fuball63

Author writes an interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching essay about AI and society, with a main theme being about AI and its impact on our humanity.

All other top level arguments offer AI summaries that miss all of the interesting, nuanced, wide-reaching topics about AI and its impact on our humanity, and complain it was too long to read.

Truly a gem of irony.

It works for me, thanks!

Awesome, thanks for the links. I also tend to believe that it is a process over tooling question; you could even accomplish this with a text document and some checklists.

I'll preface this by saying this is all anecdotal evidence based on my personal observations, so it may not apply to everyone.

I often feel the same way, especially with tech. For those of us that remember before the internet was ubiquitous, the optimism and promise of the "information super highway" seems in stark contrast with what we see today. I try to keep in mind a few things:

First, we are living in a time that will be regarded as one of the most consequential in history. We're only ~20 years of nearly every person in the planet having access to all human information, instantly. Think of what people will say about this time period in 200 years. We are currently feeling the effects of growing pains.

Second, everything that embodies that early optimism is still there, its just harder to find. Which is related to my next point:

We are seeing diminishing returns in the benefits of constant consumption of media, energy, food, etc. There is so much choice out there, and the margins are so thin, that you need to consume more to be "satisfied". I often reflect on how many more full TV series we have all seen compared to a few generations ago. Or how much text we all read daily in the form of news, tweets, and forums, compared to the daily paper. Are we better for it? I think a lot of people don't feel better.

So that leads to the optimistic conclusions of this post. Generally speaking, we have more choice than ever before in history, across the board. But we have the burden of the responsibility of moderation and curation.

I find that when I feel this way, I try to shift my "consumption" mental state to "construction". We live in an amazing time to make things and distribute them. And because there's so much noise to compete with, you have to do it friend to friend, neighbor to neighbor. Its a glimpse of how the best parts of the "new world" can provide the best parts of the "old world".

I'm a new professor that was a devops engineer in the field until a year and a half ago. I understand that out in the field, we think professors are all just lazy out of touch academics, publishing papers to meet a quota; I used to think this myself. Some definitely are, but I think its important for the audience to understand that I am new to this, working very hard at being good at this, and primarily a teaching professor (I do not do research and teach a full load, no research or administrative duties). I teach computer science. These are my observations to the five points the author raises:

1. "First, attendance was sporadic with many of my students." I think this is true and always has been true for entry level college classes. You usually have a set of students who will never come, a set of students who will always come, and the middle is what you need to worry about. My solution to this is require attendance, which I first started this year. I've noticed remarkable differences in class; I'm more involved in learning, can fix problems earlier with less feedback time, and students are more engaged with the materials outside of class.

2. "Second, work outside of class was not done with consistency." This is a tough one. I was shocked to find how many students don't read anything. Not just the textbook; they don't read documentation or even the lab assignments. I'm sure this has been a thing since I was in school in the 2000's. I think this is a case of "students just don't know how to". I try to teach them how to read documentation, as it is a skill, not something natural to common life. I also think requiring short essays on reading material is superior over multiple choice because it makes "brute forcing" through the assignment less easy. You can just copy snippets from a web search, and that happens, but again, I'm just trying to move the "middle" here.

3. "Third, basic mathematics proficiency, whatever the claims of our admissions office, is greatly lacking." This is an interesting one too, especially in computer science. Most of my students in my entry level classes do not understand the concept of a filesystem. Using phones and chromebooks their entire life, they've never had to find files outside of a search field. Some know even less about how to use the computers we bring to class. I blame this on big tech making crappy products and driving people to appliance computers, but that's a rant for another day. This is surprising but not difficult to overcome; you just have to teach it in the first week. You lose valuable time you should be teaching the material to teaching "how to find your file to submit", but good pre-made materials can alleviate this somewhat.

4. "Fourth, students seemed reluctant to come to the office seeking help." This is definitely true, but also, they don't seek out reading the text/assignments for help or on campus tutoring. I also think this is something you have to teach; how to formulate a question based on something you don't know. I also want to mention here that cheating is rampant in computer science, so this is a more tempting approach for many students. Again, another issue for another discussion.

5. "Fifth, and finally, the introductory economics course, as stated in my 2014 Inside Higher Ed article, has remained somewhat constant." Other than the student learning outcomes (SLO's), courses in college are surprisingly flexible. I'm free to do pretty much what I want in the bounds of the SLO's. But: prepping a course is very work intensive, and it takes away from the student-centric work referenced in the other 4 points.

Anyway, in closing, just want to say that there are a lot of good hardworking, non-tenured, full time professors out there. Its the hardest I've ever worked in my entire career and the most challenging work I've ever done. A lot of the points raised in the article are true, and its not just "kids these days" but systemic problems ranging from early education, tech literacy, and motivations for even attending college.

I'm a new computer science professor coming from "industry" (as the academics call it) and can confirm that cheating is rampant. I've also noticed that it is an arms race you'll never win; cheaters will always find a way to cheat, and you can try to subvert them as best you can but will eventually end up harming legitimate students, which is unacceptable.

What I wish existed was an independent board exam that students had to take for employment. Many professions have this, from medical professionals, accountants, engineers, and the trades. My thought is this would disincentivize cheating and encourage deep learning at the university level, while offloading the cost of cheat detection and enforcement to a board, whose job is to solely evaluate if someone is capable of entering the workforce. A separation of concerns.

Another reason for board exams: when I was working, I was asked to do a bunch of flimsy engineering to satisfy management. It would be nice if I could respond "If I do this, I could lose my license, so no." Just like if someone asked a carpenter to build a house not up to code, or a dentist told the hygienist to do shoddy work to improve throughput.

If anyone knows anything about this, I'd love to chat, because its something I've been thinking about for a long time and I hope there's a good reason why it doesn't exist.