The other day, I was scrolling through Twitter and saw the following tweet about Pewdiepie and his AI endeavours:
It made me think about education systems around the world and how we all keep complaining about the capabilities (or the lack thereof) of newer generations, just as Socrates did.
Are we still going to learn about various topics in 50 years? I don’t think AI will completely take over the world; that idea is meaningless. I’m also not talking about using AI so excessively that it turns the entire world into iPad kids. I’m talking about willpower.
How many of us will still be willing to learn new things in a world where we don’t have to?
AI is going to make many jobs obsolete, or those tasks will be cheaper if done with the help of AI, and thus it is going to have an impact on the job market. But we are going to have an impact too. People are going to learn less and less, not because the information is going to be restricted. We are just not going to have the willpower to learn.
Videos of students using AI for their assignments (and how foolish they look when they get caught) have been quite popular over the last couple of years.
They choose that path because they don’t have to choose the harder one. Today’s AI tools are already capable enough to complete their assignments.
Many of the people criticizing those students simply don’t have access to tools advanced enough to handle their own tasks. Yes, they still use AI for part of their responsibilities, but if they could use those tools for 100% of them, they would. You’re not using AI differently from those students because of moral superiority or intelligence; it’s just that you don’t yet have the more advanced tools.
Sure, you might use ChatGPT to write part of your presentation or build an n8n flow to generate weekly reports, but I’m talking about one-shotting your entire task.
Even editing the output (or, God knows, just copying and pasting it into the editor) is the harder path for those students, and if you use AI in situations where you don’t have to, you’re also choosing the easier path.
If you could one-shot your task, you’d do it.
So what makes us better? Why are we laughing at those kids?
Some of the criticism around those videos doesn’t really target the kids but the education system itself, and how outdated it has become in this age. Well, that’s not a valid criticism.
The issues around the education systems are another discussion. But putting the blame on the education system in this case is just wrong.
As I said before, how many of us will still be willing to learn new things in a world where we don’t have to? I’m not talking about the education system or the students anymore. I’m talking about willpower.
Even if you created the best education system, if you kill the willpower and the notion of necessity, you are not going to teach anything to anyone.
I think that’s the truly frightening part, not AI taking our jobs.