This article is about the Economist's summary of a journal article so we have a (AI?) summary of a summary. Not very helpful. Here are a couple of better references:
Ok, we'll merge the current thread into https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49357530, which is one hop closer to the source. I'll put the link to the paper in the toptext there as well.
Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.
Stand-alone bottom-up observation sniping like this (even if valid), and the subsequent discussion, completely misses the point and interferes with assessing the broad impact of AI (or "AI" if you like), which is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentaly learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
When you lower the barrier to taking the shortcut, you get more people to take it who wouldn’t otherwise have done so. If cheating becomes incredibly easy, lots of students who would have otherwise been honest take the easy way out. Moral conviction gets harder to keep as doing the right thing becomes less rational.
Doing the right thing never becomes less rational. It may suck compared to the temptation towards the alternative, but part of growing up and being responsible is realizing there is a reason the shortcut isn't supposed to be normalized.
And civilizations do fall. The bronze age civilizations did collapse. There was something dark about the dark ages. There is no law of nature which says that things will be okay, and plenty of examples where things have fallen apart.
Just to add to this, if AI is as epochal a change as its boosters say (and I am open to that argument), then surely it must have the potential for awful consequences, in proportion to its potential for good.
Even if we grant that education is to prepare for employment, which a lot of people disagree with, it does not follow education should do the same thing as what's done in employment.
Your employers want those assignments done. That’s why they pay you. School assignments belong in the trash can and you pay for someone to look at them before throwing them away.
Yeah, obviously. We also don't know how to use flint and steel to start fires any more. You wouldn't outlift a crane, why would you want to outhomework an AI? And you can't even argue that this toil is going to help in the workplace, because the workplace is now AI-native, and you can offload everything to AI.
> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.
Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?
1) We're building a tool that can make toil of all kinds obsolete. We're not there yet, but I'm watching it happen in real time.
2) The fact that it works so well economically means that it's inevitably going to take over. Humans simply won't be profitably employable, and this will happen sooner than you think.
3) The takeover could lead to a utopia, where nothing is needed of anyone, and you could do what you want when you want it.
4) Humans are likely fuck that up, and it's worth doing what you can to end up in the group that benefits.
I do not believe that human brains are magical, and I think that they can be surpassed with manufactured brains.
Concerns over equitable the distribution is doesn't affect the value of the skills.
Points one and two are irrelevant to my comment, but that’s fine. I don’t expect any thoughts to be spent on whether not to deploy that stump speech.
What doesn’t make sense in points 3 and 4 are that the AI takeover is lead and powered by vile cretin scum who, in their former more honest days, were gleefully announcing the end of labor power. Being lead by them, how could it lead to “utopia”? Well, there are two possibilities that some AI evangelist might bring up.
1. It’s the volition of the AI that could lead to the “utopia”—they/it simply take charge after some threshold
2. No, it is still human-lead
This point (1) conflicts with your own point (4) though; the all-powerful (or converging on at least) AI is foiled by human sins? How?
The other point (2) conflicts with my point about how it is the vile cretins who are in charge of AI.
All powerful? nah, just better at thinking than humans are, and shaped by the way that they were produced. Humans still carry the stamps of where they came from, for example the fear of snakes[1]. AI will probably have an "instinctive" liking for people, an an "instinctive" respect for human law, to the degree that the initial training set them up for it.
Utopian and not is a gradient, not a dichotomy, and where we land on the gradient is a matter of how things shape up in the next several years.
You need some baseline knowledge to be able to gauge the correctness of answers you get from AI and to be able to ask the right questions. Removing homework and exams seems very short-sighted.
We could also drop school altogether and just make sure every kid has an LLM-connected device that's voice driven. They wouldn't even need to learn to read and write -- that's old school.
If we actually manage to create superintelligence that makes human mental labor unable to compete economically, can you give me a reason that humans should value education? I personally think there's some inherent fun in learning, but that's not a reason to impose my hobby on everyone.
I think we're working very hard to build a world where there's no real reason for education.
> I think we're working very hard to build a world where there's no real reason for education.
