Obsolete By The Time You Read This

Technological innovation keep marching onward while our social institutions generally don’t, until some new innovation finally pushes the existing order past its tipping point. Then there's a bit of mayhem until the system reaches a new equilibrium. I suppose this is a Marxist perspective, but so be it.

I’ve been watching the effects of new technologies on higher education for a very long time, first as a student and, for the last quarter-century, as a professor. Although email, the web, and everything else digital have led to changes in how people teach, the changes actually have been quite minor. AI strikes me as a game-changer though. Here are a few reasons why I think this:

First, AI chatbots have demolished the academic cheating industry. Below is the stock price over time of the "educational support services" company Chegg since OpenAI released ChatGPT.

Instead of buying an essay from an online paper mill in Pakistan or Kenya, students who are unwilling to learn can now get what we insist they deliver for free. There is no longer any cost barrier to entry.

Second, these chatbots have now improved to the point where their text output is equal to or better than that of nearly all human students. AI can now “understand” articles and even books that one uploads in pdf form and spit out a cogent synopsis or comparison of them in seconds. Teachers find it impossible to distinguish between human- and AI-produced writing.

Third and most importantly, rapidly advancing AI will probably change how universities institutionalize knowledge. Many traditional fields of study, perceived by students and administrators as ossified vestiges of a pre-digital world, are already marginalized. Universities will use AI as yet another rationale for allocating greater resources to other methods of inquiry.