The reason some students use AI

We're entering an era where we are being forced to ask fundamental questions about:

- what does it mean to be human?

- what is he purpose of education?

- (for us) what is the true value add of an engineer?

As we reach what I would call the Apex of the information age, information (knowledge) will become slowly worthless. But intuition, reasoning, and extrapolation seem to be worth more. Being able to ask the right questions, and apply the world's knowledge are (and were) invaluable skills.

This has been the trend of this era:

Encyclopedia Encarta made general knowledge more available, then Wikipedia, and Google indices. The bulk of human information became available. With comment sections in social media, the world's thoughts became available. With YouTube, even how-tos became universal.

If you view an LLM as a compressed archive of all human data (which it "sort of" is), you start to really separate knowledge from application.

Reasoning models take that one step further.

It will be years or decades probably until we have culturally / spiritually / philosophically caught up.