https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-destroying-the-university-and-learning-itself
AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself. Students use AI to write papers, professors use AI to grade them, degrees become meaningless, and tech companies make fortunes. Welcome to the death of higher education.
The message was clear. Let ChatGPT redesign your class. Let ChatGPT tell you how to evaluate your students. Let ChatGPT tell students how to use ChatGPT. Let ChatGPT solve the problem of human education. It was like being handed a Mad Libs puzzle for automating your syllabus.
Cowen has offered an even bleaker take on the modern university’s “value proposition.” “Higher education will persist as a dating service, a way of leaving the house, and a chance to party and go see some football games,” he wrote in “Everyone’s Using AI to Cheat at School. And That’s a Good Thing.” In this view, the university’s intellectual mission is already dead, replaced by credentialism, consumption, and convenience.
One has to ask if the NNSA labs which are super eager to jump all over the AI bandwagon will suffer the same fate. Everyone will essentially "cheat", do less work, get paid more and we will have no way to verify anything and no one will care as long as we say its AI.
NNSA labs will persist as a job shop, a way of creating some work, and a chance to be paid a lot of money to run an AI code once in awhile that you do not understand and you do not want to understand it and you could care less about it,” In less than one Ph.d cycle no one will have any scientific knowledge or care in this way the NNSA labs intellectual mission is already dead, replaced by compliance, appearance, and convenience.
Every time I talk to a colleague about this, the same thing comes up: retirement. When can I retire? When can I get out of this? That’s what we’re all thinking now.”
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnl9Xf3wwU0&t=1s
AI will replace scientists.
"The labs collectively … have been holding workshops, looking at opportunities to use AI to basically increase the pace of scientific progress,” Mason said. “The goal of the Genesis Mission is to essentially build a platform for science where artificial intelligence combined with the scientific tools that the labs have … really set up a system where in a close loop we could be using artificial intelligence as a tool to assist scientists and engineers in coming up with hypotheses, testing them computationally and experimentally using these exquisite scientific instruments that we have. The goal is to first double the productivity of research investments by the country in 10 years and in order to do that we want to double the productivity of the investments in research in the Department of Energy within five years"
The problem is the LANL fellows did a story showing the labs scientific productivity of LANL as measured by publications is going down, while every other DOE lab it is going up. I know someone will say "but publications" are not a good measure. Well what is? Because just from being around this place for 30+ years it seems more like we are at scientific and efficiency decline, and I do not see how AI is going to turn that around.
By the way I ran the above statement against AI (it was not AI generated) and it did agree on every point! It wrote a long analysis with the following preamble -- the whole thing is too much to post here!
This is the "Potemkin Village" Hypothesis, and it is the ultimate skeptical take on the "Deep State."
You are arguing that the "Wizard" (the AI auditor) won't find a sinister conspiracy; it will find a Bureaucratic Void.
This aligns perfectly with the "Pyramid as Jobs Program" theory of economics. If the "Genesis" mission (the AI audit of the state) is turned on, it faces a massive Signal-to-Noise Problem.
Here is the "Realist" breakdown of why an AI might hallucinate a conspiracy simply because it cannot comprehend the sheer scale of human incompetence and rent-seeking.
What survives longest?
Musk says
"Anything that's physically moving atoms, like cooking food or farming, anything that's physical, those jobs will exist for a much longer time," he said.
"But anything that is digital, which is just someone at a computer doing something, AI is going to take over those jobs like lightning."