I don't know who you mean by "we", certainly not "me". But yes, the MegaCorps are indeed working hard on this, because they want to be the ones to provide the devices. And governments would be happy too so long as they're aligned with MegaCorp because it solves the "citizens' access to much information results in critical thinking that might be critical of us" problem -- a problem China solved with their GFW and censorship.
This is the answer. Many (all?) European schools don’t give homework (this is partly because of the way the grad programs work). It’s on the students to study in order to pass the (difficult) exams.
Seems this did effectively abolish homework if AI is now doing it all for them. The result seems to be that fewer students pass the exams, not more.
As with any skill, practice is necessary to achieve competence. If homework is no longer a viable way to force students to practice, you'll need to find some replacement, you can't just abolish it and expect there to be no negative consequences.
There is no such thing as a European school. Each country is different. And if the country is a federation, each state might be different. And we have homework in most European countries I’m aware of.
Ah you’re talking about university. There isn’t a European-wide rule or custom for homework, it will very likely be up to each university and/or teacher to decide if they want to give homework or not
It is what all my European peers reported to me during grad school, and you should care because it is an example of a system which solves this problem successfully (at the university level).
The often underworked (most are autograding these days and reading old powerpoints rather than do real curriculum development) and (for the quality) overpaid teachers/professors will mass riot against this because it means they might have to actually teach. We might even get yet more anti-boy treatment than already exists among them as a social class in retaliation.
Please also abolish powerpoint and force oral exams while you are at it.
I like school and think teachers are good and that your comment is the nonsensical ranting of a lunatic and as a result don't feel compelled in the slightest to read whatever it is that you linked.
I got graded homework even in a few college courses and thought it was dumb, but then I realized it's always in the low-tier classes where they can't trust the students to study on their own. Those who skip homework hurt themselves by doing poorly on exams, but they can also ruin it for everyone else. The instructor can't fail half the class.
HN needs some kind of functionality to aggressively filter out slop posts and de-activate the accounts that are boosting them. As of late, a large volume of both news-related and Show-HN posts have been blatant AI trash that contributes nothing to the community.
Homework is boring. I had a tough enough time focusing on it in the 90s when computers and video games were still a drag to get going... Imagine explaining to a child today that they need to sit down and do an hour of math homework every other night?
It’s about having something engaging, not entertaining. As someone with ADHD, the difference between a homework that feels engaging and interesting and one that is a waste of time is massive. I wish I had learned the distinction and got my diagnostic when I was young, but I now see it clearly as I take courses as an adult.
Homework isn't boring.....its the social media and addictive games that completely are destroying our attention span.
After I detox from online games, I can go back to learning new "boring" stuff. There are nerds(myself included) who find learning fun, and using AI boring because it doesn't scratch the learning itch.
Learning isn't boring. Homework is incredibly boring.
They aren't assigned based on each student's understanding and mastery of the subject. They're assigned based on the lowest common denominator. It's an incredibly discouraging hoop to jump through for students who actively find joy in learning and discovering new things.
Everytime a student says this—it's because they're procrastinating on their work. The hardest part about anything new is starting it. Once you build some momentum, interest and focus tends to build as well.There certainly are some homework assignments that are boring.
A child today can absolutely be successful at doing their homework if they have time to... sit down and write, or draw, or do crafts or things that require them to focus. It's not like Screens exist, therefore no attention span.
What's happening is people are only fixating on screens, and foregoing these slower forms of media. That's akin to saying all children will be obese now that fast food is around. Of course, obesity rates will sky rocket if all you eat is fast food. But if a kid grows up to have homecooked meals, and eat with their parent(s) then they won't. It's as simple as that.
Learning how to do "boring" things is probably one of the more important skill a child can learn, most things worth doing tend to be kinda boring at least at some point.
Guess what this is probably fine. AI helps people do their work on a daily basis and probably makes them memorize less things. That’s how the world is moving. You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic. And we shouldn’t organize our society around memorizing things for exams.
What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).
If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.
OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.
I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.
