Episode 35: Educational Opportunities; part I Artificial Intelligence

AI favours the small and the unique

What problems can a small campus academy address that large regular universities cannot? In this part, I talk about the opportunities raised by Artificial Intelligence.

I see four ways Artificial Intelligence will benefit Academica Libera Mentis:

1. Contrary to the large competition, our grading and examination structures are largely AI-proof in the early years,

2. AI is a natural complement to our education, particularly when it comes to skill development and admin,

3. AI largely knocks out our biggest competitors and increases the value of what we teach, and

4. A tight campus community can avoid the main negatives of AI, which anything large or diffuse cannot.

   

   Education at mainstream universities vs. ALM

   For more details on just what we do at ALM to make the most of these opportunities, read Minds that Dare, for Sale on Amazon.

Let us walk through these opportunities.

Grading and examination

Artificial Intelligence has basically made it easy to access the text-transmitted skills and intellectual arguments of the whole of humanity up until now. That has lots of advantages in terms of access, but also important disadvantages, one of which is that instead of absorbing skills and information oneself, anyone can ‘cheat’ and let AI perform standard skills and answer standard questions. That is a temptation too hard to resist for most people, particularly if they are judged relative to others who have fallen for the temptation.

AI has thus made it possible for half-illiterates to produce excellent essays and provide quick answers to quite complex standard examination questions on any material that has been widely used for examination in the past. This is destroying the cheapest forms of examination available to regular universities: online exams and hand-in essays. Moreover, it has made ‘cheating’ on sit-down exams both easier and more rewarding: if a student can somehow work out how to get AI assistance on answering questions, he or she can get fairly accurate answers and thus high grades within minutes of accessing that assistance.

This is well-recognised and well-discussed by universities and business schools, but they so far have not yet responded with the main countermove a large university has, which is to have individual and oral examinations, augmented with closely human-watched written examinations. Those are much costlier forms of examination relative to the online version, and they furthermore preclude the more important work of writing essays and papers. Written work produced over weeks mimics the eventual critical-thinking activities of the students in their eventual job much better than answering standard questions but is easy to cheat on with AI. Hence, AI in regular universities is both forcing costs to go up and is taking away the most useful form of graded learning.

Regular universities can, and of course will, use AI to adjust to these realities. AI can reduce the costs of individual examinations, such as by having individual students answer questions posed to them by AI (think of students in a booth with a computer supplied by the university). AI-mediated examination reduces the need for individual examination by lecturers, which is highly expensive. Similarly, regular universities will start to use older students as a means of oral examinations to keep the cost down. Still, one cannot let students write long essays and papers that way, and the type of questions that are needed to get comparable grades across large numbers of students will necessarily be standard and memory-based.

Now, of course, a large university can go to the ultimate countermove, which is to let individual lecturers subjectively decide on the grade of students, but this would take away the power of the university bureaucracy and would make it imperative to have small classes. Both will be bitterly resisted as they take away the economic reasons to be large.

So, AI is destroying the ability of large universities to do meaningful grading in a cheap manner and is also destroying their ability to grade higher-level critical thinking skills.

A small campus academy, like Academia Libera Mentis, has huge opportunities in this space.

For one, our material is own-generated and unique, so AI and the internet cannot yet help with answering our standard questions. For quite a few years, we will hence simply not have to contend with AI as a method of cheating on our essay questions: there is no large body of work on the internet for AI to find which could help ALM students cheat on their essays and basic exams, at least not for the most interesting and important parts of our curriculum. Unless AI develops the higher-order skill of truly understanding the principles simply from reading our textbook, and is then able to apply them to any new situation (in which case nearly all intellectual work can be done by AI), ALM examinations are somewhat immune to AI.

Secondly, with a small group of students living in a campus with the teachers and other students, cheating is far easier to detect and ridicule. There is simply no hiding the level of one’s development when one lives in a community of 50-100 other students. Within a tight community, most examination is informal anyway, such as via students explaining things to each other without receiving grades for it. It is also much simpler in a community to develop and maintain a community ethos wherein true learning is valued and cheaters are treated as losers. Moreover, there are obvious ways for the academics to tap into the combined knowledge: one for instance lets the best ‘essay writers’ present their essays to others and then to the academics, with critical questions to be answered on the spot.

