I thought I could harness AI for the good, but I was wrong. Now what?

I’ve heard it said many times that people avoid doing hard things. Henry Ford is supposed to have claimed that thinking was the hardest work and this explained why so few people could be persuaded to do it. For me, Adam Smith, writing in 1776, said it best. ‘ The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’. Higher education has to be challenging because it necessarily involves the mental effort to wrestle with ideas that are at the edge (or just beyond) our understanding. If generative AI tools remove the need for such effort, we should not expect rational individuals to forgo them.

Here is a radical thought. The focus of education should not be on assessments. This is the old way. You enable people to think, do independent research, evaluate evidence without bias, and equip them with the skills to solve problems as relevant to the various disciplines. The job market or whatever comes after a university education can assess whether someone can perform. Universities should focus less on assessing and focus more on actual educating. You should use anything and everything, including AI if it helps with your education.

@acerpacer I think most would agree that we should move away from universities as acreditation factories. But that doesn't mean that assessment has no place. I'm a runner, and I train much harder if I have a race comming up than if I don't. I'm also a dancer, and again, I practice more when I have a big dance weekend away coming up. Just so with education. Having some kind of specific goal to aim towards can help students. Otherwise we can make eduction about all the things you say, as much as we like, but without something to motivate students, most would choose to play XBox, or go drinking than do even work they are interested in. I know that I would have. Much as I love my subject, if at 19 you'd have said "read this article or put it off to tomoorw and go to the pub", I can tell that unless I had the motifvator of deadlines, I'd have never left the pub. AI can help you with your education. But it can also do your education for you, leaving you with no benefit from having been there.

@acerpacer, that's impossible. If we think removing hard thinking (in the form of building skills for one's own original writing or equation -solving) from higher education is going to cause havoc, imagine removing ALL need for students to demonstrate proficiency. that is the purpose of the assessment- so they can show you what they can do/know. Getting rid of that won't allow us to ever know if students are ready for the workforce. Would you hire an engineer to build a bridge who has never demonstrated they can measure properly? of course not. So, back to the drawing board.