GABRIEL ROSSMAN: The Coming AI Cataclysm.

One sometimes hears that instead of waging the impossible fight of getting kids not to use AI, we should teach them how to use it. There is a logic to this. When a technology becomes more available, wages go up for those who have human capital that complements the technology. But this raises the question of what sort of human capital is a complement to—as opposed to a substitute for—artificial intelligence and the corollary of whether such human capital is best cultivated through use of artificial intelligence or abstention from it? The usual assumption is that the most valuable skill one can acquire is prompt engineering. This is indeed an important skill to have, but I am skeptical that one learns to interact well with an AI through off-loading reading and writing tasks to it during one’s education.

My experience when I have caught university students making unauthorized use of AI is that the cheaters are too ignorant and lazy to know what good output would look like. Sometimes these errors are very obvious, as when two of my students turned in memos that did not summarize the assigned reading but one with a similar title. Knowing what good output looks like requires skills and knowledge that can only be acquired the old-fashioned way, by doing one’s own work. And I am talking about students at a selective university a few years into the AI boom. How much worse must it be at a junior high chosen at random? And how much worse will it be when students who used AI for their entire time in junior high and high school age into first college and then the labor force?

Maybe those kids would have been better off learning trades, even before AI.