[ExI] pre-singularity blues

[efc at swisscows.email]

Hello spike,

As a teacher, let me add my experience about this to the thread. I teach 
IT at vocational schools (1.5 year long program that sits between high 
school and university complexity/content wise) and the students are 
affected in this way as far as I can see:

* The best students don't care. They have discovered a new passion in life 
and get enormous pleasure out of understanding the concepts and building 
things themselves.

GPT might be used as an aide, but generally less than expected, since the 
students actually enjoy figuring things out.

* The worst students have become even worse. They are not motivated from 
the start, and some cheated on the entrance exam with chat gpt, and 
thought they'd be able to chat gpt their way through the program (not 
possible the way I teach) and when forced to think for themselves, and 
when I grow tired of answering the same question (where is the arrow key, 
or what does the "cd" command do in linux) for the 5:th time, it is plain 
to everyone, including themselves, that the program is not the right place 
for them.

* The average students... here it gets complicated! You have some who 
become brilliant students, and you have some who go through the motions 
and who might rely too much on gpt, but are good enough to hide it, but 
you do get suspicious but you cannot quite prove it (or rather, not 
justify wasting the time to prove it), so here I don't know actually.

In terms of skills, the companies who are involved in developing the 
curriculum are all pretty much in agreement that what they want are 
passionate young people with a knack for problem solving. They don't want 
gpt warriors and prompt writers, since those tasks are already on their 
way to get automated.

So that's what I'm seeing from the educational trenches.

Best regards,
Daniel


On Mon, 4 Dec 2023, spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:

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> My son is taking Principals of Physics, which is calculus based.  Those of you who have taken that class know it requires gallons of
> sweat if one is a mere mortal, such as me and nearly everyone I know.  I had to work for that one.
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> He wrote this to a group of friends:
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> Funny anecdote: In my university physics class (mechanics), we meet twice a week in person as usual. However, we have required online
> discussions for participation points every week. One must answer the provided prompt and respond to two other people. One poor soul
> in the class, however, was not so careful with their "use of technology", shall we say:
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> [IMAGE]
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> {end of his post}
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> OK then.  If one is going to cheat, one should at least make a half-assed effort to cover one’s tracks.
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> This has me wondering about something I don’t recall coming up in all our singularity discussions over the years.
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> It is perfectly reasonable to think that AI will be sufficiently advanced before the singularity to demotivate students.  They can
> think about a problem, ask ChatGPT, then realize GPT “understands” physics better than the student could, even if the student is
> willing to spill the gallons of sweat to learn the physics.  So… the student concludes with some justification, that spilling those
> gallons of sweat is pointless.
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> In a sense, we are already seeing the demotivating impact of ChatGPT.
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> spike
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