5 ms·

Sadly I don’t see how our current social paradigm works for this. There is no history of any sort of long planning like this or long term loyalty (either direct

Sadly I don’t see how our current social paradigm works for this. There is no history of any sort of long planning like this or long term loyalty (either direction) with employees and employers for this sort of journeyman guild style training. AI execs are basically racing, hoping we won’t need a Schwartz before they are all gone. But what incentives are in place to high a college grad, have them work without llms for a decade and then give them the tools to accelerate their work?

Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)? Last September, Tyler Austin Harper published a piece for The Atlantic on how he thinks colleges should respond to AI. What he proposes is radical—but, if you've concluded that AI really is going to destroy everything these institutions stand for, I think you have to at least consider these sorts of measures. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/09/ai-colleges-universities-solution/684160/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/09/ai-colle...
- conception 6mo ago
  Well, we are already rolling over and dying (literally) on everything from vaccine denial to climate change. So, yes, we are. Obviously yes.
  - dragontamer 6mo ago
    In the US it is dying off. Not so in plenty of other countries. Hopefully US reverses the anti-science trend before it's too late
    - conception 6mo ago
      These movements are growing in every western nation. The trend has been growing over decades. It would be nice to see it reverse but seems unlikely before calamity.
      - adriand 6mo ago
        It’s a deliberate process powered by rightwing and capitalist interests designed to create a dumber, less educated and more distracted population. A war as stupid as the one with Iran would not have been possible three decades ago. As ill-advised as the Iraq war was, Bush at least spent months explaining the rationale and building support for it, successfully. Now that’s not needed. I saw interviews with young Americans on spring break and they were so utterly uninformed it was mind-blowing. Their priorities are getting drunk and getting laid while their country bombs a nation “into the stone ages”, according to their president. And it’s not their fault: they are the product of a media environment and education system designed for exactly this outcome.
        vinceguidry 6mo ago
        I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track. Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or fooled. What the world does when they finally realize Democrats and Republicans are simply two sides of the vast apparatus suppressing the will of the people by any means necessary will be... spectacular.
        foobarchu 6mo ago
        I was there as well, the bush presidency lasted my entire middle and high school career, and I got the chance to vote for Obama in my senior year. I remember things very differently. Everyone cared about the Iraq war, gay-straight alliance was one of the most up and coming clubs, and political music was everywhere. Green Day had their big second wave with American Idiot, System Of A Down was on top of the world, Rock Against Bush was huge, anarcho-punk like Rise Against was getting big. I'm not a teenager anymore obviously, so it's entirely possible I'm just missing it, but I've seen very little that compares to those sort of movements. On the other hand, most millennials I know are still wildly politically active.
    - throwaway27448 6mo ago
      The replication crisis is hardly unique to the US and is greatly exacerbated with the use of AI.
- mrob 6mo ago
  >What he proposes is radical It sounds entirely reasonable and moderate to me.
  - senordevnyc 6mo ago
    It's neither reasonable nor moderate, which is why it'll never happen.
  - throwaway27448 6mo ago
    Also entirely ineffective. Banning individual behavior won't prevent collective dysfunction and will only harm honest actors. The only answer that makes sense is reforming the acceptance of work to be resistant to the inevitable (ab)use of AI.
    - mrob 6mo ago
      It's the exact same anti-cheating method used to great effect in top level e-sports. You can't trust competitor-supplied hardware, so the only option is for the institution to ban it and supply all hardware itself. Higher education is primarily about competition between job candidates. Eliminating cheating needs to be top priority or the whole system will collapse.
      - throwaway27448 6mo ago
        > Eliminating cheating needs to be top priority or the whole system will collapse. It's going to collapse regardless because of the replication crisis. You might as well tackle the hard problem and figure out how to integrate replication into acceptance, or the consensus publication is intended to represent is meaningless. This is true regardless of whether a human or a robot is performing the work.
- senordevnyc 6mo ago
  Article is paywalled, so perhaps you could just summarize his proposal?
  - Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
    > At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologies. To that end, smartphones and laptops should also be banned on campus. If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Work and research requiring students to use the internet or a computer can take place in designated labs. [...] Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected. You can access the full article at https://archive.is/zSJ13 https://archive.is/zSJ13 (I know archive.is is kind of shady, but it works).
    - boothby 6mo ago
      > If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper. > Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected. Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.
      - slumberlust 6mo ago
        Are you suggesting we should do nothing if the solution has any flaws?
- pxc 6mo ago
  I was pretty interested until I got to this part: > Another reason that a no-exceptions policy is important: If students with disabilities are permitted to use laptops and AI, a significant percentage of other students will most likely find a way to get the same allowances, rendering the ban useless. I witnessed this time and again when I was a professor—students without disabilities finding ways to use disability accommodations for their own benefit. Professors I know who are still in the classroom have told me that this remains a serious problem. This would be a huge problem for students with severe and uncorrectable visual impairments. People with degenerative eye diseases already have to relearn how to do every single thing in their life over and over and over. What works for them today will inevitably fail, and they have to start over. But physical impairments like this are also difficult to fake and easy to discern accurately. It's already the case that disability services at many universities only grants you accommodations that have something to do with your actual condition. There are also some things that are just difficult to accommodate without technology. For instance, my sister physically cannot read paper. Paper is not capable of contrast ratios that work for her. The only things she can even sometimes read are OLED screens in dark mode, with absolutely black backgrounds; she requires an extremely high contrast ratio. She doesn't know braille (which most blind people don't, these days) because she was not blind as a little girl. Committed cheaters will be able to cheat anyway; contemporary AI is great at OCR. You'll successfully punish honest disabled people with a policy like this but you won't stop serious cheaters.
  - senordevnyc 6mo ago
    Yeah, this proposal is likely straight up illegal.
  - Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
    You don't have to agree with his precise solution, and in fact I'm not sure whether I do. However, I found the article useful because it got me thinking about the universe of things we could be considering, if we really do think AI is poised to destroy education as we know it.
    - irishcoffee 6mo ago
- aduty 6mo ago
  > Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)? My 40-some-odd years on this planet tells me the answer is yes.
  - pasquinelli 6mo ago
    you might be right but 40-some-odd years is a tiny amount of time.
    - aduty 6mo ago
      Sure, relative to the universe, but it's more than those who haven't had idealism beaten out of them by the world.
      - pasquinelli 6mo ago
        no, not relative to the universe, relative to recent history. 40 years is not much in the context of history, which is the topic. your life experience is small and unimportant at the world-historical scale.
        aduty 6mo ago
        So what are you, 200?
FrojoS 6mo ago
> There is no history of any sort of long planning Sure there is. Its the formal education system that produced the college grad.
- conception 6mo ago
  … between employees and employers. The proposal that everyone pay for college until they are in their 40s doesn’t seem viable.
  - FrojoS 6mo ago
    Maybe, but there is a trend towards more and longer education. More college graduates, more PhD grads, etc.
  - Izkata 6mo ago
    With loans, that's kind of how it works now...
jayd16 6mo ago
Some folks need to touch the hot stove before they learn but eventually they learn. If AI output remains unreliable then eventually enough companies will be burned and management will reinstate proper oversight. All while continuing to pay themselves on the back.
joe_the_user 6mo ago
Well, the astrophysics situation is special because, as the article notes, there aren't breakthroughs that can be externally verified. Other projects' success will be proportional to their number of Schwartz' and so it seems unlikely they disappear. But they may disappear for areas in which there is no immediate money.
TrnsltLife 6mo ago
I guess that Anathem novel was prescient. We need academic monasteries where people go in and have no access to tech for a period of time. At least no LLMs/AI. They think with their heads and their chalkboard and their sand pits like the geometers of old.

