New Yorker asks, will AI make college obsolete?

The arguments "Will AI make College Obsolete" and "not everyone should go to college go learn a trade & fix my toilets" brought to you by the Folks Who Really Don't Want an Intelligent Population

You can make a long, LONG list of technologies that were supposed to make stupid brick and mortar institutions of higher education obsolete. Printed books. Radio. Television. Personal computers. CD-ROMs. The Internet. MOOCs. Write the story once, and you can re-use it every five years!

This should be read as elite college graduate Jay Kang pulling up the ladder here as one of the last MFA graduates to actually make a living writing publicly. The better question is will AI make pieces like this obsolete?

College isn't simply a credentialing process, and I absolutely loathe arguments that AI makes college obsolete or replaces academic labor. It's a tool, not a replacement. Those who say otherwise are telling on themselves wrt valuing thinking and writing. My take: open.substack.com/pub/miranday...

huh i wonder what a fat-curve upslope dunderhead like jay caspian kang wants with making college obsolete. you don’t have to go, stupid! you can get a job

Idk if AI will make college *actually* obsolete, but the university system is in extremely dire straits and I am not confident that it will be recognizable in 20 years

“Will AI make college obsolete?” You mean the steroidal autocomplete that frequently gets shit wrong because it’s a statistical model on words likely to follow other words and not an actual usable database? That “AI”? What if we just restored colleges to not be shit and ass.

I'll believe AI has made college obsolete when the New Yorker hires people without degrees to be staff writers

Will AI make learning to think critically obsolete? No. Oh my god. What the heck is this trash. Credentialing is part of the process but it’s not the core of what college education does and when it does it (predominantly in young adulthood)

Yes, AI will make college obsolete. Everyone brilliant enough to buy this should now stay 1000 miles away from any college campus or discussion of higher learning at all. Us luddite losers will take it from here.

AI won’t make college obsolete, but it *will* make college a luxury; elites will continue to send their children to college, while the hoi polloi receive job training via torment nexus.

I don't think it will. Besides, if it does make college obsolete, I think that's a big opportunity for us to claim that universities are not bond to market rules and so they can do well by moving towards an "obsolete" Humboldtian concept of university as the guardian of the knowledge and the arts

I am sure that the author, Kang, will send his offspring to an ivy-league elite university so they will have cushy lives. And the ones who believed Kang's nonsense 👇 will labor for the likes of Kang and his offspring. www.newyorker.com/news/fault-l...

A) the implication that folks in the trades are not intelligent feels ... troubling? Classist? and B) Who in Arda takes advice from the spider that teamed up with the Devil to steal the light of heaven? (Will AI make college obsolete? lol no)

College introduces students to independent, critical thinking. In that sense, AI unfortunately makes college more necessary than ever. www.newyorker.com/news/fault-l...