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.
this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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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.
Prelude to the society Vonnegut wrote about in 'Player Piano' and Bradbury in 'Farenheit 451'
And Isaac Asimov's The Feeling of Power, a short story about a man who can do mathematics in his head, a skill long forgotten after computers do all calculations for humanity.
basically idiocracy, in idiocracy, it was the AI supercomputer that was running the whole society for the 500years, it was assigning jobs, or removing jobs, or doing other stuff.
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.
Where are these kids getting these ideas?
That only works if you're already fantastically wealthy.
Jfc.
Y'all are surprised?
It's breathtaking how quickly the President of the United States and his good South African buddy can topple a superpower.
Don't worry they've defunded all of the bodies that might have compiled any fair statistics so they can deny the downfall for a few years.
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 ^_^
It’s kinda funny cause usually isn’t it the AI agent that has a misaligned goal? Like when I say don’t die, and it discovers that pausing Tetris technical means you never die. But now it’s students that have been given the wrong goal: pass the test by whatever means (e.g. use AI).
That's the real joke behind it all, the use of AI is such a problem because we're turning education into a stamp dispenser - everyone needs an A* to get anywhere.
AI has given every student a path to this - however if industry stopped demanding that universities train their damn staff for them, and instead insist we teach their future staff how to be trained (as well as giving them subject specific knowledge), then we'd see the misalignment vanish. Once the need for an A* to land a good job is gone, then so is the misalignment.
If success is determined by a metric, the metric will go up. Any relation to actual increase in value is coincidental. Lol. Long ago someone tried to incentivize programers by giving abonus per bug fixed. Didn't last long before they blew through the bonus budget and realized the programers were putting in bugs so they could fix them. (Urban legend really... probably)
AI is bullshit and has no place in a school curriculum outside of computer science. Keep that shit away from children if you want them to have any critical thinking skills.
In practice you're right, and I'm not going to even try to argue the real life consequences AI has caused. However I disagree that AI doesn't have any place in the education system. Used on the appropriate problems, AI is a tool that makes a few things which were challenging to compute much easier. One example is large AI models folding proteins for medical research. A problem that took a computer a day or more to solve can be solved in hours on the same equipment using AI software. That's just one application that admittedly isn't useful to school aged children but it's still one useful example of AI. There are others. Students should be taught how to use AI properly, and part of that is teaching them what it's good at and what it'll never be able to do.
The part I get angry about is disgusting Tech Bro Billionaires trying to shove AI into every piece of software they can. Just like the block chain they're over promising and there's a bubble. Unlike block chain technology AI actually has a few useful applications and because of that it'll take a lot longer that BitCoin to finally level out.
The protein-folding ai is not the same as the generative ai.
It's really unfortunate that the conversation around AI lumps these different technologies together
Generative ai is a tool that must be used carefully else the kids will take the easy path.
AI is probably the worst invention sense the atom bomb.
Yet they keep shoving it down our throats forcing us to delete entire systems to be rid of it
- 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.
Well yeah the education system is the burning tire fire and AI is tech bros pouring gasoline all over it
Exactly
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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.
Do you really think schools teach critical thinking and practical knowledge? State mandated education is geared to produce people who are smart enough to run the system and stupid enough not to question it. The fact that this dullard factory is being distrupted by what is essentially an electronic parrot speaks volumes about the whole charade.
This was true before AI, it's just going to be 10x worse with AI
We’ve been needing to rework education for years now anyway. At least this will force the teachers to change & adapt, whether they like it or not.
Teachers are generally quite adaptable. We have asjustes for AI in our classrooms. We have adjuated to not teaching up to standards because we would be fined by our states for pushing some imaginary agenda. We have changed our entire curriculum the week before classes start because the County curriculum specialist had a bright idea.
The reality is that we have to navigate arbitrary law, we have to not do what's best for our classroom and teaching style because someone who hardly spent any time in a classroom thinks they know better. We have to do all this while being blamed for the behavior of students when their parents block the school phone numbers.
The key concern with reforming social programs like public education is that they are ongoing concerns with impacts that extend decades into the future. "Creative destruction" in public education is liable to cause far more harm than good if the transition is not handled with knowledge and care.
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