The Atlantic – Colleges Are Preparing to Self-Lobotomize – “The skills that students will need in an age of automation are precisely those that are eroded by inserting AI into the educational process. After three years of doing essentially nothing to address the rise of generative AI, colleges are now scrambling to do too much. Over the summer, Ohio State University, where I teach, announced a new initiative promising to “embed AI education into the core of every undergraduate curriculum, equipping students with the ability to not only use AI tools, but to understand, question and innovate with them—no matter their major.” Similar initiatives are being rolled out at other universities, including the University of Florida and the University of Michigan. Administrators understandably want to “future proof” their graduates at a time when the workforce is rapidly transforming. But such policies represent a dangerously hasty and uninformed response to the technology. Based on the available evidence, the skills that future graduates will most need in the AI era—creative thinking, the capacity to learn new things, flexible modes of analysis—are precisely those that are likely to be eroded by inserting AI into the educational process. Before embarking on a wholesale transformation, the field of higher education needs to ask itself two questions: What abilities do students need to thrive in a world of automation? And does the incorporation of AI into education actually provide those abilities? The skills needed to thrive in an AI world might counterintuitively be exactly those that the liberal arts have long cultivated. Students must be able to ask AI questions, critically analyze its written responses, identify possible weaknesses or inaccuracies, and integrate new information with existing knowledge. The automation of routine cognitive tasks also places greater emphasis on creative human thinking. Students must be able to envision new solutions, make unexpected connections, and judge when a novel concept is likely to be fruitful. Finally, students must be comfortable and adept at grasping new concepts. This requires a flexible intelligence, driven by curiosity. Perhaps this is why the unemployment rate for recent art-history graduates is half that of recent computer-science grads.

• See also Current Affairs – 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.
• See also The New York Times What OpenAI Did when ChatGPT users lost touch with reality
• See also The New York Times – College Students Flock to a New Major: A.I. At M.I.T., a new program called “artificial intelligence and decision-making” is now the second-most-popular undergraduate major.
• See also Business Insider – Bosses think AI will boost productivity — but it’s actually deskilling workers, a professor says”…Anastasia Berg, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, said that new research — and what she’s hearing directly from colleagues across various industries — shows that employees who heavily rely on AI are losing core skills at a startling rate. “We have a tremendous amount of empirical data on this question of skill attrition or skill atrophy,” Berg said on “The Philosopher” podcast this week. “We talk a lot about what it takes to acquire a skill,” but skills also require maintaining, she said..there is research from Oxford University Press and journals, including Springer and MDPI, that suggests AI may boost speed and engagement in learning, but often at the cost of depth, critical thinking, creativity, and long-term skill development…”
• See also Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search – Experimental evidence of the effects of large language models versus web search on depth of learning.
• See also Business Insider – A history professor says AI didn’t break college — it exposed how broken it already was