My son, Patrick, sent me a recent article about the use of artificial intelligence to generate course papers that then got good grades at Harvard, and this seems like an excuse to say something about this subject, which in one form or another has garnered a great deal of attention.
Let me begin by observing that there is nothing new about
getting someone else to write your papers for you in college. Indeed, I have
heard many times that fraternities maintain files of such papers for the use by
their members. But the ready availability of AI and its rapid improvement raise
useful questions about the function of higher education in the United States
and other advanced capitalist economies.
I have been writing about this for 60 years and I do not
want simply to repeat what I have said before, so let me simply assert several
propositions for which I have elsewhere provided extended defenses, as a way of
getting us started. I will restrict my observations to the United States, with
which I am extremely familiar, but it should be obvious that much of what I say
applies elsewhere as well.
First of all, America has a steeply hierarchical system of
jobs, the compensation and fringe benefits for which vary so greatly that
almost everything about one’s life chances depends on where on the pyramid of
jobs one lands. Half of the full-time
jobs in the United States pay less than $45,000 a year and many of those lower
half jobs, perhaps almost all of them, offer little in the way of job security
or fringe benefits. In the past 40 years or so, a higher education degree (not
a higher education, that is something different) has become one of the
principal devices for sorting people into the best jobs. Most of what one
learns in college has little or nothing to do with the ability to perform the
functions of these better compensated jobs.
Second, there are roughly 4500 colleges and university
campuses that offer a four-year Bachelor’s Degree, and a bit more than one
third of American adults have such a degree. As everyone understands, for those
who have a college degree, the realistic possibility of getting a place in the
top 10 or 15% of the job pyramid depends very greatly on which of those
institutions of higher learning one has attended, and what sorts of grades one
has managed one way or another to get along the way. The steepness of the job
pyramid and the scarcity of jobs with really good compensation creates a
permanent panic among the young and their anxious parents.
Third, there is a distinction between critique, grading, and
certification. Certification is a social process designed to decide who will be
permitted to perform certain functions or hold certain jobs. A driving permit
is a certification. Either you pass or you do not. The bar examination is a
certification. Unless you are Tom Cruise in
The Firm it does not matter how well you do, just so long as you pass. The
only purpose of grading is to sort people into scarce and desired positions of
some sort or other – admission to graduate school, clerkships and associateships,
internships and residencies, and so forth.
So long as the wealth, privileges, protections, and
recognitions in a society are extremely unequally distributed, ways will be
found to decide which persons receive the advantages. In America, when I was
young, being white, being male, being straight, having wealthy parents, being
good at certain athletic activities (but not necessarily others), being
considered good-looking by others, being Christian, or at least appearing to be
Christian, were all ways of having a better shot at the good stuff.
AI does not change this fundamental fact about our society.
20 comments:
I agree completely with those last two paragraphs. As an aside, I’ve often thought your take on Kavanaugh (I am a GOOD boy!) was the best take, and Slate has a piece out analyzing how intellectually thin his opinions are. I think it proves your assessment (he’s more interested in approval than argument).
Anonymous,
Kavanaugh's opinions may be intellectually thin but he's managed to position himself at the fulcrum of the Court's ideological spectrum.
I'm distracted by this locution: 'fundamental fact'. I pride myself on being distracted by alliteration, but I won't get distracted -- this 'fundmamental fact' locution, I associate it with a view that chains of ground can descend indefinitely without ever terminating in a level of fundamental fact. There is this view, and also, there is the idea that this view allegedly exhibits a kind of explanatory failure -- because what with explaining the existence of dependent facts in terms of further dependent facts ad infinitum, well, hang on, there are no fundamental facts.
Of course people love this kind of rhetoric -- 'One of the most fundamental facts is this: where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths.' Or, 'The most fundamental fact of existence is awareness of existence' (a Deepak Chopra quote). I think one can come to view this locution as almost an insult to the intelligence, and that we started with alliteration didn't help. At least, I find it distracting at this point.
So as long as incentives to cheat exist, students will cheat
I ask, supposing the only thing at stake in higher education was self-actualization and excellence. would students cheat?
Did athletes in the ancient pentatholon and decatholon cheat, just for the glory?
Supposing like Asian countries we prized genuine academic excellence- would there be cheating?
The Romans had a cursus honorum- to qualify for higher positions people endured genuine hardship and challenge.
I doubt four years at Harvard is a feat equivalent to serving in say Gaul for four years
We need a more trying way to try our elite.
