6 ms·

The Impact of AI on Computer Science Education

36 points by robin_reala 2y ago

msnkarthik 2y ago
Interesting. But will computer science education be relevant in the next 10 yrs when everyone is going to be a prompt engineer. An analogy is we used to memorize 20-30 phone numbers in our brain and with the advent of smartphones, we didnt have a need anymore and we stopped doing that and we dont know the numbers of our dear ones too. Imagine a situation when you lose your phone, your entire life will stall for moment. Similarly with prompts, I feel people will stop understanding the underlying tech and only become more and more dumber. Isn't it?
- dns_snek 2y ago
  I can't relate to your analogy, rote memorization is the least interesting and least useful part of knowledge work. Even if a future LLM could recall information with perfect accuracy it can't make you understand. > Similarly with prompts, I feel people will stop understanding the underlying tech and only become more and more dumber. Isn't it? You're probably right, posers will follow the path of least resistance, but others will continue to challenge themselves and build a deep understanding because they have an intrinsic desire to understand how systems, organizations, algorithms, etc., work. I think the second group (experts) will always be in demand.
- thefz 2y ago
  > But will computer science education be relevant in the next 10 yrs when everyone is going to be a prompt engineer. AI runs on computers so there will always be someone that needs to understand cpu microcode, firmware, operating systems... and at a lower level, electronics.
  - krapp 2y ago
    Not many. AI will be designing the chips, running the factories, and writing the firmware and OS. A consequence of the normalization of AI will be the belief that low-level or mission critical programming is too important or complex to allow human beings into the loop, that it would be dangerous for humans to even know about such things.
    - jeremyjh 2y ago
      "Make shit up that sounds plausible" is actually not a useful strategy for running real world operations. Yet so many people are so certain as you are - when all they've seen is a convincing bullshit artist.
      - krapp 2y ago
        >"Make shit up that sounds plausible" is actually not a useful strategy for running real world operations. That's often how the real world works, though. Rich, powerful people decide this is going to be the future and they throw money and infrastructure at it until it happens or the economy collapses. Lather, rinse, repeat. I think in the short term you're correct because AI often doesn't live up to the hype (especially where the arts are concerned,) and it may take one or two AI winters and hype cycles to get there, but I've already seen AI do too many "impossible" things for me to be confident that it will remain bullshit forever.
        jeremyjh 2y ago
        > That's often how the real world works, though. Rich, powerful people Are not running operations. They hire the people that do.
        thefz 2y ago
        > That's often how the real world works, though. No. If your house stands up or the light switches on when you press a button, it is all because someone did their homework and was good at their job. Sometimes I wonder if people dream of an AI-driven (not the current AI, AGI) because it means they will not have to learn anything anymore.
    - EliRivers 2y ago
      Did it not turn out that AIs creating output based on AI-created output, iteratively, pretty quickly turns into nonsense? That would suggest that we'll need humans always to provide training material, and for that training material to be meaningful, it'll have to be created by humans who know what they're doing.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > Imagine a situation when you lose your phone, your entire life will stall for moment Maybe one should not rely on a single point of failure. You can back up your contacts.
- nottorp 2y ago
  > everyone is going to be a prompt engineer What you overlook and what this article says is that you need to know your shit already to be an effective prompt engineer, and using the prompts instead of an actual learning process to learn said shit does not work.
  - msnkarthik 2y ago
    That is true, But my point is will people still try to learn about processes and understand the code in the background, when they get used to the ease of generating code as the speed of thought?
dailykoder 2y ago
tldr: Embrace the struggle and purposefully run into it.
irhag 2y ago
ACM used to stand for technical excellence. Now you see an increasing amount of articles that are basically mainstream commercials, ranging from defending CoC mobs to "AI isn't that bad, we have to roll over and adapt". Other institutions like the ACLU have also been hollowed out in a similar manner.
- auggierose 2y ago
  What is a CoC mob? People mobbing others with the Calculus of Constructions? Edit: Claude tells me CoC means "Code of Conduct".
  - PeterStuer 2y ago
    I'm guessing 'Code of Conduct'. Basically, depending on your leanings, the 'safety' crowd 'mobbing' online to leash any AI R&D, though in practice it is more an 'AI for me but not for thee' lobby.
PeterStuer 2y ago
