Urban legend really… probably)
aidan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Maybe the best headline that’s come out of the recent LLM explosion
melsaskca@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
It’s breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.
CapriciousDay@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
Don’t worry they’ve defunded all of the bodies that might have compiled any fair statistics so they can deny the downfall for a few years.
Sam_Bass@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yet they keep shoving it down our throats forcing us to delete entire systems to be rid of it
KeenFlame@feddit.nu 10 months ago
Ah yes. The education system. Yeah. That one. where the kids gets slain periodically and systematically. That education system. Where they don’t get food. The one where they are killed in systematically over and over without reaction. It’s being destroyed by ai? OK.
eugenevdebs@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 months ago
- Teachers are overworked, underpaid, some still using course work that hasn’t been updated in years despite what the field has advanced
- Students go into college due to the social expectation, some even unsure of what to get into as a career or even a class
- Exceeding above the course requirements does nothing for your GPA, an A that got a “110%” and an A that got 90% are the same.
- Students failing or passing still rack up debt for this social expectation
- Teachers still failing to pay bills for this social need
Yeah AI is the fault here, its not the system at large been fucked over since Reagan.
UntitledQuitting@reddthat.com 10 months ago
Well yeah the education system is the burning tire fire and AI is tech bros pouring gasoline all over it
crash_thepose@lemmy.ml 10 months ago
Exactly
mycelium_underground@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A fitting description, a big tire fire won’t really change with the addition of gasoline, burning rubber has a lot of energy to release.
sugarfoot00@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
I love that this guy is in an Ivy League school to meet his ‘co-founder’, when it’s hard to believe that someone that knows nothing and is intellectually incurious could ever found anything of value.
Furbag@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.
These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.
Rooty@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Do you really think schools teach critical thinking and practical knowledge? State mandated education is geared to produce people who are smart enough to run the system and stupid enough not to question it. The fact that this dullard factory is being distrupted what is essentially an electronic parrot speaks volumes about the whole charade.
Furbag@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’m not talking about state mandated education. Nobody is required to attend university.
If you go to a college worth attending, they will teach you critical thinking skills as part of the course requirements.
Regardless, the situation with generative AI is not helping in that regard.
TwigletSparkle@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 months ago
This was true before AI, it’s just going to be 10x worse with AI
happydoors@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Unfortunately, I think many kids could easily approach AI the same way older generations thought of math, calculators, and the infamous “you won’t have a calculator with you everywhere.” If I was a kid today and I knew I didn’t have to know everything because I could just look it up, instantly; I too would become quite lazy. Even if the AI now can’t do it, they are smart enough to know AI in 10 years will. I’m not saying this is right, but I see how many kids would end up there.
Nalivai@lemmy.world 10 months ago
know AI in 10 years will.
That kind of the main problem: there is no indication that it will. I know one thing: current way LLM works, the chances that the problem of “lying” and “hallucinations”, will even be solved are slim to none. There could be some mechanism that works in tandem with it, but it doesn’t exist yet.
So most likely either we will collectively learn this fact and stop relying on this bullshit, which means there is a generation of kids who essentially skipped a learning phase, or we don’t learn this fact, and there will be a society of mindless zombies that are fed lies and random bullshit on a second-to-second basis.
Both cases are bleak, but the second one is nightmarish.tehn00bi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s all based off of predictions, it has no concept of the physical world or the ability to understand facts. Its goal is to please the user, not parse the entirety of human knowledge and provide an insightful complete thought.
end_stage_ligma@lemmy.world 10 months ago
but we already have Fox News
JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This could be complete bullshit because im not an expert but i sometimes think that we could have a future where without testing and nurturing peoples critical thinking skills we end up with people who dont know how to create a rational argument or assess information they are given for its accuracy and authenticity, or to know when they are being deceived by malicious actors.
English writing assignments as simple as a book report require you to take different views and angles on something to understand it better and the nuances of the whole, but tell a LLM to write it for you and you are not developing that part of your own mind where you may learn to do things like see the whole story above the individual events noise, see things from others perspective/feelings and understand alternate world views. These are critical for having empathy for others and understanding the world around you.
And that is just one small example i came up with.gadfly1999@lemm.ee 10 months ago
We are already there. Just look at the state of society right now and observe the critical thinking and media literacy skills of the average person.
In the words of cyberpunk author Wiilam Gibson: “The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.“
tehn00bi@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I always think about the Time Machine and the Eloi people. I really think that is the world we are headed towards. Basically creating a class of cattle brained people, and a class of super humans.
Triasha@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Brave New World? No, the rulers aren’t that benevolent.
1984? Still no, they aren’t that competent.
We are heading for fareinheit 451.
Zexks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You’ve never watched a 12 year old write a book report have you.
orcrist@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Yes and no. Remember that rich kids could always hire ghost writers. ChatGPT made that available to the masses, but that particular problem goes back centuries.
What we have seen is that the curriculum is often decided by a distant committee who actually doesn’t understand life on the ground. In reality, there are easy ways for teachers to undercut the utility of ChatGPT, if they have the freedom to make changes. But that depends on teachers having control and the time to make changes to how they teach.
LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 10 months ago
What’s breathtaking is how clueless education system administrators are falling for sales hype and other things. They’ve been screwing up the system for a very long time, and now they have a whole new set of shiny objects to spend your money on.
aidan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
In my former school district they paid millions to consultancy firm to “use AI to optimize the bus route”. The first day of testing the new route many kids didn’t get home until after 9pm. They immediately reverted to the old route.
pineapplelover@lemm.ee 10 months ago
My my university (California State University system) has some chatgpt school partnership now.
tamal3@lemmy.world 10 months ago
My point is that it’s a somewhat outdated skill, and these kids have enough to figure out without the encumbrance of a paper dictionary. Most of my kids have never used one before, and yes, I can show them how to use it, but it’s not a functional testing accommodation. Testing accommodations should not include learning skills that are only tangentially related, especially not when there is a reasonable alternative.
tamal3@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Unpopular opinion:
I am a public school teacher and I support public schools, but there have been a lot of issues with our education system for a long time. Talk to any kid with ADHD who had to sit through 12 years, and they are indicative of a larger problem. Our idea of school now is as a place that teaches kids to behave and mostly follow rote instruction. Wouldn’t it be so much better if we were teaching kids to be creative thinkers, work well in groups, problem solve, and think critically about the information they’re getting? We know that’s what school should be, but maybe now we will be forced to go there. Yes, there will be issues like learned helplessness and certain skills being difficult to teach, but it’s kind of exciting too.
Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?
Triasha@lemmy.world 10 months ago
“Though it’s also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated… can we not, please?”
Trump and Republicans would like nothing more than to turn this country into another Russia where your kids have to pay through the nose go abroad to get a decent education.
carrion0409@lemm.ee 10 months ago
As someone with adhd the public school system was hell. My local community college had a program where you could get your ged and learn a trade so I left my junior year to do that instead. I really wish the public school system was better but sadly people just don’t care enough.
Snowclone@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I work with special needs kids in a school district and the amount of access kids with even mild symptoms is atrocious. It’s a huge problem.
ICastFist@programming.dev 10 months ago
I wouldn’t call it unpopular because how the education system works in America and several other countries has been a very obvious problem for decades. What we should be teaching is more barometer question
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barometer_question
The student admitted that he knew the expected “conventional” answer, but was fed up with the professor’s "teaching him how to think … rather than teaching him the structure of the subject.
AA5B@lemmy.world 10 months ago
only the wealthy kids will be well-educated
You could argue we’re already way too far down this road. Quality of education is very dependent on location. Some of it is rich districts but also richer states. Whatever level of granularity you want, there’s always sone more willing or more able to spend money on better educating their children.
For all its faults, Department of Education was at least trying to set minimum standards for those areas unwilling to invest in a good education system and minimum investments for those unable. We desperately needed to raise this bar, not remove it
orcrist@lemm.ee 10 months ago
There is plenty wrong with generative AI as a tool if you think of it in those terms.
I would say that if the depth of analysis is limited to “AI” or “genAI” then use of it in schools is overwhelmingly bad. If that’s the limit of our ability to frame the issue, then banning AI would appear inevitable, and any graded assignment that might encourage AI use should be banned.
But if you want to break things down, you can find specific tools (i.e., calculators, grammar checkers) that could be labeled as AI or specific uses of genAI (i.e., brainstorming) that have use. And it is this latter approach – clearly identifying positive uses – that is difficult for students, media writers, and apparently policy makers to do.
brognak@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Man, I am 38. When I was in highschool I was in an alternative curriculum Math program called IMP, and it is/was literally what your talking about.
Instead of memorizing equations we were instead given a hypothetical situation and learned to solve it socratically both through conversations as a class with the teacher, and in small groups to try and figure out how to solve it. It made me love math so much I almost made it my life, it was literally everything I needed as a severely ADHD teen. Everything was a puzzle to be solved, and when you solved it you gained not just knowledge, but the perspective to know where the knowledge applies.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 10 months ago
OpenSciEd is a model that teaches science like that. There’s been a ton of pushback from conservatives.
Landless2029@lemmy.world 10 months ago
This is me with coding. Learn the rules. See a problem. Code a solution.
Suavevillain@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The fact people can’t even use their own common sense on Twitter without using AI for context shows we are in a scary place. AI is not some all knowing magic 8 ball and puts out a ton of misinformation.
vane@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Produce army of people that rely on corporate products to stay alive. What can go wrong ?
Zexks@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Yeah who needs air conditioning. Fuck those weaklings. Or heating for that matter, Canadians are weak for all that corporate prodeuct reliance.
Goltbrook@lemm.ee 10 months ago
I reckon we have reached that state for a long time.
The vast majority of people would have a pretty hard time without food logistics, utilities, medical treatments, pharmaceuticals. The list goes on.
All of which are provided by corporations of some form or another.
Something something about civilization being 5 warm meals away from collapse.
p3n@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?
RaoulDook@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Well, here’s how you figure that out - think about it with your brain. Should children and young adults be given materials and assignments that require them to use thinking and develop their brains, or should they be given machines to do their thinking for them so that it’s easier to complete schoolwork?
One route develops valuable brain skills that can be useful for life, and the other teaches dependency on fancy machines to accomplish the same.
kamen@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Came here to say that. If AI has the leeway to affect things in negative way, then we’re not focusing on the right thongs to begin with. If kids are graded sometimes for the amount of (not necessarily coherent and sound) amount of text they’re able to spit out, this is what you get.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 10 months ago
Not US but I still remember printing off a full page of text, teacher looked at it for less than 5 seconds before giving it a tick. This is all meaningless, no one is reading it, no one cares, nothing matters.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 10 months ago
The corrupt cheapskates trying to nickel and dime every ISD in the country to bankruptcy absolutely fell over one another at the opportunity to fire staff and replace them with Clippy.
Twenty years ago, state officials were all fawning over the idea of turning every university in the country into a pile subscription based Udemy online courses. Ten years ago, letting Pearson hijack the lesson plan of every classroom in the country was the dream. This has been a long time coming.
toastmeister@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
The teacher uses a PowerPoint and multiple choice tests to depict fake effort at teaching, the students use AI to depict fake effort at learning. I see nothing wrong here.
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 10 months ago
How are other countries handling it? I can’t imagine AI being an American only education issue.
ZMoney@lemmy.world 10 months ago
If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I’m supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I’m here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we’d have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don’t waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.