Technology

Capitalism went so hard it fucked up its future workforce

I can confirm this is not just in the land of burgers. Back in the war from October to December, I fleed to Germany and went to school there, and the stuff I saw where absolutely disgusting: kids were using ipads (ibads) given to them by the school, the computers ran windows on them, and every time even a single task came up, they would directly resort to artificial unintelligence. When the "ceasefire" started and I finally went back to Lebanon, most of the kids were using Artificial unintelligence to write their essays as well. I don't blame these kids, they don't know better, they don't know how artificial unintelligence is trained from the stolen work of the people, they don't know what non-free software is, and they don't know how these devices/software are tracking their every move. It's up to the school's to teach them such and schools are doing a terrible job both in America and internationally.

When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

Yikes.

It's breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.

• Teachers are overworked, underpaid, some still using course work that hasn't been updated in years despite what the field has advanced
• Students go into college due to the social expectation, some even unsure of what to get into as a career or even a class
• Exceeding above the course requirements does nothing for your GPA, an A that got a "110%" and an A that got 90% are the same.
• Students failing or passing still rack up debt for this social expectation
• Teachers still failing to pay bills for this social need

Yeah AI is the fault here, its not the system at large been fucked over since Reagan.

Prelude to the society Vonnegut wrote about in 'Player Piano' and Bradbury in 'Farenheit 451'

Ah yes, goal misalignment at its finest.

The students need high grades to get a job, so they focus on ensuring that happens (AI use being the easy path).

The teachers have progression targets to meet, so they focus on ensuring this happens (keep the AI vulnerable assessments).

If you want to change a module as a teacher, good luck getting that work loaded when you should be implementing AI in your curriculum ^_^

Yet they keep shoving it down our throats forcing us to delete entire systems to be rid of it

Imagine paying tens of thousands of dollars (probably of their parents saved money) to go to university and have a chatbot do the whole thing for you.

These kids are going to get spit out into a world where they will have no practical knowledge and no ability to critically think or adapt.

Is it really screwing up the education system, or is it just revealing how screwed up it already was?

Unpopular opinion:

I am a public school teacher and I support public schools, but there have been a lot of issues with our education system for a long time. Talk to any kid with ADHD who had to sit through 12 years, and they are indicative of a larger problem. Our idea of school now is as a place that teaches kids to behave and mostly follow rote instruction. Wouldn't it be so much better if we were teaching kids to be creative thinkers, work well in groups, problem solve, and think critically about the information they're getting? We know that's what school should be, but maybe now we will be forced to go there. Yes, there will be issues like learned helplessness and certain skills being difficult to teach, but it's kind of exciting too.

Though it's also possible that public schools will close and only the wealthy kids will be well-educated... can we not, please?

Yes and no. Remember that rich kids could always hire ghost writers. ChatGPT made that available to the masses, but that particular problem goes back centuries.

What we have seen is that the curriculum is often decided by a distant committee who actually doesn't understand life on the ground. In reality, there are easy ways for teachers to undercut the utility of ChatGPT, if they have the freedom to make changes. But that depends on teachers having control and the time to make changes to how they teach.

NGL, it’s really f*cking depressing when you give students 30m to create something of their own imagination, and they do it in the first minute with chatGPT and spend the other 29m playing games the phone and asking to “go to the bathroom” whenever they notice someone in the hallway.

The excuses you hear when you do something so oppressive as to request they keep their phones in their own backpacks for the duration of the task.

What's breathtaking is how clueless education system administrators are failing at their jobs. They've been screwing up the system for a very long time, and now they have a whole new set of shiny objects to spend your money on.

If we decide to ban smartphones from schools we should ban them from work too. I'm supposed to be writing an article right now and instead I'm here. Then we should ban them from streets so that people have to pay attention to where they are going and the things going on around them. At that point we'd have something like functioning human beings again instead of mindless zombies. We could still have terminals for plugging into the Machine but our time with it should be regulated (like it already is with research clusters) so that we don't waste energy. There, the whole problem is solved and all it takes is a global butlerian jihad.

That's going to be great fun when the AI bubble pops and the subscription prices go up exponentially.

On the other hand, there have been other opinions about education that say it should be about making or researching something. Give a student a goal and let them figure it out using chatbots or whatever.