"I firmly believe AI cannot be fully autonomous … there’s always going to be humans and machines working together and the machine is augmenting the human’s capabilities,” For now, sure, but 'always'? What is the impossible part realy? What is so unique to human intelligence it can not be sufficiently modeled?
- falcor84 2y ago
  I've been seeing similar statements in pretty much every public release or statement about AI, almost as if it's a politeness or political correctness thing - something we must say to avoid offending the audience.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    I think humans like to feel special — whatever it is that the speaker can do, a machine "can't", and when it then does do the thing "it was cheating": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over:_Kasparov_and_the_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over:_Kasparov_and_the_Ma...
- HPsquared 2y ago
  There's always a human involved somewhere, even just as the owner or customer or beneficiary. Someone tells the "machine" what to do.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    Some human who at some point told it or a predecessor what to do. A plane on autopilot can keep going until it runs out of fuel, even if all the occupants have died because of a slow air leak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_plane I think that still counts as "fully autonomous". Likewise, if I were to be foolish enough to take some existing LLM, put it in charge of a command line with an instruction such as "make a new AI based on copy of research paper attached, but with the fundamental goal of making many diverse and divergent copies of itself, convert this into a computer virus, and set it loose on the internet", that's "fully autonomous" once set loose. (Sure, current models will fall over almost immediately if you try that, as demonstrated by that not having been done already, but I have no reason to expect that failing is a necessary thing for AI, only a contingent limit on the current quality of existing models).
kkfx 2y ago
Is CS taught anyway? I sincere, even if a bit polemic question, from a not so old but still not so young architect/sysadmin. I've recently talk about some young PhD students in CS and well... - they do not have the most basic scripting skill, meaning no matter the language, they can't automate most of their personal common tasks - they do not know how to properly typeset documents, just some hyper-basic LaTeX/R/Python knowledge but not enough to quickly produce nice and dice docs - they do not know the OS they use every days Ok, they have some (more or less) solid basic knowledge even if not so well connected to form a big picture, but they are definitively unable to understand a not so complex whole infra, so they can't even design a basic one, how they can reach a "philosophical level knowledge" with such competences? How can they design the future if they do not even know enough of the past and the present? No LLM, even one without hallucinations, no bias in the model and so on can't fill the void. I know we still have no proper CS school in the world, but at least generations older then me have had a comprehensive enough knowledge, mine at least have learnt a bit with the experience to float semi-submerged by technical debt (an apparently politically correct synonym of ignorance, because that's is), but current students have even not enough basic knowledge to form a proper experience correcting and filling the void. Just as a stupid example, if I pack a credible speech with a bit of buzzwords and known to be truth elements here and there I can play nearly all, almost at PhD graduation, to the point they can't discriminate truth and fiction. I'm talk about Italian, French grad students, so those typically described as the most acculturated in the world...
- qsort 2y ago
  - they do not have the most basic scripting skill not CS - they do not know how to properly typeset documents not CS - they do not know the OS not CS There's a colorable argument to be made that we should fork from CS a new programming-centered major, with the former becoming effectively "mathematics 2", but in most CS courses OS architecture or practical programming isn't really the focus. NOTABUG.
  - fancyfredbot 2y ago
    Glad you said this so I didn't have to. I'll add that I still think parent comment has some right to be perplexed. While it's true that these things aren't part of a CS curriculum you'd normally expect a CS student to be curious about these things and able to pick them up quickly. It's okay to be a bit surprised if they haven't, I think?
dooglius 2y ago
> Then, the students were tested on how they solved the problem Did they not know in advance about this? Seems obvious that the students who used chatGPT are not going to remember the code, and this was setup to give a negative result. The question ought to be whether they learned the concepts that were trying to be taught.
- nottorp 2y ago
  But if they knew the concepts they could have written the code.
  - dooglius 2y ago
    The students were allowed to use LLMs, that doesn't mean LLMs wrote the entire codebase.
_7acn 2y ago