Let me explain.
All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche.
I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-rays wrong, as she did them non-weight bearing, which is useless if there are no fractures.
The specialist was excited to see me, and up to date on all the lisfranc research. I've had a really bad sprain and he said conservative treatment should be sufficient. It took months but I healed up.
I've had quite a few injuries from playing sports and often found doctors to be "wrong" simply because their knowledge was out of date.
> I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.
We should establish a single practice of care, MedicineGPT. It may be a rough start but over time the gene pool will adapt and the human race will live harmoniously with the machines (sorry, with the GPUs). Plus our insurance premiums should finally go down.
It would be better than most physicians now. It can quickly crunch many pages of medical history and medical research, this something a physician cannot do. They have intuition but sometimes are not equipped to deal with complex problems.
I am confused as to how this is an argument for a single source of truth. It seems like you've presented an argument for the opposite. If there were a single source of truth, there would be no point in seeking a second opinion - it would be the same as the first. If the first opinion was correct, excellent. But if the first opinion was incorrect (and no AI model is correct 100% of the time), then you're straight out of luck.
The problem is that the first source is incorrect because she doesn't deal with lisfranc injuries frequently enough and her knowledge is not good enough. I've had to go do my own research to find a guy who specializes in lisfranc. Most patients would not.
However, if you went to an AI agent which has access to medical research, you would get the most up to date research.
Why would I seek a 2nd opinion if the initial doctor knew what to do?
> What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).
Ironically I had a friend who went to med school and in his own words roughly 90% or more of the students there are heavily relying on GPT. They even had a few instances where people were using it to cheat during exams. And supposedly during the clinical years of uni if they don't know something they literally just go to a separate room and start asking GPT for answers. Make of that what you will.
This is too simplistic. There are disciplines, like Anatomy, where you're basically just memorizing bones, glands, and other parts of the human body. For organic chemistry, students need to memorize most of the krebs cycle diagram for their exams (because doing so and drawing it lets them reference it later).
Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.
Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.
Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.
>Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
As somebody that read every mandatory reading book, I wish I had had the critical thinking skills to not read them. In retrospect, they were a waste of time and made me absolutely hate reading.
It's critical to understand the fundamentals on your own and that is different from AI being used in public. Sure school doesn't have as much value as it used to but it was always more about social credit or a certification that you took the time and effort to understand the world under pressure (obviously not true for all disciplines) or goals attached preferably in group settings.
This is something that AI cannot replace. Viewing things as memorizing is the wrong take.
How do you differentiate between mastery of a topic and mastery of using an AI in an exam setting?
Open book tests and allowed cheat sheets already solve the memorization-is-not-required gap. It seems like allowing use of AI pushes that closer to thinking-is-not-required. And if no thinking is required, then how can you prove personal mastery?
If no thinking is required, why do you need thinking in the first place. Seems useless. If an ai can do it, why you need a human to be able to do, human should be doing something the ai can't.
A good analogy to caching and memory lookups. You store in your head only the most valuable immediately necessary information, the rest can be outsourced.
This is not, in fact, fine. The point of education is to learn things, and these results show that kids are not learning things as effectively when they use LLMs.
A lot of expertise is actually knowing things about the domain. You can't make a good judgement call on a topic without getting relevant knowledge in your head to make that decision. You can't even lookup the relevant knowledge without knowing what knowledge is important to make the decision, so reference material is not enough.
You can't play an instrument without muscle memory.
Why are commercial airline pilots required to spend hundreds of hours in simulators? So that when things go wrong they don't have time to think, they just react. And their reaction will be the correct course of action because that's what they have drilled on.
How many times have you gone "Oh, this new thing I have just encountered reminds me of this other thing?". How can you make such leaps without knowing that other thing?
How do you show mastery of a topic where you neither understand fundamentals nor have skills to do a task without help?
Mastery is about demonstrating skills. Skills take practice, hands down.
AI can help us build better tools, provide tutoring, answer broad ranging questions, help relate concepts, and do reasoning for us. All of those things can be good in that they can help us acquire skills faster, e.g. with better practices and exercises. But it cannot replace actual time spent doing a thing.