Homework and partying won't cut it by me
The problem with AI to generate course papers is that it will destroy the last defense of the idea that the university is a community of scholars, the house of the intellect.
Of course students have always plagiarized and cheated, but with AI even those students who have an interest in the life of the mind will be forced to resort to AI because if they don't, they will be at a great disadvantage with regard to their peers who use AI without scruples.
The idea that the university is a the house of intellect has always been at least 75% seer hypocrisy because as Professor Wolff points out, for most people going to a good university is the road to a well-paying job and the rest is bullshit that one has to shit through on the road to success and money.
However, that 25% which was not seer hypocrisy was real once and with AI all the hypocrisy will be gone since everyone will cheat and everyone will know that everyone cheats. Nonetheless, sometimes there is something to be said for hypocrisy.
correct error: I meant to say "has to sit through", not "has to shit through" in the penultimate paragraph.
Howard,
"a more trying way"
what do you have in mind?
outward-bound survival tests?
boxing? martial arts? gladiator combat?
500 nautical miles in an open boat with no rescues allowed for mishaps?
memorizing the entire works of Homer, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace in the original and then a mandatory public recitation?
That's how it was in my day and that's why I'm a librarian.
I think inner city kids who have to fend for themselves and be their own men and women are better qualified than Harvard grads- maybe that's why I liked Obama, even though he didn't play hardball enough
Of course Obama was not an inner city kid...quite the opposite. Or do I miss the point? (Possibly)
Obama is a Harvard Grad (also Columbia). I wouldn't have minded having to fend on the mean streets of Honolulu.
it will only be a little fairer if written exams are reduced in favor of oral exams. The famous Turing test, which supposedly tests AI, is a test to find out when people are ready to identify their "invisible" interlocutor as a human being. The easiest way to find out would be to remove the "invisibility" by looking at the person's mouth when they speak.
Of course, all this does not change the fact that our educational systems consolidate the social stratification of our societies. Whether one calls this a "basic fact" or the result of decades of observation and analysis based on verifiable data.
aaall,
More precisely, Obama attended Occidental College in Calif., then transferred to and graduated from Columbia, and then Harvard Law School.
The last President to be a "Harvard grad" in the sense of an alumnus of Harvard College was John F. Kennedy. In other words, Harvard College has not produced a U.S. President in roughly 60 years. (Plenty of other high office holders, but not a President.)
P.s. The "Harvard grad" (in the sense of alum of the College) who has the best chance of being President in the next quarter century might be Pete Buttigieg.
I was in high school on Oahu at the same time as Obama. I went to the largest public school, Leilehua, while the future drone-master went to Punahou, a hyper-pricey 'elite' private school that was the, uh, Harvard of the paradisiacal isle. When I was there the alumni among the local gentry would proudly plaster their cars with 'Punahou' stickers from graduation to grave. Of course we didn't know of Obama back in those days; it was Adolph Reed Jr. in 1996 who first sounded the alert in the Village Voice with his prescient characterization: "one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance."
What I heard is that Obama was from Kenya and grew up in the slums of Nairobi- he was pretty street smart and had an unconventional background despite his sterling educational credentials.
And let me add that it would hardly bother me were he born in Kenya or Indonesia or wherever
Tongue in cheek, Howard.... please.
The famous Turing test, which supposedly tests AI, is a test to find out when people are ready to identify their "invisible" interlocutor as a human being. The easiest way to find out would be to remove the "invisibility" by looking at the person's mouth when they speak.
I don't mean to be pedantic but that is not accurate.
What the TT tests is the ability of a machine to behave in a way that cannot be distinguished from humans. The machine passes the test when people cannot tell whether they are interacting with a machine or with another human. If they try guessing, half the time they will be wrong.
A machine who systematically got everything right in academic tests, for example, would be systematically outperforming real humans, thereby giving away its non-humanity.
'The only purpose of grading is to sort people into scarce and desired positions of some sort or other – admission to graduate school, clerkships and associateships, internships and residencies, and so forth.'
The 'only purpose' of grading -- well, if we take grading to be where you accurately communicate to others the level of academic achievement that a student has obtained, and wait a minute, maybe *that* is the purpose of grading, for, in turn, whatever purpose.. if we want to communicate achievement status to the student, to others.. but again, this is maybe something that students can use for self-evaluation and growth..
I might be happy to slow down here: what is the purpose of grades? Why were grades invented?
When I personally think a cynical thought about grades, I think of how they allow you to take on more students with less effort.
What will be the role of universities once AI becomes a physcial part of humans, with devices such as neuralink and it's derivatives?
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