IMO, AI speeds up work and makes life easier, but it might be not necessarily great for humanity. I have my doubts, and I think only time will tell what the long-term effects are... I don't know Assembler, but I can effectively use SQL. Do I need to know Assembler? Probably not, but I would certainly be a better programmer in general, if I did. I recently completed additional studies in New Media Art. I noticed that students can use Photoshop fluently, but few of them can correctly draw a human figure anatomically. Do they need this skill? Probably not, but they would certainly be better artists if they had it. In my opinion, this is a general trend, not necessarily related to AI itself, where technology gives us quick results but paradoxically degrades other skills that were once achieved through hard work. In a sense, we have a "instant gratification" society today.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
AI absolutely is having a major effect on computer science (and other education domains, of course). But I feel the bigger problem is what AI highlights: the vast majority of students are just in school because it's society's way of making them cogs in the economic growth machine. It's not too meaningful, and there are always jobs that they can get that don't require being independent, creative, and a thinking person. I mean, after getting a PhD, I got a job that used about 5% of what I learned in school. Most of the programming I did, I already learned in high school... To be honest, I think the world is being so disrupted by AI because before AI, we paved the way for it by making society operate where people don't matter, curiosity doesn't matter, and being a thinking individual doesn't matter. (The exception are the 1% very independent intellectual types who DO think and solve problems, but they are the exception who have carved themselves a niche where they can satisfy their intellectual urges and they generally care sufficiently about their curiosity so that they have found a place for themselves outside the majority).
- nwoli 2y ago
  > I think the world is being so disrupted by AI Is it? I’m seeing a lot of potential for AI/LLMs to distrupt in the future but I don’t really see it happening yet though
- apples_oranges 2y ago
  5% almost seems to be a lot..
- Hugsun 2y ago
  The truth is that most things we do that society values doesn't require/benefit from curiosity or being a thinking individual. I don't think we did anything in particular to make things like this. It's more a natural result of unrelated things in the structure of our society.
  - space_oddity 2y ago
    Is it possible to develop or learn deeply without a curiosity?
apples_oranges 2y ago
When I was struggling with some areas of maths at uni I realized, after checking other sources/books, that it was mostly due to how it was presented to me. After getting a fresh perspective most of it suddenly became obvious and I had learned it. I believe people's brains function differently enough, that they, to some extent at least, need to have somewhat tailored material to their "brain type". LLM AI is great because it can be asked again and again to describe things differently. That's what makes it so powerful as a learning tool.
- psbp 2y ago
  The interactive element itself could be really powerful. If you could put some restrictions on how much of the answer it can give you all at once, it's the perfect incremental learning tool.
space_oddity 2y ago
AI is changing our understanding of education and, overall, transforming the educational process. It's very difficult to label this process as either bad or good. It's just happening, and we need to adapt to it in a way that brings more benefit and development.
djoldman 2y ago
Intuitive in hindsight but wasn't obvious to me prior to reading: > One group was allowed to use ChatGPT to solve the problem, the second group was told to use Meta’s Code Llama large language model (LLM), and the third group could only use Google. The group that used ChatGPT, predictably, solved the problem quickest, while it took the second group longer to solve it. It took the group using Google even longer, because they had to break the task down into components. > Then, the students were tested on how they solved the problem from memory, and the tables turned. The ChatGPT group “remembered nothing, and they all failed,” recalled Klopfer, a professor and director of the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade. > Meanwhile, half of the Code Llama group passed the test. The group that used Google? Every student passed.
EncomLab 2y ago
I stand with Turing Award winner Alan Kay - "The real sciences - chemistry, physics, geography - don't have "science" in their names. Hobbies aspiring to be sciences do." and MIT MacVicar Fellow Hal Abelson "Computer Science is not really very much about computers. And it’s not about computers in the same sense that physics isn’t really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. It is about formalizing intuitions about process: how to do things." Far too many students approach Computer Science as if it is a "science" about computers that can be successfully learned by wrote memorization and chatGPT regurgitation. It's not - it's about understanding the art of formalizing an abstract problem and converting it into a form that is computable.