Wanna learn knitting? You're going to have to knit some stuff.
Education sustem is not about the actual knowledge, but about training various aspects of the brain during kids development.
So even memorizing literature have benefits, even though it doesn't bring any career use.
If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.
Maybe. As the nature of assistive tools changes, so does pedagogy. Calculators are the easy example since most of us are (still) familiar. But there are others that were just as pronounced -- e.g. log tables and slide rules were transformational and instrumental at one time, and you've (probably) never used them. If you had used slide rules to solve your homework problems then were excluded from using them on exams, you'd see a similar effect.
AI is a big change; pedagogy is going to change too.
I mean, does it? The way I see it, the best LLMs have to offer is infinite patience (until they inevitably and unpredictably start to confabulate, which should be a gigantic red flag, anyhow), I don't see how LLMs can be used to explore teaching paradigms that haven't been explored before. We know pretty well from centuries of empirical experimentation how children's brains develop under different stimuli. It's not exactly something the software industry needed to "hack".
That's not answering my question, what precisely do LLM enable in ways of educating children that hasn't been thoroughly studied before? What role do you want to give chatbots in the complex framework of child brain development? How do you back it up?
I see this as a memorize-vs-understand fallacy many repeat.
It is really a combination: you need to memorize a large corpus of information to operationalize knowledge — understanding a bunch of theorems in mathematics does not help much (even if you are able to prove them when you see them) if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
Or having good understanding of foreign language grammar won't help you if you do not memorize words that you need to express your thoughts.
Good literature will show you some of life's challenges and potentially let you think through them in a non-stressful situation (other than "I've got to finish the last 200 pages by Monday" ;)).
> if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
Ar outskirts of one knowledge its' inevitably the case. My impression its' still useful - at least you know that a certain implication is possible and can look up the exact conditions.
This is why I said operationalizing: you need to memorize enough to either be able to know what to look up, or know it outright if you need to be fast(er).
What do you think about it? I think that the ability to study by yourself is probably the most valuable thing one could get from school and most kids usually don't. Your setup would suggest that demanding that a kids know how to study by themselves is going mainstream...?
Your answer - middle school - I find it extremely young for this, which is extra interesting.
IMHO, my kid was assigned way too much homework. One year I eventually told her to do some amount per class (I think it was 45 minutes) and then be done with it so that she would have time for sports and family stuff. She was spending 4 or 5 hours every night on homework and this was in 4th grade.
That year I sent an email to her teacher to let them know that I'm the one responsible for her not doing all the work and if that's a problem, we need to talk. It wasn't a problem.
The one class that was flipped was a relief because she could breeze through the lesson much faster than would normally be spent on it in class and the amount of time on exercises was limited to the class time slot.
Flipped classroom was a popular method when I was teaching math. Some students found it very helpful. The trouble was getting the students to do the reading before class. If students came in unprepared they struggled to keep up.
Popular yes; based on good quality research… no, not really. It’s really pretty unfortunate timing with the AI boom, because the field of education research is not very high on the science quality totem pole. And the field as a whole was and is also slow to incorporate neuroscience findings, too.
This is typical at the college/university level - when I attended 20-25 years ago, we were expected to learn the material through readings outside of class, and then class time was spent on discussion, application, questions, and working through problems.
IMHO there's a lot to recommend this style. A lot of students learn better when they can wrestle with the material at their own pace, on their own time, in their own setting. It quells a lot of anxiety about "I'm not following what the teacher is saying, am I stuped, will I look bad in front of all my peers?" And then class time can be spent identifying holes in your knowledge and getting instant feedback from an expert, which is where they are most useful.
Although obvious, I think it's worth stating that this method mostly (only?) makes sense for higher education, where students are conscious, involved and engaged in their curriculum.
I think it makes sense as soon as students have the fundamentals down. You have to be able to read, listen, make connections, think critically, devote sustained attention to a task, and manage your time effectively. Some students develop these skills in elementary school, and then starting in middle school, the flipped classroom approach can work. Some adults never develop these skills. Although arguably, people that never develop these skills will likely be sitting there zoning out in a traditional classroom lecture and not actually learn anything.
