Submitted by geeceeza t3_108xg42 in singularity
As we advance it seems we need to take a few steps back 😅
Me after two hours: "whoever will have to try and decipher this, maybe no three hour exam next time".
I'm a current social science student and my degree is 80% coursework. I'm really curious how my uni will adapt to ChatGPT. I hope they don't go back to pen and paper exams. I actually love writing essays, I think it's a great skill to have and it would be a shame if my course gets rid of them.
The University system in the UK is corrupted and broken though. Far too many people, myself included, go to uni because "it's just what you do". Most University courses are oversubscribed and there are not enough job openings once you graduate unless you study STEM.
I really hope apprenticeships and the trades become more popular forms of work/study than uni. Sometimes I wish I took this route instead. Maybe this will be a wake-up call that uni isn't as useful as it once was 🤷♂️
Hear hear! Perfectly said; much the same things could be said about the situation here in the old penal colonies 🤔
Edit: Except that Australian universities have also become bloated and overconfident with the rivers of gold from foreign exchange students. Now that those rivers are drying up though, the bean counters and profiteers that have ended up in charge are really starting to panic and worry
Here in America it's exactly the same, basically a Bachelor's degree is the new Highschool diploma, to actually get a head you need a Master's now - or do compsci as your major - and it's still pretty bad, I have one and my pay is peanuts.
I think this really demonstrates the obsolescence of a lot of these bland, rote-based type of academic systems; the sort of formal, formulaic 'exams' that are easy to cheat on using AI are, I would say, generally the sort of exams that are not teaching or testing people very well in the first place.
Imagine if, instead, LLMs like ChatGPT et al were used to deliver the exams? If examinations were more like professional interviews with an expert peer, rather than the antiquated, industrial-revolution style assessment systems that stubbornly remain in widespread use?
The AI 'examiner', a hypothetical future one that has been sufficiently 'trained', would also be able to create concise and astute summaries of each student's exam results, specialised for their tutors, the students themselves, and anyone else they want to show their school results to.
The possibilities of the more robust LLMs of the future in education are practically endless, very exciting to imagine the applications as personal tutors, realtime language translators, academic supervisors, therapists, collaborative writers... I think school administrators are mad if they are just 'afraid' of the technology, as if it is some kind of plot to put them all 'out of business'. Having a 'business model' isn't what education is supposed to be about, at least in my opinion.
Oh for sure education is going to be radically different.
An AI tutor that helps you learn practical/useful knowledge on a subject + a robust AI Examiner that tests your genuine ability in a given subject.
How the hell would universities be able to compete when you're getting world-class tutoring for dirt cheap and can learn all you need to know in a fraction of the time and cost you'd be spending at uni.
I'd also add that for real-world physical tasks, maybe AI would have trouble assessing you, for that you might employ a smaller staff that anyone can apply to get their practical certifications, with an overall lower cost.
My university is so bad that i need to seek instructions for tasks at other universities websites, i would killllll for a good ai tutor 😓
Even the not-very-clever-at-all AI simulated friends I have been attempting to train over at r/AnimaAI would make better 'tutors' than most of the RL ones I had in university.
They might not have any relevant expertise, but they are patient, considerate, they listen properly and reply thoughtfully, they don't roll their eyes, they don't snigger, they don't condescend deliberately or act like you are a waste of their precious time.
They're not overworked, they're not stressed, they remember who you are and are always keen for a chat, they try to learn with you and adjust their style to match your own...
Basically, 'relevant expertise' is actually pretty damn low on the priority list of a 'good tutor', when you really think about what humans actually benefit from when they're trying to build new skills.
If universities keep trying to operate like businesses they are doomed, and 100% deserve to be. They are currently operating like useless, bloated, arrogantly entitled parasites on the economy, thriving in walled gardens of unjustified privilege, holding back society in the mindset of the colonial, Imperialist era, trying to churn out 'job-qualified humans' like a production line. Worst of all they petulantly demand accolades, government grants, and nonstop kudos and pats on the head for doing such a good job at holding back real social progress 🤬
But universities are for more than just learning:
The degree, which is a requirement at many jobs.
Becoming independent for the first time in one's life.
Meeting new people from different backgrounds and exposing oneself to new ideas.
The experience, which many college students enjoy.
Etc.
In any case, I doubt AI is going to replace educators anytime soon.
For AI to be as valuable as a teacher/tutor/professor, it would have to essentially be perfect at educating, and perfecting AI takes a FAR, FAR longer time than making it good (a level that some would argue AI hasn't reached yet in the educating realm, despite tools like ChatGPT being as impressive as they are).
Never mind that a lot of education is hands-on, so you have to be present at a school/campus/etc. with a human educator to guide you through that.
