I am absolutely not one to seek out reading to confirm prior opinions, but I do not reject such reading. By chance, I came across an article which caught my eye, then confirmed my beliefs about AI and lent indirect support to other beliefs about related aspects of higher education. In “Bosses Horrified as ‘AI Native’ College Graduates Hit the Workplace,” Joe Wilkins recapitulates major studies on the effects of AI on college education. The article is not analytical, but it is alarming, as shown in three (lightly edited) passages.
Wilkins cites a New York financier who says that “new hires who were seen as ‘AI natives’ are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so … that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.” He added, “We want critical thinking, not just AI.”
Wilkins summarizes, “Over the past few years, a veritable tidal wave of headlines, studies, and think pieces have flooded the internet with horror stories about the decline in literacy rates, social skills, and critical thinking abilities of the country’s college students.” Noting these factors have existed before AI was adapted, AI “only seems to be accelerating the drop-off in real-life abilities, particularly among young people for whom it can serve as a cognitive crutch.”
Wilkins concludes, “students who go all-in on AI at the expense of other skills will likely find themselves ill-prepared for the actual demands of life after college.”
Nothing about this article surprises me, and nothing about it should surprise anyone with half an education, which is less than what one gets from a largely, if not exclusively, technical education. For, ultimately, technical subjects are centered on numbers, merely the quantitative dimensions of reality. As William Bruce Cameron, not Albert Einstein, wrote in 1963, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” The quotation circumscribes the technical subjects encompassed by STEM: science, technology, engineering, mathematics.
I do not say this as a foe of technical subjects and a friend of the humanities. I have walked on both sides of the science/humanities divide and am much the better for both journeys. I hope that you will excuse me if I adopt an autobiographical approach to this topic.
I spent my first 18 years preparing for a life in science. In elementary school, I was a “nature boy.” In junior and senior high school, I was a science “brainiac,” a good student in math and science. I earned good grades, praise, and awards. Nevertheless, in my junior and senior years, despite having excellent teachers, I began to lose interest in these subjects. Fortunately, I had not let success in math and science divert me from my interests in the humanities. I continued my love of history from my earliest years and slowly came to appreciate literature but, ironically, not Shakespeare, whom I thought a bore and a fraud; the irony, of course, is that, a decade-and-a-half later, I became a Shakespeare scholar. There is a moral here: one never knows how interests will evolve, and early success is no guarantee of future interest or success.
I was lucky. When I arrived at my university as an engineering physics student, I knew that I did not want to design nuclear weapons or spaceships—which is what I thought EP graduates did (computers were on the horizon only because they were huge)—, soon transferred to liberal arts, and ended up, four degrees later, with a Ph.D. in English. Others were not so lucky. As a dormitory counselor, I saw many freshmen who were successful in math and science in high school encounter difficulty in college. They had good analytical skills in technical courses but poor critical thinking skills because they had loafed through courses in the humanities. For some, the failure was too great to reverse, and they dropped out, to what future I never knew. For others, the failure spurred them to repair the deficit, and they found a path to fields in which they had a genuine interest, not one based on external rewards: high grades, praise, awards, and expectations of future earnings, high status, etc. I have had some of those things throughout my education and since, but I did not let them make decisions for me, and, so I opine, no one should.
Although I had no more education in math and science, my career had its ironies. I became a consultant to high-tech companies and did a lot of work on civilian and military uses of nuclear energy. In one instance, after organizing a research schema to evaluate the effectiveness of a nuclear power regulation, the project director asked me if I wanted to be a nuclear engineer. A few years later, I persuaded the Secretary of Commerce that a White House proposal to merge six DOE energy labs into the DOC was not in the national interest; the proposal was dropped. As I said, I have been better off with an education in both technical subjects and the humanities.
Although I know little about AI, I know that it is a threat to students for whom it plays a dominant part in their education as nothing more than vocational training. AI can survey vast tracts of information, digest it, and deposit it into papers and reports (GIGO: garbage in, garbage out) to which the student has contributed little. (Teachers can use AI to grade papers—really, grade the AI which generated them.) AI becomes an addiction for the lazy who avoid grappling with the subjects or the thinking which should go into a good education. As many STEM-type graduates are finding these days, in the title of a folk song, “easy’s gettin’ harder every day.”
I have not looked at recruitment ads for a long time. In my day, employers would state a requirement for good writing. The statement was mostly empty talk; they rarely considered an applicant’s writing. But, as Wilkins’s article indicates, employers want applicants who can think across a broad range of subjects, which is what critical thinking involves, and are finding that those whose skills are limited to AI and associated technical subjects do not fit their needs. Understandably so: AI makes many entry-level positions demanding in terms of non-technical issues. Those ignorant about or unskilled in dealing with the multi-dimensional, multi-factored, multi-layered issues involved are not going to do their jobs, their employers, their customers, or themselves much good. I titled this blog “AI Needs to Be Replaced by AI” as a puzzle to the reader. I really mean Artificial Intelligence Needs to Be Replaced by Actual Intelligence.
Finally, those “critical thinking” issues are the kinds which permeate life away from work. They are part of family and social relationships, and civic, political, and religious life. In my experience, most people who limit themselves to technical fields and dismiss the humanities turn out to be boring to everyone except their fellow bores. And their ignorance of the humanities makes them dangerously prone to be dupes for demagogues.
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