Hence, both the need for lecturer-graded examination is much smaller at ALM, whilst the value of using AI to do exams is much lower, and the ability to expose AI-use much greater. In this way, ALM benefits from the destruction AI is wreaking on large regular universities. Note importantly that ALM’s advantages are not merely because of smaller classes, but crucially because one is a tight community and has unique content: simply going to smaller classes won’t help large universities with, for instance, the ability of students to cheat on essays and papers. Cheating students can avoid the gaze of other students outside of class unless the students live together.

AI as a natural complement to ALM

ALM academic teaching has three separate components: unique generalised knowledge embedded in our 100 anchors, standard skills, and basic data/texts. Outside of the academic curriculum, aesthetic, social, and community-building skills are learned by living together. Only our 100 anchors are unique to ALM, the rest is well-known and standard to top-level education over the centuries.

As already explained above, our integrated curriculum is immune to AI, at least in the early years of ALM. It is best learned by students reflecting together and applying the material on their own lives and the ALM community. AI can help a bit with writing up the reflections, but not much in growing the understanding of the student.

Indeed, the radically honest nature of the 100 anchors includes knowledge almost no-one writes about online, except in propagandistic and manipulative ways. ALM teaches one to see flattery, bullying, forbidden desires, greed, and powerlust as just as human as sacrifice, purity, and morality. You can learn and read about the second set anywhere, but honesty about the first set? Nowhere that I am aware of. Since AI is essentially the knowledge embedded in what humans have openly discussed, the presence of knowledge humans will not openly discuss immunises us from AI.

All other aspects of the academic curriculum are helped by AI in obvious ways. Students can for instance use standard AI tools to critique their writing and point out language mistakes and better ways to construct sentences. As is known already, it is not wise to rely on AI to constantly critique one’s writing, but to use AI for a week every two months or so to sharpen the writing tools is good practice: then one gets the benefits of getting the ‘sharp writing gaze of AI’ without becoming ‘just like AI’.

Similarly, one can practice presentations on AI, improve the production of videos, use AI to run complex mathematical models, use AI to find and critique standard data, and so forth. AI is not a competitor in this, but a natural complement to the 100 anchors teaching.

Indeed, AI can take away the parts of teaching I personally find most boring and least useful, namely the highly repetitive bits. I can then spend my time on helping students realise the implications of the 100 anchors for their own lives and whatever they know about the rest of the world, i.e. personalised guiding based on an understanding of humans and human groups.

AI can similarly augment the aesthetic and healthy community activities of ALM. Obviously, AI will be of no direct use in physical sports competitions, but it can help devise training schedules. AI will not do the cooking, but can help with designing interesting meals. Students wont get pregnant from AI, but can get romantic advice from AI. Students wont meditate with AI, but their group meditation can be to the chant of an AI. AI will not do the painting, but can help with designing the paintings and give advice on the materials and methods. And so forth: AI is a natural complement to the healthy campus activities and can accelerate learning in various skills practiced in the afternoon, ranging from carpentry to physio. The temptation of relying on AI companionship rather than human companionship is naturally limited when one actually lives together as a human community: the real thing is better than the similitude offered by AI.

Hence, I do not fear or reject AI in teaching, but see it as a natural complement to what I teach and what ALM as a whole teaches. A tight campus community has much less to fear from the temptations of AI to social life than atomistic large universities. Indeed, I think only small campus academies can help students come to grips with the temptations of AI: whole campus communities can work out how to retain their humanity whilst getting the best out of AI.

The help of AI in increasing our value

The unique value ALM offers is a broad and quite deep general understanding of humanity, together with the benefits of students forming a tight community. The standard basic skills and activities we otherwise undertake are designed to maximise this value.

Consider how AI knocks out our competition: AI is making the production of sycophantic nonsense (termed ‘Bullsh*t’ by my fellow LSE professor Graeber) childishly easy. Hence practically all what they still teach at business schools, business degrees, fluff degrees, and politically-correct teaching will lose its value due to AI. Instead of an expensive human who writes nonsense reports, implements the marketing, writes standard software, and so forth, AI will do so. Already, AI is leading to mass layoffs among those performing standard writing and administrative tasks. Only the top professionals survive, and their productivity is increasing since they can use and correct AI.

So, AI will make most of the middle group of professionals and administrators obsolete.