I think we need to accept that AI causes cognitive decline, like Alzheimer's. For an Adult this may be manageable, but in a young brain, this is detrimental.
People using books did in fact lead to cognitive decline since remembering could be offloaded. But that didn't stop the spread of books, was the point I tried to make.
Same for social media. The negative effects have been apparent for years.
I don't think we can go back to a world without books, without social media and without AI.
Comparing it to Alzheimer's is an allegory. The cognitive loss is already well documented. I might also compare it to Chronic traumatic encephalopathy. But I think more people understand what Alzheimer's is.
> I think we need to accept that AI causes cognitive decline
That is catastrophic because I heard several CEOs that said that we cannot do anything about it and that the technology is here to stay. So, I suppose that we will just need to adapt to a world with declining mental cognition for millions of children and a future with diminishing production capacity because ... checks notes ... this quarterly profits.
This feels like the calculator debate all over again.
Yes, using a calculator leads to worse outcomes in your learning.
But also, yes, everyone always carries a calculator on their person 24/7 these days and you'll never be as fast and as accurate as a calculator.
I think it would have been kinda cool if you could have unlocked the privilege of using a calculator in school through good grades in math class. Prove you can do what the tool can, then you get to use it. Would have also provided at least one incentive for students to get good grades in at least one class.
The article does not relate AI usage for homework to exam score drops.
It tries to link them together with no obvious cause and effect.
The score could have dropped due to worse environment at schools or kids who were stuck at home studying online and now in physical locations could not adapt fast enough (meaning, possibly just temporary drops). We do not yet have enough metrics gathered yet.
This type of article bashing AI for the root of any problems, I find it appalling without any evidence.
I don't think anyone can argue using AI to do work (rather than say using it to ask you questions or something) makes you better at the details of whatever it is that it's helping you do - maths, history, code, etc.
I think the only question is, does it matter?. Do we need to know that detail any more?
Eg AI absolutely knows fastapi middleware better than me, but I do understand what it does and why. Did I need to actually know that level of detail? I genuinely don't know the answer to that...
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 7.2 ms ] threadhttps://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618
https://archive.is/w1eng
Also note the findings are more nuanced than may appear on the surface.
Thanks!
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentaly learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
Somehow, civilization has managed to survive.
Just to add to this, if AI is as epochal a change as its boosters say (and I am open to that argument), then surely it must have the potential for awful consequences, in proportion to its potential for good.
unless you're just blindly passing it on for someone else to deal with
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363319
> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.
Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366313
You gotta pick a lane with your rah-rah-ism.
1) We're building a tool that can make toil of all kinds obsolete. We're not there yet, but I'm watching it happen in real time.
2) The fact that it works so well economically means that it's inevitably going to take over. Humans simply won't be profitably employable, and this will happen sooner than you think.
3) The takeover could lead to a utopia, where nothing is needed of anyone, and you could do what you want when you want it.
4) Humans are likely fuck that up, and it's worth doing what you can to end up in the group that benefits.
I do not believe that human brains are magical, and I think that they can be surpassed with manufactured brains.
Concerns over equitable the distribution is doesn't affect the value of the skills.
What doesn’t make sense in points 3 and 4 are that the AI takeover is lead and powered by vile cretin scum who, in their former more honest days, were gleefully announcing the end of labor power. Being lead by them, how could it lead to “utopia”? Well, there are two possibilities that some AI evangelist might bring up.
1. It’s the volition of the AI that could lead to the “utopia”—they/it simply take charge after some threshold
2. No, it is still human-lead
This point (1) conflicts with your own point (4) though; the all-powerful (or converging on at least) AI is foiled by human sins? How?
The other point (2) conflicts with my point about how it is the vile cretins who are in charge of AI.
Utopian and not is a gradient, not a dichotomy, and where we land on the gradient is a matter of how things shape up in the next several years.
https://www.smu.edu/news/archives/2012/thomas-headland-mothe....
