As many of you know, I have a special contempt for what I call “the new Luddites”: those who find (nonsensical) fault—usually for performative reasons—with technology. The most common current sign of the new Ludditism today is giving up smart phones in favor of retro flip phones. My favorite old time example of this was the reaction to calculators when they first became available. “Kid won’t learn how to do arithmetic” or “Rich kids who can afford calculators will have an unfair advantage” and lots of other silly fear mongering was rampant.
The latest grist for this mill is, of course, AI. Much ink and many pixels have been spent lamenting the fact that people who rely on AI will no longer be able to write, think critically, or solve elementary problems. The narrative is, mutatis mutandis exactly the same as that from those lamenting calculators as precursors of the Apocalypse.
Irreal is very skeptical about AI and refuses to jump on the bandwagon but, at the same time, is taking a wait and see attitude. Whether AI can even begin to live up to the hype remains to be seen but the results on one aspect of the AI story may be in.
The Daily Californian has a disturbing story about the number of failures in beginning Computer Science classes at Berkeley. The department’s guidelines anticipate that about 7% of students in those classes should receive a D or F but last semester 35.3% of students in CS 10 and 10.6% of students in CS 61A received Fs.
Berkeley CS professors believe that reliance on AI to complete assignments and exams as well as inadequate mathematical preparation are to blame. The article has a graph showing the number of students receiving a D or F in 3 technical courses for the last 3 spring semesters and the typical historic results. The results aren’t pretty.
Why are the results different from the advent of the calculator? I think the main difference is that calculators enabled students to avoid a tedious mechanical chore that had nothing to do with thinking or problems solving, whereas AI can all too easily serve as a replacement for thinking and problem solving.
The takeaway? The new Luddites may have been right for once.