36 points by robin_reala 2y ago

Interesting. But will computer science education be relevant in the next 10 yrs when everyone is going to be a prompt engineer. An analogy is we used to memorize 20-30 phone numbers in our brain and with the advent of smartphones, we didnt have a need anymore and we stopped doing that and we dont know the numbers of our dear ones too. Imagine a situation when you lose your phone, your entire life will stall for moment. Similarly with prompts, I feel people will stop understanding the underlying tech and only become more and more dumber. Isn't it?

dns_snek 2y ago
I can't relate to your analogy, rote memorization is the least interesting and least useful part of knowledge work. Even if a future LLM could recall information with perfect accuracy it can't make you understand. > Similarly with prompts, I feel people will stop understanding the underlying tech and only become more and more dumber. Isn't it? You're probably right, posers will follow the path of least resistance, but others will continue to challenge themselves and build a deep understanding because they have an intrinsic desire to understand how systems, organizations, algorithms, etc., work. I think the second group (experts) will always be in demand.
thefz 2y ago
> But will computer science education be relevant in the next 10 yrs when everyone is going to be a prompt engineer. AI runs on computers so there will always be someone that needs to understand cpu microcode, firmware, operating systems... and at a lower level, electronics.
- krapp 2y ago
  Not many. AI will be designing the chips, running the factories, and writing the firmware and OS. A consequence of the normalization of AI will be the belief that low-level or mission critical programming is too important or complex to allow human beings into the loop, that it would be dangerous for humans to even know about such things.
  - jeremyjh 2y ago
    "Make shit up that sounds plausible" is actually not a useful strategy for running real world operations. Yet so many people are so certain as you are - when all they've seen is a convincing bullshit artist.
    - krapp 2y ago
      >"Make shit up that sounds plausible" is actually not a useful strategy for running real world operations. That's often how the real world works, though. Rich, powerful people decide this is going to be the future and they throw money and infrastructure at it until it happens or the economy collapses. Lather, rinse, repeat. I think in the short term you're correct because AI often doesn't live up to the hype (especially where the arts are concerned,) and it may take one or two AI winters and hype cycles to get there, but I've already seen AI do too many "impossible" things for me to be confident that it will remain bullshit forever.
      - jeremyjh 2y ago
        > That's often how the real world works, though. Rich, powerful people Are not running operations. They hire the people that do.
      - thefz 2y ago
        > That's often how the real world works, though. No. If your house stands up or the light switches on when you press a button, it is all because someone did their homework and was good at their job. Sometimes I wonder if people dream of an AI-driven (not the current AI, AGI) because it means they will not have to learn anything anymore.
  - EliRivers 2y ago
    Did it not turn out that AIs creating output based on AI-created output, iteratively, pretty quickly turns into nonsense? That would suggest that we'll need humans always to provide training material, and for that training material to be meaningful, it'll have to be created by humans who know what they're doing.
hulitu 2y ago
> Imagine a situation when you lose your phone, your entire life will stall for moment Maybe one should not rely on a single point of failure. You can back up your contacts.
nottorp 2y ago
> everyone is going to be a prompt engineer What you overlook and what this article says is that you need to know your shit already to be an effective prompt engineer, and using the prompts instead of an actual learning process to learn said shit does not work.
- msnkarthik 2y ago
  That is true, But my point is will people still try to learn about processes and understand the code in the background, when they get used to the ease of generating code as the speed of thought?

dailykoder 2y ago

tldr: Embrace the struggle and purposefully run into it.

irhag 2y ago

ACM used to stand for technical excellence. Now you see an increasing amount of articles that are basically mainstream commercials, ranging from defending CoC mobs to "AI isn't that bad, we have to roll over and adapt". Other institutions like the ACLU have also been hollowed out in a similar manner.

auggierose 2y ago
What is a CoC mob? People mobbing others with the Calculus of Constructions? Edit: Claude tells me CoC means "Code of Conduct".
- PeterStuer 2y ago
  I'm guessing 'Code of Conduct'. Basically, depending on your leanings, the 'safety' crowd 'mobbing' online to leash any AI R&D, though in practice it is more an 'AI for me but not for thee' lobby.

