Brian Eno has spent decades pushing the boundaries of music and technology, but when it comes to artificial intelligence, his biggest concern isn’t the tech — it’s who controls it.
Honestly, I would argue that education is a shit show by itself rather than AI in particular making education a shit show. That’s why a student would be incentivized to use AI to cheat and solve all of their homework for them. It reminds me of all my math classes where my teachers would emphasize showing your work on paper and solving it without a calculator because that labor built an actual understanding of the work involved. The problem was: I, along with many other kids at the time, felt alienated from the work – it didn’t seem absolutely necessary to know this work through and through due to how it would translate to your career path later, which if you don’t have any idea what you wanted to do after school or no use for math above basic arithmetic, most people were fine just using a calculator and I know many people today who still can’t do basic calculations on the fly like counting their money or tipping percentages. So that makes me dubious of the idea that “billionaires aren’t making my students cheat” when they are exactly the ones who create mass amounts of alienation from our labor and create a job market highly specialized for a select few of people who can make it through this very narrow idea of systemic education, where the rest of the economy is a bunch of service jobs that don’t require a person to need deep understanding of topics they went over in school for a grade – it doesn’t help much when it comes to stocking a shelf or handing someone their food. If we existed in a mode of production that didn’t brutally wipe a majority of the population’s involvement in their own education, you would have way less cheating and a heavily reduced reliance on LLMs doing all the heavy lifting. Furthermore, under this different mode of production, technological advancements like AI would be used for the advancement of humanity rather than fattening the pockets of said billionaires who market it as the quick fix to everything, further alienating people. Individualizing this phenomenon completely obscures all of the systemic things at play in the wider society but especially in education. Western education systems are exclusionary as hell so of course that would drive unscrupulous behaviors in students. But viewing the students who use AI in any capacity as the problem only exacerbates the main issue and lets billionaires get away with murder of the mind (mentacide).
Honestly, I would argue that education is a shit show by itself rather than AI in particular making education a shit show. That’s why a student would be incentivized to use AI to cheat and solve all of their homework for them. It reminds me of all my math classes where my teachers would emphasize showing your work on paper and solving it without a calculator because that labor built an actual understanding of the work involved. The problem was: I, along with many other kids at the time, felt alienated from the work – it didn’t seem absolutely necessary to know this work through and through due to how it would translate to your career path later, which if you don’t have any idea what you wanted to do after school or no use for math above basic arithmetic, most people were fine just using a calculator and I know many people today who still can’t do basic calculations on the fly like counting their money or tipping percentages. So that makes me dubious of the idea that “billionaires aren’t making my students cheat” when they are exactly the ones who create mass amounts of alienation from our labor and create a job market highly specialized for a select few of people who can make it through this very narrow idea of systemic education, where the rest of the economy is a bunch of service jobs that don’t require a person to need deep understanding of topics they went over in school for a grade – it doesn’t help much when it comes to stocking a shelf or handing someone their food. If we existed in a mode of production that didn’t brutally wipe a majority of the population’s involvement in their own education, you would have way less cheating and a heavily reduced reliance on LLMs doing all the heavy lifting. Furthermore, under this different mode of production, technological advancements like AI would be used for the advancement of humanity rather than fattening the pockets of said billionaires who market it as the quick fix to everything, further alienating people. Individualizing this phenomenon completely obscures all of the systemic things at play in the wider society but especially in education. Western education systems are exclusionary as hell so of course that would drive unscrupulous behaviors in students. But viewing the students who use AI in any capacity as the problem only exacerbates the main issue and lets billionaires get away with murder of the mind (mentacide).