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:
Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
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.
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.
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.
The difference is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.
If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all.
These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.
Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.
Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.
Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.
(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)
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:
https://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.
In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.
Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
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.
Your employer gave you your job based on your exam results.
The exams aren't the thing that matter, they're an experiment to measure the thing that matters. Which, presumably, still matters at work!
Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.
Fortune cookie ass statement.
Your career is more akin to the totality of school than it is to any specific facet of it imo.
The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
Disagree. School exams test for academia-readiness too. And sometimes the schools and lecturers are filled with ideology irrelevant to real work.
Career exams tend to be a mix but a lot less ideology.
One of the main reasons safety standards are written in blood.
We cannot be boosting AI slop like this
abolish homework
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.
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.
The difference is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.
If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all.
These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.
Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.
Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.
Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.
(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)
you know we let social media companies cause massive harm over 2 decades; but clearly, this will be deifferent!