In a recent The Gray Area podcast, James Walsh, a features writer for New York magazine’s Intelligencer, asks, “Who is going to be able to afford to go to college to learn to write?” It is an earnest question, grounded in both economic insight and uncertainty about the very nature of higher education.
Hosted by Vox writer Sean Illing, James and Sean reflect on current and possible future impacts of AI on learning, higher education, and the structural supports of democratic society. Walsh, who recently wrote Everyone is cheating their way through college (paywall)—a report on AI’s impact on higher education after interviewing current college students—is here to tell us that there is no going back to a time before AI in education, and everything must change. But how and why? There are no obvious answers.
One line of thought is that faculty, schools, and universities need to redesign long-standing approaches to curriculum to be “AI-proof.” This is a common tack, appearing in many thought-pieces. For example, in writing about the future of writing, Meghan O’Rourke opines that the days of teaching essay writing are over, and professors need realistic assessment strategies (pass/fail) and spaces where students must work without access to AI. Similar approaches call for falling back to AI-proof assignments and evaluation (e.g., oral exams and blue books!).
But let’s consider an alternative, perhaps more extreme outcome: the age of higher education is over, and we’re headed into a post-literate society. Whether the topic is writing or anything else, this society embraces the reality that humans don’t need to know as much anymore. AI-driven tools will assist us in every aspect of our lives. Sure, there will still be hallucinations and mistakes, but maybe accountability isn’t as important as speed and efficiency in this future?
Here, Walsh’s expensive education is for a minority of elites who value thinking. It’s a nostalgic endeavor: cognition as a mix of memory, facts, and intellectual muscle. These will be slow and anti-capitalist spaces where higher learning is powered and buttressed by pre-AI norms. The expected ROI would be dismal in an AI-driven culture and marketplace. Learning would just be “for fun.”
Wealthy, lefty elites may opt for this, just as I chose to study art as an undergraduate. After all, what was I thinking? There were more profitable disciplines (business, medicine), and more practical ones (law, science, politics). But I chose to focus my studies on art and art making because I enjoyed it, and helped me explore the world around me in powerful ways. But it did not prepare me for a particularly focused or accessible career path. Learning about art and art making was an end in itself.
Today, we are already hybrid animal machines, and we all must face our cyborg future: the forces of AI and capitalism are fast-approaching to demolish our educational traditions. A post-literate society will follow, and humans will adopt new ways of thinking, learning, and doing. The academy must adapt by offering competitive technologies and services, as well as acknowledging its limitations.