Imagine an AI bot endlessly churning out turgid prose on ‘neoliberalism.’
I’ve spent much of my career arguing that the main function of higher education is not to teach useful skills [or even useless skills], but to certify student’s employability. By and large, the reason our customer are om campus is to credible show, or “signal”, their intelligence, work ethic, and conformity. While we like to picture education as job training, it s largely a passport to ether real training that happens on the job.
How will AI change our system? To start, we should be against any major disruption. Students will not abandon traditional colleges in masse for virtual AI training center. And since most majors are already barely job-related, students will generally stick with their existing majors. What will change for students is workload and evaluation. Professor are used to assigning papers and projects to be done outside of class. Using AI to chart on such work will soon be child’s play. Harsh punishment for cheating might preserver the status quo, but colleges generally give characters a slap on the wrist, and that won’t change. Unmonitored academic work will become optional, or a farce. The only thing that will really matter will be exams. And unless the exams are in-person, they’ll be a farce, too. I’m known for given difficult tests, yet GPT-03already gets A’s on them. AI will also change the labor marked itself. As a general rule, new technologies take decades ro realize their full potential. The first trans-Atlantic phone call wasn.t place until 1956, almost 80 years after the invention fo the phone. E-commerce was technically feasible in the mid-s’90s, but local mall still endure. We should expect AI to slowly disrupt a wide range of industries, including computer science itself. This will, in turn, slowly alter student’s career aspirations. But as an economist, I scoff a the idea that AI will permanently disemploy the population. Human want share unlimited, and human skills are flexible. Agriculture, was humanity’s dominant industry for millennial when technology virtually wipe out agricultural jobs, we still found plenty of new work to do instead. I do not, however, scoff at the idea that AI could drastically reduce employment in computer science over the net tow decades. Hans will specialize in whatever AI does worst.
What about us humble professors? ? Those pf is with tenure have nothing to worry about. Taxpayers and donors will keep funding us no matter how useless we become. If you don’t have tenure, students will keep coming and your job will go on – unless you’re at mediocre private college with a small endowment.
Except for cutting-edge empiricists, hovers, AI will make research even more a scam than it already is. Consider the ease with which the Sokal Hoac or the “grievance studies” hoax were perpetrated. AI will be able to do the same on an industrial scale. If you want a picture of the academic future, imagine a bot writing a thousand turgid pages a second about ; neoliberalism, ”patriarchy,” and “antiracism”0 forever. Outside of the most empirical subject, the determinants of academic status will be uniquely human – networking as sheer charisma – making it a great time to reread Dale Carnegie’s Jow to Wind Friends and Influence People. – Bryan Caplan is professor of economics at George Mason University.