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Comment by rabid_0wl | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a vast difference between leveraging a tool and outsourcing your cognitive functions, which is what seemed to happen in this specific case. Are schools failing students? How do you instill a desire to learn? I hope someone smart is trying to solve this because the ramifications on society are bleak. One anecdotal case isn't proof but it follows general trends I've seen across campuses.

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The ramifications are bleak if you're destined to become an employee. Students believe that AI can do their work for them, so they shouldn't be surprised if AI gets the job they wanted.

On the other hand, these students are proving that AI is as capable as a student (in their eyes at least) which bodes very well for employers. Limitless numbers of cheap workers.

> these students are proving that AI is as capable as a student (in their eyes at least) which bodes very well for employers. Limitless numbers of cheap workers.

Limitless numbers of cheap workers are great for employers when they have them. Not as great when everyone has them.

Who is going to pay for the goods or services provided by your limitless number of cheap artificial workers when everyone else has also replaced their natural consumer human employees with their own cheap artificial workers?

Students usually don't have adequate experience or judgement to make good employees. AI being good at satisfying a professor doesn't mean AI is good enough to satisfy an employer.

So whether it bodes well or not depends upon whether that gap exists or not. It's probably job specific.

The quality standard expected for most work is even lower than what's expected in school.

It's the complexity and domain knowledge that gets you at work.

Even when AI can do the work, their value often is that they have understanding of the work and so can correct the AI. Anyone can prompt an AI to vibe code a program, but someone needs to understand the various things that make for quality so that the program can get to an acceptable level without the boss having to spend his time doing that. That is your boss wants someone who can make decisions that the AI will get wrong.

Just realized I was a little unclear (as is usual for me...). The value of humans is understanding enough to correct the AI when it is confidently wrong. That means you need to be able to do the job well enough without AI that you know when AI is wrong.

It is too late for the current crop of university students. Most of them should have never graduated middle school. The failure is very deep.

Also consider many of them had their education destroyed by "remote learning" during covid.

That has never been an easy question. Learning is hard work. If your parents/school didn't force you to learn it as a kid, then odds are your attempts to learn something new as an adult fail. Many adults take up a musical instrument, or foreign language -only a few learn more than the most basic phrases, these are the most common things for adults to attempt and the track record is poor. Sure adults who know C++ (a tiny subset of adults) might learn Rust with high success - but the hard part is learning to program not the syntax of the language.

A desire to learn generally only gets you to a superficial level before you get bored and realize there is a lot of hard work before you could get a useful level of knowledge. Getting deep requires years of focused effort and that almost always means forced effort. The few adults who learn a musical instrument or foreign language prove the point.

The truth is that most people don’t go to school out of a desire to learn. At least not mostly. They do it out of a desire to earn a living, to be able to get decent jobs.

If getting the degree is just a certificate to allow you to get jobs, that’s all a lot of people will care about.

We need a system of apprenticeship. Some school, yes, but we have over indexed on school and forced it into a role for which it is ill suited.

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