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Another poster made an analogy to the introduction of cheap calculators and it does make me wonder. If the AI tools get to the point where they really can do th

Another poster made an analogy to the introduction of cheap calculators and it does make me wonder. If the AI tools get to the point where they really can do the analysis better, with more clarity, better logic, deeper understanding, and output true information then why DO we want to train humans to do this? It's no longer a valuable skill to be able to calculate by hand the square root of arbitrary numbers when a calculator can do it far faster with basically 100% fidelity. If AI tools get this way for other mental work then why should we train people to do it at all? >It's like having a weightlifter come in to a gym to repeatedly lift barbells with a crane - he's getting no results out of that. To use your own analogy, the weightlifter doesn't NEED to get physically strong anymore, they do it for competitive reasons or as a personal challenge. Chess may also be a good example, currently no human can beat the best Chess AIs but since Chess isn't a particularly important Economic endeavor it just exists as a game and the chess AIs are kind of a novelty. But if chess were super critical to Economies then its unlikely humans would be involved in it at all for anything other than fun. The chess AIs would dominate completely.

PeterisP 4y ago
My perspective here is viewing essays as a pedagogical tool - currently when we design a process (course/module/lecture/other content) for people to learn something, essays are one option that can be used when the intended activity is for the learner to study something and reflect on it for some time in order to achieve the desired learning outcome (and there's all kinds of pedagogical theory to judge when this is useful and when something else would be more effective instead). It's a means to an end, and that end is effective learning of something we've decided to be worth learning. In this case, the main point of an essay is effectively as a "proof of work" token, to use a cryptocurrency analogy - and just as with cryptocurrencies, if some shortcut is found that allows faking that "proof of work" then the whole process starts to become shaky. In this case we don't really want to abandon that core work done by the learner (since in some cases we have good reasons to prefer that particular type of work) but this rises a need to some alternative to essays that would achieve a similar result but not be as vulnerable to fakes. But regarding your initial point - IMHO if at some point we decide that people don't need to learn mental skills such as analysis of concepts because an AI can do all of that better, that certainly might be possible at some point, but at that point the whole notion of "why study stuff" disappears as well; I'd say that we stop needing to train people for that when we stop needing to train people, period; when the whole notion of studying any mental skill becomes as irrelevant as studying chess is now, and we can simply shut down higher education as such. And we (and our discussion) are not yet at this point, for now we still do care how to train people to do all of that.

PeterisP 4y ago

My perspective here is viewing essays as a pedagogical tool - currently when we design a process (course/module/lecture/other content) for people to learn something, essays are one option that can be used when the intended activity is for the learner to study something and reflect on it for some time in order to achieve the desired learning outcome (and there's all kinds of pedagogical theory to judge when this is useful and when something else would be more effective instead). It's a means to an end, and that end is effective learning of something we've decided to be worth learning. In this case, the main point of an essay is effectively as a "proof of work" token, to use a cryptocurrency analogy - and just as with cryptocurrencies, if some shortcut is found that allows faking that "proof of work" then the whole process starts to become shaky. In this case we don't really want to abandon that core work done by the learner (since in some cases we have good reasons to prefer that particular type of work) but this rises a need to some alternative to essays that would achieve a similar result but not be as vulnerable to fakes. But regarding your initial point - IMHO if at some point we decide that people don't need to learn mental skills such as analysis of concepts because an AI can do all of that better, that certainly might be possible at some point, but at that point the whole notion of "why study stuff" disappears as well; I'd say that we stop needing to train people for that when we stop needing to train people, period; when the whole notion of studying any mental skill becomes as irrelevant as studying chess is now, and we can simply shut down higher education as such. And we (and our discussion) are not yet at this point, for now we still do care how to train people to do all of that.