The loss that he describes is deeper and more existential than anything academic integrity can protect: a specific, if perhaps decaying, way of being among students and their teachers. “AI has already changed the classroom into something I no longer recognize,” he told me. In this view, AI isn’t a harbinger of the future but the last straw in a profession that was almost lost already, to funding collapse, gun violence, state overreach, economic decay, credentialism, and all the rest. New technology arrives on that grim shore, making schoolwork feel worthless, carried out to turn the crank of a machine rather than for teaching or learning.
Man anyone remember when your parents trapped within that boomer mentality thought a college degree was all you needed to make the big bucks? :yes-honey-left:
Higher education was already dead and mutilated by capitalism and reactionary denigration, ChatGPT just made sure to double tap it and prove that most students are just attending college as a means of obtaining a piece of paper (I was one of them) and praying they can get a job that leaves them only semi in the near poverty zone. I'm honestly wondering what the educational makeup is going to be in the US within the next decade because as trends continue we are likely seeing how late stage capitalism is reinforcing that learning, just like putting effort into work, actually means nothing for your material wellbeing.