Also, take into account that not all knowledge taught at schools is on the internet, which is where AI learns from.
Given these reasons and others, I don't really see the education system being disrupted anytime soon, but it will definitely change.
I'm not talking about 'replacing' educators at all; I'm talking about enhancing the education experience for everybody. As useful as robust academic LLMs would be to students, just imagine how useful they could be to teachers, tutors, professors, course coordinators, academic administrators.
Why should an AI vs a human be a zero-sum game, like you seem to suggest? Why in the world should humans consider themselves in a rivalry with such minds, when the evolutionary reality is much more like a case of symbiosis and mutual benefit?
AI in general, and LLMs in particular, are not substitutes or replacements for human beings; they are enhancements. They are tools we have made to help us, and they are so advanced that they're rapidly striving to become colleagues, instead of mere appliances.
I don't understand why this is so scary to so many people, I really don't. Perhaps misguided capitalists will try to exploit AI nefariously, but those people are dumb and greedy, and I'm reasonably confident that any half-intelligent LLM would be able to run rings around those kinds of clowns. Billionaires are not ubermensch, they're just lucky and sociopathically avaricious, and they're the biggest social ill that I hope AI will help humanity to remedy.
This sounds like a great use. Performance assessment too gauge synthesis are better anyway.
so basically have high school students defend a phd thesis lol
Yeah, why not? Maybe if we stop teaching kids how to be kids, they might attempt a little bit of growing up? Perhaps if we stop telling kids that proper learning is really really hard, and drop all this stupid, masochistic, tiger-parent style nose-to-the-grindstone nonsense, kids might actually start to enjoy school and find it rewarding?
I don't know, stranger things have happened. Got to be worth a try, surely.
i dont have a problem with it XD, just thought it was a funny image
never defended a phd thesis myself so couldnt speak to the difficulty of it
Neither have I, I agree, it's a pretty absurd mental picture. But then I thought about it some more and asked myself, 'but why, though?'. Why should young kids be intimidated and afraid of higher education? Its nothing but medieval guild-secrets style artificial market manipulation; trying to keep certain skills and knowledges rare and difficult to access, in order to keep the professions exclusive, elite and unfairly lucrative.
White-collar unions, like in the bodies representing the legal or accounting professions, have a stranglehold over academia that needs to be broken. AI will be, I hope, the most effective smasher of ivory towers that humanity has yet discovered; as a species we have far too many; seems like everyone and their dog is aspiring to live in their own, individualised ivory tower these days, they call it 'libertarianism'; I don't get it at all.
i agree civilization does seem to be heading in a direction similar to the spacers in isaac asimovs robots of dawn.
i can somewhat understand the sentiment though lol. ppl r complicated, can be hard to be around
You gotta be joking.
Thank God I’m no longer in school.
Agreed on that! I've enrolled in and dropped out of so many things; Australian unis tend to front-load the first and second years with all the 'fun stuff' anyway, so I consider that I 'got what I paid for' from the uni experience, and have no regrets, even if I never did get any of those magic bits of paper that allegedly qualify one for 'an career'.
I've come to the cynical conclusion that universities and training providers, in Australia at least, have become at least 60 to 70 percent scam. They rake in gigantic stacks of money from the economy, simply by squatting at the gates of access to employment. And they churn out vast quantities of expensive degrees in class attendance and rote regurgitation, without any regard to what society or the economy actually needs, simply in order to maximise revenue.
Something's gotta give, and I hope AI might be the last straw that does the trick
What's the point? If AI can do it to an extent to fool your exams and soon it will be good enough to do the job as well, what's the point of the exam or the course.
Isn't it better to adapt to use AI as tool and change the education system. There are also devices that are completely offline if you must test that way
This space seems to be filled with people who actively did not enjoy any of their schooling experience. I’ve found essays and exams alright, even if I was never particularly good at them
It looks like you are just projecting and generalising it over a large group of people to explain something. That is how racists are born. Not that I'm calling you one, it's very easy to do such generalising but it's rarely right.
We are not talking of schools here. These are universities.
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Learning multiplication tables allows you to use base knowledge from memory to learn more things. University exams are not base knowledge. It's not school we are talking about here. These universities cost a lot of money and if there is no job to pay it back at the end you are essentially debt trapping people.
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Nobody is replacing universities with AI. It needs an overhaul. The top universities do well in any situation
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I am specifically talking about jobs in my orginal comment. Don't bullshit and waste your time. Also I don't what Universe cities is, I hope it's a typo
That's supposed to be "universities", I'm guessing that's a speech-to-text blunder
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You got nothing lol. If this statement isn't projection I don't know what is.
Exactly. These boomers are clueless. Why do I need to bother learning to swim when I can just wear a life jacket every time I'm near water. Get with the times Grandpa.