Wowfunhappy 6mo ago

Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)? Last September, Tyler Austin Harper published a piece for The Atlantic on how he thinks colleges should respond to AI. What he proposes is radical—but, if you've concluded that AI really is going to destroy everything these institutions stand for, I think you have to at least consider these sorts of measures. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/09/ai-colleges-universities-solution/684160/ https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/09/ai-colle...

conception 6mo ago
Well, we are already rolling over and dying (literally) on everything from vaccine denial to climate change. So, yes, we are. Obviously yes.
- dragontamer 6mo ago
  In the US it is dying off. Not so in plenty of other countries. Hopefully US reverses the anti-science trend before it's too late
  - conception 6mo ago
    These movements are growing in every western nation. The trend has been growing over decades. It would be nice to see it reverse but seems unlikely before calamity.
    - adriand 6mo ago
      It’s a deliberate process powered by rightwing and capitalist interests designed to create a dumber, less educated and more distracted population. A war as stupid as the one with Iran would not have been possible three decades ago. As ill-advised as the Iraq war was, Bush at least spent months explaining the rationale and building support for it, successfully. Now that’s not needed. I saw interviews with young Americans on spring break and they were so utterly uninformed it was mind-blowing. Their priorities are getting drunk and getting laid while their country bombs a nation “into the stone ages”, according to their president. And it’s not their fault: they are the product of a media environment and education system designed for exactly this outcome.
      - vinceguidry 6mo ago
        I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track. Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or fooled. What the world does when they finally realize Democrats and Republicans are simply two sides of the vast apparatus suppressing the will of the people by any means necessary will be... spectacular.
        foobarchu 6mo ago
        I was there as well, the bush presidency lasted my entire middle and high school career, and I got the chance to vote for Obama in my senior year. I remember things very differently. Everyone cared about the Iraq war, gay-straight alliance was one of the most up and coming clubs, and political music was everywhere. Green Day had their big second wave with American Idiot, System Of A Down was on top of the world, Rock Against Bush was huge, anarcho-punk like Rise Against was getting big. I'm not a teenager anymore obviously, so it's entirely possible I'm just missing it, but I've seen very little that compares to those sort of movements. On the other hand, most millennials I know are still wildly politically active.
  - throwaway27448 6mo ago
    The replication crisis is hardly unique to the US and is greatly exacerbated with the use of AI.
mrob 6mo ago
>What he proposes is radical It sounds entirely reasonable and moderate to me.
- senordevnyc 6mo ago
  It's neither reasonable nor moderate, which is why it'll never happen.
- throwaway27448 6mo ago
  Also entirely ineffective. Banning individual behavior won't prevent collective dysfunction and will only harm honest actors. The only answer that makes sense is reforming the acceptance of work to be resistant to the inevitable (ab)use of AI.
  - mrob 6mo ago
    It's the exact same anti-cheating method used to great effect in top level e-sports. You can't trust competitor-supplied hardware, so the only option is for the institution to ban it and supply all hardware itself. Higher education is primarily about competition between job candidates. Eliminating cheating needs to be top priority or the whole system will collapse.
    - throwaway27448 6mo ago
      > Eliminating cheating needs to be top priority or the whole system will collapse. It's going to collapse regardless because of the replication crisis. You might as well tackle the hard problem and figure out how to integrate replication into acceptance, or the consensus publication is intended to represent is meaningless. This is true regardless of whether a human or a robot is performing the work.
senordevnyc 6mo ago
Article is paywalled, so perhaps you could just summarize his proposal?
- Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
  > At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologies. To that end, smartphones and laptops should also be banned on campus. If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Work and research requiring students to use the internet or a computer can take place in designated labs. [...] Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected. You can access the full article at https://archive.is/zSJ13 https://archive.is/zSJ13 (I know archive.is is kind of shady, but it works).
  - boothby 6mo ago
    > If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper. > Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected. Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.
    - slumberlust 6mo ago
      Are you suggesting we should do nothing if the solution has any flaws?
pxc 6mo ago
I was pretty interested until I got to this part: > Another reason that a no-exceptions policy is important: If students with disabilities are permitted to use laptops and AI, a significant percentage of other students will most likely find a way to get the same allowances, rendering the ban useless. I witnessed this time and again when I was a professor—students without disabilities finding ways to use disability accommodations for their own benefit. Professors I know who are still in the classroom have told me that this remains a serious problem. This would be a huge problem for students with severe and uncorrectable visual impairments. People with degenerative eye diseases already have to relearn how to do every single thing in their life over and over and over. What works for them today will inevitably fail, and they have to start over. But physical impairments like this are also difficult to fake and easy to discern accurately. It's already the case that disability services at many universities only grants you accommodations that have something to do with your actual condition. There are also some things that are just difficult to accommodate without technology. For instance, my sister physically cannot read paper. Paper is not capable of contrast ratios that work for her. The only things she can even sometimes read are OLED screens in dark mode, with absolutely black backgrounds; she requires an extremely high contrast ratio. She doesn't know braille (which most blind people don't, these days) because she was not blind as a little girl. Committed cheaters will be able to cheat anyway; contemporary AI is great at OCR. You'll successfully punish honest disabled people with a policy like this but you won't stop serious cheaters.
- senordevnyc 6mo ago
  Yeah, this proposal is likely straight up illegal.
- Wowfunhappy 6mo ago
  You don't have to agree with his precise solution, and in fact I'm not sure whether I do. However, I found the article useful because it got me thinking about the universe of things we could be considering, if we really do think AI is poised to destroy education as we know it.
  - irishcoffee 6mo ago
aduty 6mo ago
> Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)? My 40-some-odd years on this planet tells me the answer is yes.
- pasquinelli 6mo ago
  you might be right but 40-some-odd years is a tiny amount of time.
  - aduty 6mo ago
    Sure, relative to the universe, but it's more than those who haven't had idealism beaten out of them by the world.
    - pasquinelli 6mo ago
      no, not relative to the universe, relative to recent history. 40 years is not much in the context of history, which is the topic. your life experience is small and unimportant at the world-historical scale.
      - aduty 6mo ago
        So what are you, 200?

FrojoS 6mo ago

> There is no history of any sort of long planning Sure there is. Its the formal education system that produced the college grad.

conception 6mo ago
… between employees and employers. The proposal that everyone pay for college until they are in their 40s doesn’t seem viable.
- FrojoS 6mo ago
  Maybe, but there is a trend towards more and longer education. More college graduates, more PhD grads, etc.
- Izkata 6mo ago
  With loans, that's kind of how it works now...

jayd16 6mo ago

Some folks need to touch the hot stove before they learn but eventually they learn. If AI output remains unreliable then eventually enough companies will be burned and management will reinstate proper oversight. All while continuing to pay themselves on the back.

joe_the_user 6mo ago

Well, the astrophysics situation is special because, as the article notes, there aren't breakthroughs that can be externally verified. Other projects' success will be proportional to their number of Schwartz' and so it seems unlikely they disappear. But they may disappear for areas in which there is no immediate money.

TrnsltLife 6mo ago

I guess that Anathem novel was prescient. We need academic monasteries where people go in and have no access to tech for a period of time. At least no LLMs/AI. They think with their heads and their chalkboard and their sand pits like the geometers of old.