AI will also increase the value of things AI is naturally bad at. I already mapped out ten years ago what those areas are: specialised services requiring manual labour and higher-level organisation design skills. This is exactly what we are seeing in the labour market. Plumbers, masons, gardeners, roof tilers, decorators, refurbishers, and other such professions are seeing their wages go up. Those specialised services require workers to go to different physical places and then change those physical spaces according to the wishes of clients. That requires a lot of skills in one package (social skills, manoeuvrability, tool-use, organising with others), which is beyond AI’s current abilities. As a result, there is a flip happening between blue collar work and white collar work, with many smart young people now choosing to become electricians rather than accountants, repairman rather than software engineer.

On the other hand, AI is increasing the value of top-level critical thinking and human-organisational skills. One sees this in the accelerated wages of top managers and consultants: whilst consultancy companies are radically reducing their intake of younger workers, the top consultant are earning more than ever. The demand for high-level critical thinking skills is going up, as survey after survey indicates.

So, the importance of top-level critical thinking skills is increasing exactly at the moment that learning those skills at regular universities is being eroded by AI, and the addiction effects of social media and mobile phones are making them ever harder for youngsters to attain.

All this is perfect for ALM. We try to be the antidote to all these problems: our unique integrated curriculum teaches critical thinking and general human-related knowledge much faster than regular universities (so we get students to the top quicker); our tight community structure avoids the debilitating effect AI has on learning when students are atomised and thus tempted by AI to cheat on their own learning; and our healthy campus program is expressly designed to get the best out of human communities so as to give students a real community to live for! AI thus makes what we do both more timely, more valuable, and more effective.

The main negatives of AI

The main negatives of AI for personal and social development are that it provides a shortcut to a reasonable, but low level, flow of joys. AI is already great at flattery and will soon be combined with robotics to provide sex robots that never say no. AI will play chess, bridge, or any other social game with those who have no friends. AI will give advice on how to cook, sleep, run, talk, and read. AI will supply whatever type of friendly or unfriendly voice one wants to have near one, and a community of AI will provide one with whatever low-level community needs one thinks one has. It will seem to many they do not need other humans as AI will supply everything.

This was already bad for Generation Z and X, but will be way worse again for the next generation.

ALM cannot yet counteract these terrible temptations and effects where it is most needed, which is in primary schools and in the early years in the family. But ALM does counteract them for those young adults who want an alternative, or whose parents want an alternative.

Here, ALM as a community incubator has enormous advantages over regular universities. We build up human communities wherein the genders can truly negotiate with each other and work out their problems, rather than each fleeing to some AI toy for easy gratification. We build up friendship groups so that friends play with actual friends, rather than with fake AI friends that regularly need a paid upgrade to keep functioning. We force students into becoming more social by having students in such close proximity that they cannot avoid each other: they either work out their irritations with other students or they give up ALM altogether. Indeed, by offering whole families the possibility of going through our programs as one, we make families tighter and help them develop strategies against the de-humanising temptations of AI.

I am tempted to go further and say that what ALM offers - a return of tight human communities that take ownership of their own organisation and future - is the only answer to AI in the modern world. Only in tight human communities that maximise the best of what it is to be human, will humans galvanise the best of AI without losing their own humanity. Atomised, AI will leave humans poor and childless in an endless loop of quick gratification until death releases one. No more families, no more higher causes, just endless dopamine hits until death parts the humans from their AI-aided addictions.

Tight communities, like those of the Amish or other tight religious communities, will be the ones still thriving in the modern age. Unlike the Amish, ALM does not reject modern technology but is finding its way through the temptations. I think that is the only way forward. The alternative is not submission in some form of feudalism, but irrelevancy and eventually annihilation – more likely due in my opinion to collapsing families than due to war.

In conclusion

The power and temptation of AI in this world are both terrifying. At current trajectory, AI is undermining all regular universities and is continuing to destroy the basic fabric of human societies, namely connections between people. AI offers cheats to examination, to skill learning, and to grappling with other humans.

ALM in this regard is going in the direction of hope: by focussing on human-related knowledge and skills, we are homing in on what AI is bad at and we are forming the tight communities in which humans can resist the temptations of AI whilst still benefiting from its technological promise.

For more details on just what we do at ALM to make the most of these opportunities, read Minds that Dare, for Sale on Amazon.