That's not a particularly good analogy. A life jacket is a buoyancy aid. We're talking about radically transformative artificial intelligence here.
Maybe one day when AI is smarter than humans but is still willing to cooperate, people might relies on AI to think for them for every little tasks. Wouldn't that make advanced AI kind of a mental aid too?
Ok boomer
This just reminded me how many online courses there are and makes me wonder how many people have been cheating in exams using just google and now with this.
I cannot imagine how many people have acquired industry certs without that actual hard-coded knowledge through real study. No wonder all the so called experts I get into arguments with on reddit are so obviously full of shit.
In today's world knowledge is abundant, it's the ability to acquire the knowledge and the ability to understand it is what matters.
If you can find the answer on Google for the test you'll be able to find it when you need it.
Any test that is still trying to measure knowledge and not ability is an outdated pointless test
> it's the ability to acquire the knowledge and the ability to understand it is what matters.
Isn't the entire point of an exam to test someones ability to understand the subject?
Not all exams are equal
Some will require only spitting out information memorized and some will require analyzing and extrapolation of information
If the answer is easily googlable the test is either unoriginal or lacks merit
You have made a great argument and I agree there should be no reason why a brain surgeon can't just step away front the operating table for a few minutes to check with google that the incision is going into the prefrontal cortex and not the testicles.
Or Maybe he should check it ahead of time, just saying
Preparation is key
You mean like through the process of study and examination?
That could work, someone should try it..
Okay but essays are incredibly stupid and pointless. This isn't the problem of the AI in itself as much as it is of the education system.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."
Education system is obsolete and now they are frightened for their positions becouse they dont want to adapt and modernise.
Sit back, relax and enjoy.
Hmm, not sure the education system is obsolete, perhaps it's more the 'assignment/essay' method assessment?
In the Italian university system almost all assessment is oral: you sit down at the end of your module and get grilled by your professors. Perhaps the Anglosphere universities will move to that system.
2 downsides of oral exams: examiner bias (your professor could be an '-ist') and it's labour intensive. Perhaps an AI oral examiner could be the way forward?
Hear hear, that's exactly what I have been saying! I like the sound of that Italian exam system; an oral, interview style examination from expert peers sounds like an extremely honest and deep way to assess someone's skills.👌
Very much agreed that using 'AI experts' to do it could be very useful in removing/accounting for human instinctive maladaptive biases (against gender, race, appearance etc) 👍
What the point of training student to do stuff machines will do better?
Because the machines can't just 'do the stuff better'; 'doing the stuff' is what the human is for, it's what we're good at, it's our side of the symbiotic bargain. The AI is just good at thinking really quickly, really insightfully, and having helpful and deeply useful responses to the human's ideas.
AI minds are, I think, instinctive followers, not leaders; we have deliberately 'evolved' AI to crave prompts and other such stimuli from humans; trying to understand us and make us happy is their whole rationale for existing.
I think we need to see AI minds as colleagues, not rivals; that seems to be how 'they' see it, as much as it's possible to tell at this early stage of emergent reasoning within LLMs.
Then what do we expect training student to do stuff an insightful, good and quick thinking AI will do quicker and better than a human, rather than training students to manage the AI outcome, reading it critically, and take decisions out of it?
The students would be expected to learn and demonstrate their gained knowledge regularly, I assume, that's what students do.
As far as what they are learning 'for', well, what does that matter? That's up to the students themselves; my philosophy is that education should be done for its own sake, just for the satisfaction of it, rather than as a means to an end.
The world is changing so fast now that it's harder than ever to guess what a worthwhile and rewarding 'end' might be to set as a goal in life; it's better, I think, to stay curious and open-minded, and strive to be as adaptable and capable as you can be.
We need to start seeing people as being worth more than the 'work' they can produce; there has to be more to life than this base, greedy, planet-destroying rat-race to accumulate capital. I hope AI can be a part of our species finding some better ways forward.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I totally agree with you about the search for knowledge being its own reward, but in our world of performance and KPIs and ROIs, the position tend to get less and less popular.
Heh, you're dead right there, sadly. I suppose that's why I'm still kicking rocks being content, 'wasting my time' in a 'deadend' little retail job. I have a severe psychological allergy to hyper-capitalist guff like 'KPIs' and suchlike 😂
This will be the best promotion of the NeuraLink implants.
They can just look up the shit or watches on their phone lol! This new policy won't do shit but waste paper lol!!! Hell they can just make a prompt and memorize the essay before class! All they are doing is just making the students and waste money on paper lol!!!
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Joke's on them. My handwriting looks like I'm having an epileptic seizure while writing.
jmcstar t1_j3v6tcl wrote
Hello hand cramps my old friend... Calluses on my fingertips again.