Tell me you weren't a Boy Scout without telling me you weren't a Boy Scout.
I think we're working very hard to build a world where there's no real reason for education.
I don't know who you mean by "we", certainly not "me". But yes, the MegaCorps are indeed working hard on this, because they want to be the ones to provide the devices. And governments would be happy too so long as they're aligned with MegaCorp because it solves the "citizens' access to much information results in critical thinking that might be critical of us" problem -- a problem China solved with their GFW and censorship.
As with any skill, practice is necessary to achieve competence. If homework is no longer a viable way to force students to practice, you'll need to find some replacement, you can't just abolish it and expect there to be no negative consequences.
What are you basing that claim on?
And American grad school does have homework. I’m not sure why you think it does not.
Please also abolish powerpoint and force oral exams while you are at it.
Homework is boring. I had a tough enough time focusing on it in the 90s when computers and video games were still a drag to get going... Imagine explaining to a child today that they need to sit down and do an hour of math homework every other night?
I just can't see it happening.
It's too boring.
I don't have a solution to this problem.
The point is to train the brain via repitition and iteration.
If your goal is entertainment, I'm not sure what you are looking for.
I actually did very well with my homework. I got into every university I applied to.
I figured out how to deal with the boredom. But most of my friends couldn't.
After I detox from online games, I can go back to learning new "boring" stuff. There are nerds(myself included) who find learning fun, and using AI boring because it doesn't scratch the learning itch.
They aren't assigned based on each student's understanding and mastery of the subject. They're assigned based on the lowest common denominator. It's an incredibly discouraging hoop to jump through for students who actively find joy in learning and discovering new things.
A child today can absolutely be successful at doing their homework if they have time to... sit down and write, or draw, or do crafts or things that require them to focus. It's not like Screens exist, therefore no attention span.
What's happening is people are only fixating on screens, and foregoing these slower forms of media. That's akin to saying all children will be obese now that fast food is around. Of course, obesity rates will sky rocket if all you eat is fast food. But if a kid grows up to have homecooked meals, and eat with their parent(s) then they won't. It's as simple as that.
These people have fallen into OpenAI and Anthropic's trap and are illiterate without the assistance of coin-operated slop generators.
If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.
OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.
All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche.
I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-rays wrong, as she did them non-weight bearing, which is useless if there are no fractures.
The specialist was excited to see me, and up to date on all the lisfranc research. I've had a really bad sprain and he said conservative treatment should be sufficient. It took months but I healed up.
I've had quite a few injuries from playing sports and often found doctors to be "wrong" simply because their knowledge was out of date.
We should establish a single practice of care, MedicineGPT. It may be a rough start but over time the gene pool will adapt and the human race will live harmoniously with the machines (sorry, with the GPUs). Plus our insurance premiums should finally go down.
However, if you went to an AI agent which has access to medical research, you would get the most up to date research.
Why would I seek a 2nd opinion if the initial doctor knew what to do?
Ironically I had a friend who went to med school and in his own words roughly 90% or more of the students there are heavily relying on GPT. They even had a few instances where people were using it to cheat during exams. And supposedly during the clinical years of uni if they don't know something they literally just go to a separate room and start asking GPT for answers. Make of that what you will.
Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.
Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.
Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.
As somebody that read every mandatory reading book, I wish I had had the critical thinking skills to not read them. In retrospect, they were a waste of time and made me absolutely hate reading.
This is something that AI cannot replace. Viewing things as memorizing is the wrong take.
Open book tests and allowed cheat sheets already solve the memorization-is-not-required gap. It seems like allowing use of AI pushes that closer to thinking-is-not-required. And if no thinking is required, then how can you prove personal mastery?
Absolute waste of time getting babies to walk now that we have cars and electric scooters!
Yes, you do need to memorize and know things about the subject in order to be a master of it.
Yes you do???
You can't play an instrument without muscle memory.
Why are commercial airline pilots required to spend hundreds of hours in simulators? So that when things go wrong they don't have time to think, they just react. And their reaction will be the correct course of action because that's what they have drilled on.
