Meh... if a dumb robot can do <X> for you, maybe we shouldn't have <X>. <-- This logic doesn't get us far. Robots do many things for people in industrialized societies.

I for one, think training students on how to write is very important. It trains them how to think critically, how to present solid arguments, how to persuade, etc. I certainly don't want my society to have fewer educated people.

You’re right. We should cancel all math classes immediately. We’re way past due since we should have done it with calculators.

This is like saying that phones can play songs, so maybe we should stop learning how to play musical instruments.

The robots can write shitty essays because they were trained on billions of other people's sentences. They can regurgitate human effort, not replace it entirely.

And we don't write essays so that the world is full of essays. We write them so that we understand and consider new concepts.

Unless we plan to make the movie Idiocracy a documentary, we need to continue to learn how to learn.

I don’t get this, that dumb robot got trained and so is doing the job. There are some fundamental building blocks that every human needs to be trained in. We can question what these building blocks are but never apply a blanket statement that “if a robot can do it we don’t need to learn it”. We will end up with severely challenged humans and that would be the manifestation of robots taking over not because the AI became sentient but because we humans gave up learning.

What should we do if a dumb robot can keep us suspended in a nutrient rich gel and create a detailed set of mental experiences for us?

This is easy to say once you already understand how to write essays.

It's like having wood sawing as a woodworking exam, when power saws have just been invented.

Computers can dictate words now, maybe we shouldn't waste time teaching toddlers to read.

This completely misapprehends the point of writing essays.