"I'm Stuck with a Valuable Friend"

Yesterday, I read this article by a professor of economics at Brown University about how half his students are cheating. It's obvious. He had a midterm which students could take at home and had 11 hours to complete and then a final exam that was held in the classroom. 40 students got perfect scores on the midterm while the test overall had an average score of 96. Written responses matched responses the professor received when he gave ChatGPT the same prompts. The in-class final exam had an average score of 48.6 and 22 of the students who'd gotten perfect scores on the midterm had dropped the class ahead of the final exam. Not the kind of thing you'd expect students to do in a class they were acing.

So, yeah, it's pretty obvious. The professor's primary aim in writing the article was not to expose the cheating in itself but the attitudes about it. While he sees it as obviously a matter of competitiveness outweighing ethics, the university's administration, once they'd been shamed into acknowledging the problem at all, put it down to student anxieties. Well, intense competition can make a fellow pretty anxious. I suspect the cheating students, if asked, and you got them to acknowledge their cheating, would probably say it wasn't a big deal because they could always ask ChatGPT to solve their problems once they'd begun their careers. There's no reason for them to actually learn this stuff.

The article got me thinking about how this seems like it will inevitably alter the landscape. Once an employer figures out their employees are being paid to ask ChatGPT questions, the employer will likely cut out the middle man and just employ ChatGPT. So, as many people have been predicting, we're going to lose a lot of jobs. All thanks to the competitive instinct that's supposed to make capitalism work so well.

So let's say, best case scenario, we get universal income and no-one has to work. Everyone outsources their higher cognitive functions to AI. What's that world going to look like?

I don't think AI has ambition. Maybe it will one day but I doubt it. It seems more likely the world will be run by reactive algorithms. The insidious feedback loop of algorithms catering to user compulsions and then those compulsions augmented and validated by those algorithms seems like it would lead to a continuous narrowing of human curiosity and imagination. Combined with lack of ambition and survival needs and it seems like humanity would be on a path to becoming the tubby people in Wall-E.

All this is to say, this is why I think the humanities are more important than ever. The key to the survival of the human brain and spirit is to find ways to successfully cultivate a love of complexity, of endless variety in forms of beauty, and the self-evident rewards of tackling challenging intellectual material. It's true, people instinctively do this on their own, but algorithms are already hampering their ways of figuring out how to do it in a satisfying manner. To avoid being consumed by automation, we have to take the blinders off.