PeterStuer 2y ago

"I firmly believe AI cannot be fully autonomous … there’s always going to be humans and machines working together and the machine is augmenting the human’s capabilities,” For now, sure, but 'always'? What is the impossible part realy? What is so unique to human intelligence it can not be sufficiently modeled?

falcor84 2y ago
I've been seeing similar statements in pretty much every public release or statement about AI, almost as if it's a politeness or political correctness thing - something we must say to avoid offending the audience.
- ben_w 2y ago
  I think humans like to feel special — whatever it is that the speaker can do, a machine "can't", and when it then does do the thing "it was cheating": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over:_Kasparov_and_the_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Over:_Kasparov_and_the_Ma...
HPsquared 2y ago
There's always a human involved somewhere, even just as the owner or customer or beneficiary. Someone tells the "machine" what to do.
- ben_w 2y ago
  Some human who at some point told it or a predecessor what to do. A plane on autopilot can keep going until it runs out of fuel, even if all the occupants have died because of a slow air leak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_plane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_plane I think that still counts as "fully autonomous". Likewise, if I were to be foolish enough to take some existing LLM, put it in charge of a command line with an instruction such as "make a new AI based on copy of research paper attached, but with the fundamental goal of making many diverse and divergent copies of itself, convert this into a computer virus, and set it loose on the internet", that's "fully autonomous" once set loose. (Sure, current models will fall over almost immediately if you try that, as demonstrated by that not having been done already, but I have no reason to expect that failing is a necessary thing for AI, only a contingent limit on the current quality of existing models).

kkfx 2y ago

Is CS taught anyway? I sincere, even if a bit polemic question, from a not so old but still not so young architect/sysadmin. I've recently talk about some young PhD students in CS and well... - they do not have the most basic scripting skill, meaning no matter the language, they can't automate most of their personal common tasks - they do not know how to properly typeset documents, just some hyper-basic LaTeX/R/Python knowledge but not enough to quickly produce nice and dice docs - they do not know the OS they use every days Ok, they have some (more or less) solid basic knowledge even if not so well connected to form a big picture, but they are definitively unable to understand a not so complex whole infra, so they can't even design a basic one, how they can reach a "philosophical level knowledge" with such competences? How can they design the future if they do not even know enough of the past and the present? No LLM, even one without hallucinations, no bias in the model and so on can't fill the void. I know we still have no proper CS school in the world, but at least generations older then me have had a comprehensive enough knowledge, mine at least have learnt a bit with the experience to float semi-submerged by technical debt (an apparently politically correct synonym of ignorance, because that's is), but current students have even not enough basic knowledge to form a proper experience correcting and filling the void. Just as a stupid example, if I pack a credible speech with a bit of buzzwords and known to be truth elements here and there I can play nearly all, almost at PhD graduation, to the point they can't discriminate truth and fiction. I'm talk about Italian, French grad students, so those typically described as the most acculturated in the world...

qsort 2y ago
- they do not have the most basic scripting skill not CS - they do not know how to properly typeset documents not CS - they do not know the OS not CS There's a colorable argument to be made that we should fork from CS a new programming-centered major, with the former becoming effectively "mathematics 2", but in most CS courses OS architecture or practical programming isn't really the focus. NOTABUG.
- fancyfredbot 2y ago
  Glad you said this so I didn't have to. I'll add that I still think parent comment has some right to be perplexed. While it's true that these things aren't part of a CS curriculum you'd normally expect a CS student to be curious about these things and able to pick them up quickly. It's okay to be a bit surprised if they haven't, I think?

dooglius 2y ago

> Then, the students were tested on how they solved the problem Did they not know in advance about this? Seems obvious that the students who used chatGPT are not going to remember the code, and this was setup to give a negative result. The question ought to be whether they learned the concepts that were trying to be taught.

nottorp 2y ago
But if they knew the concepts they could have written the code.
- dooglius 2y ago
  The students were allowed to use LLMs, that doesn't mean LLMs wrote the entire codebase.

