Study design: "David Stromberg of Stockholm University and Victor Lei and Wu Yanhui of the University of Hong Kong set out to fill the gap. They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where ai adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group."
As with most training the journey is the point, not the destination.
That said, I think smart use of AI could help. It could explain concepts in a way that might help you understand better, it could probe your knowledge in a more dynamic way by tailoring questions, and so on. This requires the AI be restrained by some harness, not free to write down the answers for you.
I believe AI is basically an amplifier of bad and good. I’m cynical about the world and assume it will be used more for bad than good, but I don’t doubt some of the best people in every field will be using AI to amplify their work in good ways.
In the case of some management, is causing them to unlearn, forgetting about proper review and maintenance practices.
Career exams tend to be a mix but a lot less ideology.
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.
> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
(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.)
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.
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.
By what means? Have you got a magic wand that will turn 3rd graders into mature functional adults who will study on their own without homework?
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.
Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.
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...
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.
Does it? https://www.jstor.org/stable/749255
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.
And I could also call most of those things assignments instead of exams and nobody would bat an eye.
Your analogy was both thoughtless and stands up to no scrutiny
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")
Is an acceptable answer.
Asking people to be conclusive on the spot is a recipe for acting on bad data. There are too many biases related to stature, they interfere with accuracy.
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 incidentally 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.
unless you're just blindly passing it on for someone else to deal with
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. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).
It’s the exposure to feeling under pressure, creativity of the mind etc - the less you expose a human to ‘suffering’ the more useless they become.
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 every kind 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. Sipping wine on the beach isn't mutually exclusive with a great deal going to the winners.
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 skills.
I get it, there's a strong anti-AI vibe here because of point 4. I'm somewhat worried, but I'm also really excited about the possiblilities, and I don't think we can avoid going to a fully AI future no matter how anti-AI you are; we can only figure out where to set the dial on how the rewards get shared.
> The study followed 27,000 pupils aged 12 to 18
(Third grade is 9-10 years old I believe.)
What are you basing that claim on?
This sounds really strange, never heard of.
BTW / Offtopic: I have read some weeks ago, today if you are hosting a party for your kids birthday, parents are preparing "give away bags" for handing over when leaving the party
Please also abolish PowerPoint and force oral exams while you are at it.
Teachers are also luddites as a social class. Math teachers cried about calculators yet everyone of them who refused to adapt did disservice to their students (especially anyone doing statistics). My state's education system is utter trash despite being well off economically because of strong teachers unions keeping them from undergoing even a tiny bit of scrutiny.
They do not deserve the social credit/grace that they get. They are ultimately gatekeepers, whose extremely biased decisions in grading/treatment of their flocks decide which kid grows up on the streets and which kid grows up to eat lobster thermador every day.
Teachers also should not be disciplinarians. Children with discipline problems bad enough to disrupt a whole class should be thrown out of the class room as basically the only thing a teacher does for "discipline". The "right to education for the shit kids means we can't do that" framing is such trash for those who want an education and will inevitably be disrupted by a small minority of terrible students.
Also it's interesting that one of the only other things Max Stirner wrote about besides philosophy was education and his myriad problems with it (given his history as a school teacher).
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-fals...
GP said exactly the same thing.
I agree with GP’s broader point, which is that you cannot have understanding without a specific set of baseline facts. The student studying only those facts and never achieving the understanding they are meant to support is a tragedy of our education system.
There are people who need to understand microbiology at a specific level and they cannot derive it all on the fly. They can achieve better memorization through understanding but I personally have found rote memorization can be an essential first step in some disciplines.
These people have fallen into OpenAI and Anthropic's trap and are illiterate without the assistance of coin-operated slop generators.
Thank god for china!
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. What is the definition of "mastery" that you are using? What are the Things being memorized?
Yes you do???
I do like it though, and I like that college generally leaned that way more (and was better balanced, as it had substantially less time in classrooms, so you could study during the day).
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.
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