A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.
⭕ Study groups are disappearing.
⭕ Office hours are emptying out.
⭕ Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum.
⭕ Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.
The committee warns MIT professors against replacing undergraduate research assistants with AI agents just because they’re cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.
I hate this so much
AI will not make people more productive
I dunno, for me at least it’s less about ‘AI’ making me more productive, but rather automation that absolutely makes me more productive. Ai certainly makes the process of getting automations in place a whole lot quicker. Any time I do something repeatedly that I don’t want to do, it’s the question of ‘how can I automate this process’, and that frees up time for other things, and ensures that what I do is more accurate. That’s not something new because of ‘AI’, but rather python has been the beacon for that for many years, with tons of books on the topic.
AI is like the microwave. Sure it a huge time saver to eat a microwave meal but that doesn’t make a good cook obsolete.
Absolutely agree. But the car certainly made horses overall obsolete when it comes to standard transportation.
AI isn’t a car and will never be
The people who are pushing that idea are the ones who will lose billions when it all comes down.
I don’t think the Chinese will lose anything. They are investing knowing AI will be the future and making it cheap and accessible. Same thing they are doing with EVs and green technology.
Unless they persuade enough gullible people (or corrupt governments) to eat the losses for them. Which is what they are trying.
Creating efficient automations is the basic must-have-skill of a good engineer. If you outsource that to a slop bot, you surrender to being a replacable mediocre button pusher. And your slop automations will be shit.
I disagree. Certainly for systems architecture you may need a ‘good’ engineer, but you really don’t need to hire someone to automate the routine clicks you are doing every day. Oh look I have to pull and move the same data everyday, can’t I write a python script for that? Yes. And for many who are not programmers, an LLM can easily do that for you, and works just as well as that junior dev who is overloaded and can’t be bothered to do that for you.
You have the right disagree, without being right about it. That “junior dev” mindset is PR speak for “reasons to pay them less”. Actual developers have acquired skills as hobbyists long before entering a job, and will self-train continuously on the job. That’s how you get senior developers. Using a slop bot to generate code is something that 1) an actually skilled dev wouldn’t do because they have zero time gain from it, and 2) it will mean you keep dumb people dumb, never having them learn skills as time passes. Non-deterministic coding assistants are for gullible people who want to license-launder other people’s code and/or wouldn’t ever be able to create any proper software. And yes, that includes people who suffer from brain deterioration after having once been decent devs.
Perhaps. Every senior dev I have talked to absolutely is using AI right now. Slop code is relative.
Spoiler: those are not senior devs, whether they believe so or not.
The last Windows Patch Tuesday had almost 1000 patches.
And it fucking broke Windows.
It wasnt broken before?
I should have said broke more.
Yep, lots of stuff to fix. Its been in bad shape for decades.
Not sure why you got downvoted for that. It’s true.