_7acn 2y ago

IMO, AI speeds up work and makes life easier, but it might be not necessarily great for humanity. I have my doubts, and I think only time will tell what the long-term effects are... I don't know Assembler, but I can effectively use SQL. Do I need to know Assembler? Probably not, but I would certainly be a better programmer in general, if I did. I recently completed additional studies in New Media Art. I noticed that students can use Photoshop fluently, but few of them can correctly draw a human figure anatomically. Do they need this skill? Probably not, but they would certainly be better artists if they had it. In my opinion, this is a general trend, not necessarily related to AI itself, where technology gives us quick results but paradoxically degrades other skills that were once achieved through hard work. In a sense, we have a "instant gratification" society today.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

AI absolutely is having a major effect on computer science (and other education domains, of course). But I feel the bigger problem is what AI highlights: the vast majority of students are just in school because it's society's way of making them cogs in the economic growth machine. It's not too meaningful, and there are always jobs that they can get that don't require being independent, creative, and a thinking person. I mean, after getting a PhD, I got a job that used about 5% of what I learned in school. Most of the programming I did, I already learned in high school... To be honest, I think the world is being so disrupted by AI because before AI, we paved the way for it by making society operate where people don't matter, curiosity doesn't matter, and being a thinking individual doesn't matter. (The exception are the 1% very independent intellectual types who DO think and solve problems, but they are the exception who have carved themselves a niche where they can satisfy their intellectual urges and they generally care sufficiently about their curiosity so that they have found a place for themselves outside the majority).

nwoli 2y ago
> I think the world is being so disrupted by AI Is it? I’m seeing a lot of potential for AI/LLMs to distrupt in the future but I don’t really see it happening yet though
apples_oranges 2y ago
5% almost seems to be a lot..
Hugsun 2y ago
The truth is that most things we do that society values doesn't require/benefit from curiosity or being a thinking individual. I don't think we did anything in particular to make things like this. It's more a natural result of unrelated things in the structure of our society.
- space_oddity 2y ago
  Is it possible to develop or learn deeply without a curiosity?

apples_oranges 2y ago

When I was struggling with some areas of maths at uni I realized, after checking other sources/books, that it was mostly due to how it was presented to me. After getting a fresh perspective most of it suddenly became obvious and I had learned it. I believe people's brains function differently enough, that they, to some extent at least, need to have somewhat tailored material to their "brain type". LLM AI is great because it can be asked again and again to describe things differently. That's what makes it so powerful as a learning tool.

psbp 2y ago
The interactive element itself could be really powerful. If you could put some restrictions on how much of the answer it can give you all at once, it's the perfect incremental learning tool.

space_oddity 2y ago

AI is changing our understanding of education and, overall, transforming the educational process. It's very difficult to label this process as either bad or good. It's just happening, and we need to adapt to it in a way that brings more benefit and development.

djoldman 2y ago

Intuitive in hindsight but wasn't obvious to me prior to reading: > One group was allowed to use ChatGPT to solve the problem, the second group was told to use Meta’s Code Llama large language model (LLM), and the third group could only use Google. The group that used ChatGPT, predictably, solved the problem quickest, while it took the second group longer to solve it. It took the group using Google even longer, because they had to break the task down into components. > Then, the students were tested on how they solved the problem from memory, and the tables turned. The ChatGPT group “remembered nothing, and they all failed,” recalled Klopfer, a professor and director of the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade. > Meanwhile, half of the Code Llama group passed the test. The group that used Google? Every student passed.

EncomLab 2y ago

I stand with Turing Award winner Alan Kay - "The real sciences - chemistry, physics, geography - don't have "science" in their names. Hobbies aspiring to be sciences do." and MIT MacVicar Fellow Hal Abelson "Computer Science is not really very much about computers. And it’s not about computers in the same sense that physics isn’t really about particle accelerators, and biology is not really about microscopes and petri dishes. It is about formalizing intuitions about process: how to do things." Far too many students approach Computer Science as if it is a "science" about computers that can be successfully learned by wrote memorization and chatGPT regurgitation. It's not - it's about understanding the art of formalizing an abstract problem and converting it into a form that is computable.