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Except in the narrowest sense of "writing" meaning to put words on a page in grammatical order, it can't really be compared to learning to perform a mechanical
by noduerme 4y ago
Except in the narrowest sense of "writing" meaning to put words on a page in grammatical order, it can't really be compared to learning to perform a mechanical chore like long division. It's more comparable to learning numeracy. To learn to write is to learn how to structure thoughts in human language, just as to learn math is to learn to structure thoughts in a universal framework built on logic.
One could make the question more explicit: If machines can think, is there a need for students to learn how to think? If not, is there a need to teach anything at all?
Just my personal view: The presence of reasoning machines makes it all the more urgent for our species to learn reasoning skills. The passing on of knowledge has perhaps been our key evolutionary advantage. Without the ability to write (and to structure thoughts), future humans would be defenseless against whoever or whatever could do so.
- mbfg 4y agoSure, basic writing is probably still important, but more nuanced things, for instance, do students really now need to learn the form of an argumentative essay? That is/was a good skill to have. But now or in the future one could say i want an argument essay for why we should build this feature. i'd just get ChatGPT to do it.
- noduerme 4y agoeh, learning form in argument is exactly the same thing as learning to order one's thoughts. Would you do away with a lawyer's need to parse the law, or an engineer's need to learn control structures because a computer could write a paper they wouldn't understand? We need to be teaching people to spot the flaws in AI arguments and to spot when other people have used AI to write those arguments. There's no way to do that unless the students are competent in writing excellent arguments themselves.