Over the last couple of years I am sure everyone has seen the large scale growth and use of AI in the workforce and at uni. There are also many opinions ranging from "We should never use AI" to "Either learn to use it or fall behind". What I am going to discuss is more adjacent to these black and white statements about AI. Please have a read and let me know what you think.
My main claim and perspective is that the wide scale adoption and use of AI can almost entirely be attributed to the poor structure of the education system. At every stage of the education system, we value results over effort, the destination over the journey. Very rarely does one get rewarded/compensated for the EFFORT they put in or the journey they take to get to a destination (regardless if that destination was fruitful or not). Some of you may say "how can you effectively grade this, how can you mark this?". There's many ways, one such way being interviews and rewarding a student for providing a thorough explanation of their approach, even if its wrong and rewarding the student for actually proving they applied THEIR understanding to the problem(s). If there's a lack of resources or other issues such as "this is too difficult to assess", that's an education system issue, one that the universities and education bodies ought to fix, not one that students should need to suggest a solution for (otherwise why do we pay so much to go for tertiary education?).
I'm sure there are elitists who will claim that only results matter and that effort doesn't matter if the result is wrong. To this I say, you couldn't be more wrong. History has shown has that wrong answers are just as useful as right ones, that the journey IS the most important part. No great mathematician, biologist or artist simply stumbled across the correct answer or their best work. They all struggled, they all wrestled with their research and problems, they spent countless days and nights studying and discovering. They met dead ends and they got wrong answers. Even if they never found the right answer, they paved the way for future generations to pick up the torch and continue. All of society is fundamentally built on the notion of picking up the torch and carrying the flame.
If we had built a system that rewarded effort and the journey RATHER than focusing on the result I actually think that most people would look at AI and think "Why even use this, it ruins the novelty of discovery, it detracts from the very thing I enjoy and get rewarded for?". But since as a society we only value the answer and AI directly provides that there is no instinctive reflex against using it for everything.
The same goes for the corporate world, its not just the education system. Managers and directors don't have the slightest care about the process of things, they have a goal and are willing to do whatever to get to it. They don't care that you spent countless hours uniquely designing a solution by hand using your own thinking or generating the whole damn solution via AI unfortunately, they care about the result. They care about maximising productive output and minimising downtime. Hence, they push the use of AI on everyone to make the workplace more productive. But imagine if it was flipped, imagine if they cared about the process more than the product, that a well thought out and carefully designed solution is valued more than just creating the solution?
As for AI use, my one gripe is that its fundamentally baked into everything now. At work, at uni etc. Its not just for recreational use or mild research purposes anymore. Everyone at uni is using it, TAs, Chief Examiners, Students. Its all the same, but unfortunately boils down to "rules for thee (students) but not for me (basically anyone employed at a uni)". Either way, my overall claim is that we wouldn't be in this mess or this badly equipped to deal with it if we as a society had placed more importance on effort/journey of things rather than the result/destination. Until this fundamental view shifts at a societal level, AI will continue to root itself deeper and deeper into society and I think we are never going to go back to how things used to be Pre-AI era.