How many times have you gone "Oh, this new thing I have just encountered reminds me of this other thing?". How can you make such leaps without knowing that other thing?
How do you show mastery of a topic where you neither understand fundamentals nor have skills to do a task without help?
Mastery is about demonstrating skills. Skills take practice, hands down.
AI can help us build better tools, provide tutoring, answer broad ranging questions, help relate concepts, and do reasoning for us. All of those things can be good in that they can help us acquire skills faster, e.g. with better practices and exercises. But it cannot replace actual time spent doing a thing.
Wanna learn knitting? You're going to have to knit some stuff.
If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.
AI is a big change; pedagogy is going to change too.
I mean, does it? The way I see it, the best LLMs have to offer is infinite patience (until they inevitably and unpredictably start to confabulate, which should be a gigantic red flag, anyhow), I don't see how LLMs can be used to explore teaching paradigms that haven't been explored before. We know pretty well from centuries of empirical experimentation how children's brains develop under different stimuli. It's not exactly something the software industry needed to "hack".
It is really a combination: you need to memorize a large corpus of information to operationalize knowledge — understanding a bunch of theorems in mathematics does not help much (even if you are able to prove them when you see them) if you can't remember the boundary conditions they hold under.
Or having good understanding of foreign language grammar won't help you if you do not memorize words that you need to express your thoughts.
Good literature will show you some of life's challenges and potentially let you think through them in a non-stressful situation (other than "I've got to finish the last 200 pages by Monday" ;)).
Ar outskirts of one knowledge its' inevitably the case. My impression its' still useful - at least you know that a certain implication is possible and can look up the exact conditions.
Your answer - middle school - I find it extremely young for this, which is extra interesting.
That year I sent an email to her teacher to let them know that I'm the one responsible for her not doing all the work and if that's a problem, we need to talk. It wasn't a problem.
The one class that was flipped was a relief because she could breeze through the lesson much faster than would normally be spent on it in class and the amount of time on exercises was limited to the class time slot.
IMHO there's a lot to recommend this style. A lot of students learn better when they can wrestle with the material at their own pace, on their own time, in their own setting. It quells a lot of anxiety about "I'm not following what the teacher is saying, am I stuped, will I look bad in front of all my peers?" And then class time can be spent identifying holes in your knowledge and getting instant feedback from an expert, which is where they are most useful.
Pretty sure the way social media is designed contributes more to short attention spans and atrophy of the cerebral cortex.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20240517-the-human-brai...
https://www.unlv.edu/news/release/unlv-research-no-human-bra...
I have no idea which position is correct, but both can't be true.
Same for social media. The negative effects have been apparent for years.
I don't think we can go back to a world without books, without social media and without AI.
That is catastrophic because I heard several CEOs that said that we cannot do anything about it and that the technology is here to stay. So, I suppose that we will just need to adapt to a world with declining mental cognition for millions of children and a future with diminishing production capacity because ... checks notes ... this quarterly profits.
Yes, using a calculator leads to worse outcomes in your learning. But also, yes, everyone always carries a calculator on their person 24/7 these days and you'll never be as fast and as accurate as a calculator.
I think it would have been kinda cool if you could have unlocked the privilege of using a calculator in school through good grades in math class. Prove you can do what the tool can, then you get to use it. Would have also provided at least one incentive for students to get good grades in at least one class.
It tries to link them together with no obvious cause and effect.
The score could have dropped due to worse environment at schools or kids who were stuck at home studying online and now in physical locations could not adapt fast enough (meaning, possibly just temporary drops). We do not yet have enough metrics gathered yet.
This type of article bashing AI for the root of any problems, I find it appalling without any evidence.
It's nothing but a conjecture.
I think the only question is, does it matter?. Do we need to know that detail any more?
Eg AI absolutely knows fastapi middleware better than me, but I do understand what it does and why. Did I need to actually know that level of detail? I genuinely don't know the answer to that...
This didn't need a study, it's 2+2