The big worry about artificial intelligence has been that it will take our jobs. Now, a bigger concern is that it will take our brains.
We are facing a future in which AI does all the hard work of thinking for us, thus rendering our brains lazy, unchallenged and enfeebled.
This AI brain drain has already been showing up in high schools and on college campuses where, rather than actually learning things, students are often letting AI write essays, take tests and solve equations for them. This phenomenon has turned teachers and professors into sleuths doing their best to deduce if an assignment was done by a kid in their class or a bot in that kid’s computer.
Cheating with AI has become so rampant that, rather than trusting their students to produce original thoughts on personal computers, many educators are returning to the old-fashioned blue book where students have to physically write down their answers while sitting in the classroom. (One wonders how today’s generation of students manages to even use a pen or pencil, given that many of them never were taught cursive because obtuse school administrators fell for the hype that typing on a computer would forever be the superior method for academic communication.)
Making students prove they’ve actually learned something via traditional methods may work at a school with ivy-covered brick buildings, but online universities now face the impossible task of determining if those to whom they bestow degrees actually did any work at all. There are AI bots that can fulfill all requirements for an online course without a student doing anything harder than telling AI to write every paper and take every test for them.
Perversely, in years to come we may be better off having AI entities handle our finances, legal work, healthcare and any number of other tasks, even if it costs jobs. After all, how will we know if tomorrow’s human professionals did anything during their education besides tell a bot to do all their thinking for them?
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