A committee of professors and students spent 5 months studying how AI changed learning on campus, and the findings read like a warning to every university on the planet.

⭕ Study groups are disappearing.

⭕ Office hours are emptying out.

⭕ Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce credible solutions to almost any written assignment in the undergraduate curriculum.

⭕ Students who lean on chatbots lose mastery and confidence, and some slip into what the report calls cognitive surrender, reaching for AI at the first hint of struggle.

The committee warns MIT professors against replacing undergraduate research assistants with AI agents just because they're cheaper, because a university exists to grow people, not output.

https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/

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[–] 8 points 1 day ago (5 children)

It was sad to see that students with so much access to tech became so ... I don't even know.

Tech became too easy to use. In the 00s, you'd need to have an understanding of file paths. You'd need to know where a programmes files were located, to fix whatever broke

Eventually "auto repair" became the standard, then we moved onto handheld consoles (smartphones and tablets). Which relied on app stores, that already confirmed the app wouldn't destroy anything. So all these annoying to deal with issues just... Vanished. But so did skill, because you never needed the skill to solve a problem in the first place

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  • [–] 6 points 1 day ago (4 children)

    The skills simply change over time. It's great that you could muck about and maybe fix something back in the day, but does that same skill apply to modern architecture? No. The true skill you learned what your ability to be curious, to constantly learn and improve, and use those skills across a wide variety of problems, not just simple tech issues. Those are the skills we should be teaching the next and future generation, rather than what the classic education paradigm has been, which is memorization and how to show up on time, to make good factory workers, which are existing less and less in the modern world. Does AI help or harm that? It's just another tool that can be used in good or bad ways, just like the calculator.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago

    In a way you're right but a lot of this comes at a cost. As in people are not used to being bored anymore. Not being bored leads to less creative thinking and procrastination. Internet is out, well I guess I'm working on the motorcycle instead of sitting at the computer.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 5 hours ago

    I disagree. For me it's helped with curiosity as it lets me explore topics and problem solving I haven't been able to because I don't know how to fully finish something. Oh there is this great github project I would like to run, but it's linux only, is it possible to integrate this on my mac and add the following to it. Sure enough, LLM helps get you through it, you document the process, and boom now you have learned something new.

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