How long before Higher Ed collapses due to AI?

[Anonymous]

Just saw on twitter than Starbucks just dumped its ai inventory management system because it both miscounted and mischaracterized.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of these kids are unemployed because they haven’t found the job they thought they would have, not because there are no jobs.
I am fully prepared for the possibility that my son may eventually work as a mechanic or carpenter after finishing at a SLAC.

Consulting firms, for example, are only hiring 20% of the 2026 grads as compared to 2024 grads. When you see that kind of job loss in various sectors, then in fact, there are no jobs, or certainly fewer than just a couple of years ago.

I’m as anti-generative AI as it gets, but if it can kill the consulting industry…maybe I’ll have to rethink my position.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What kind of country do we want? All uneducated people who don’t go to college, for what? What is even the point of human life if we don’t have work to support ourselves?

The point would be to learn. The leisure to learn! Imagine if we had universal basic income so that we could enroll in college part time our whole lives! Two classes a semester and one in summer. Anything you want! If we didn't have to work we could learn for fun. AI
wouldn't be the death of college it would be the birth or college - we just have to decouple college from the idea of it's purpose of getting a job since ai would be doing our jobs now.

There will always be people interested enough in something that they will want to work at it - and perhaps there will be a incentive structure for that.

We had a nigh-universal basic income during covid and, unfortunately, approximately nobody did that. But people did spend a lot of quality time with video games and worse.

Yes because complete social isolation and not being able to go enjoy time with others is an accurate reflection of a world with a UBI

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5 years? I know some top schools will stay around as novelty but overall seems like collapse is imminent. When graduating classes start experiencing increasing double digit unemployment? Seems like that is just around the corner.

There is zero chance of this. For one thing, AI is no where close to ready for prime time. Second, you still need humans to develop content, review fact and oterhwise be creative. Three AI can do things that humans can in the physical world. The fact is, yes, there are tasks that AI can complete, but only 80% of the way there and it requires humans to get the other 20%, regardless of task.

Yes but when AI is completing 80% of the tasks and only requiring deminimus effort from humans to complete it, the jobs for humans will start drying out. And as humans "fix" or "complete" the task to 100%, AI is learning what the human is doing (when companies start using employees to feed training data to AI as many companies have started to do) and iteratively getting better at completing the task to 100%. And, I don't think you're 5 years ago. There's an exponential growth curve happening in the world of AI. Think about the last year and how much more functionality and utility we got from the top two models out there.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5 years? I know some top schools will stay around as novelty but overall seems like collapse is imminent. When graduating classes start experiencing increasing double digit unemployment? Seems like that is just around the corner.

There is zero chance of this. For one thing, AI is no where close to ready for prime time. Second, you still need humans to develop content, review fact and oterhwise be creative. Three AI can do things that humans can in the physical world. The fact is, yes, there are tasks that AI can complete, but only 80% of the way there and it requires humans to get the other 20%, regardless of task.

Yes but when AI is completing 80% of the tasks and only requiring deminimus effort from humans to complete it, the jobs for humans will start drying out. And as humans "fix" or "complete" the task to 100%, AI is learning what the human is doing (when companies start using employees to feed training data to AI as many companies have started to do) and iteratively getting better at completing the task to 100%. And, I don't think you're 5 years ago. There's an exponential growth curve happening in the world of AI. Think about the last year and how much more functionality and utility we got from the top two models out there.

They still mostly suck.

[Anonymous]

If you think high schoolers have top enough education to run the country, businesses, and create new AI models, then we wouldn’t have higher Ed. But, take a look at the reading and math scores in the past decade coming out of secondary schools—higher ed is going to be needed even more!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Better question seems to be how long until the AI bubble bursts.

+1
I honestly believe AI has been waaaaaaaaay overhyped.

For the people making these kinds of statements, you're really not using AI to its fullest capacity and it would be nice if you could actually understand that. For those who are heavily utilizing tokens and are required to do so by their jobs, no one on that end is saying it's "waaaaaaaaaay overhyped."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5 years? I know some top schools will stay around as novelty but overall seems like collapse is imminent. When graduating classes start experiencing increasing double digit unemployment? Seems like that is just around the corner.

There is zero chance of this. For one thing, AI is no where close to ready for prime time. Second, you still need humans to develop content, review fact and oterhwise be creative. Three AI can do things that humans can in the physical world. The fact is, yes, there are tasks that AI can complete, but only 80% of the way there and it requires humans to get the other 20%, regardless of task.

Yes but when AI is completing 80% of the tasks and only requiring deminimus effort from humans to complete it, the jobs for humans will start drying out. And as humans "fix" or "complete" the task to 100%, AI is learning what the human is doing (when companies start using employees to feed training data to AI as many companies have started to do) and iteratively getting better at completing the task to 100%. And, I don't think you're 5 years ago. There's an exponential growth curve happening in the world of AI. Think about the last year and how much more functionality and utility we got from the top two models out there.

They still mostly suck.

No they actually dont. If you've been using the models over the last two years, you know exactly how good they gotten. They're not perfect (and I'm not sure they can ever reach perfection given what LLMs are); however, to say they "suck," just means you haven't really been using the models other than to fix some emails.

[Anonymous]

Every 20-30 years, a new technology becomes available, jobs change, and evolve.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5 years? I know some top schools will stay around as novelty but overall seems like collapse is imminent. When graduating classes start experiencing increasing double digit unemployment? Seems like that is just around the corner.

There is zero chance of this. For one thing, AI is no where close to ready for prime time. Second, you still need humans to develop content, review fact and oterhwise be creative. Three AI can do things that humans can in the physical world. The fact is, yes, there are tasks that AI can complete, but only 80% of the way there and it requires humans to get the other 20%, regardless of task.

Yes but when AI is completing 80% of the tasks and only requiring deminimus effort from humans to complete it, the jobs for humans will start drying out. And as humans "fix" or "complete" the task to 100%, AI is learning what the human is doing (when companies start using employees to feed training data to AI as many companies have started to do) and iteratively getting better at completing the task to 100%. And, I don't think you're 5 years ago. There's an exponential growth curve happening in the world of AI. Think about the last year and how much more functionality and utility we got from the top two models out there.

They still mostly suck.

No they actually dont. If you've been using the models over the last two years, you know exactly how good they gotten. They're not perfect (and I'm not sure they can ever reach perfection given what LLMs are); however, to say they "suck," just means you haven't really been using the models other than to fix some emails.

Well, we'll see, I've yet to encounter any AI that isn't significantly worse than the human its replacing. Lots of errors and fabrications. Perhaps its good for coding, that isn't my realm, but I expect that within the next three to five years there will be significant pull back from AI, and acknowledgement that its purported capabilities have been dramatically oversold in most other areas.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5 years? I know some top schools will stay around as novelty but overall seems like collapse is imminent. When graduating classes start experiencing increasing double digit unemployment? Seems like that is just around the corner.

There is zero chance of this. For one thing, AI is no where close to ready for prime time. Second, you still need humans to develop content, review fact and oterhwise be creative. Three AI can do things that humans can in the physical world. The fact is, yes, there are tasks that AI can complete, but only 80% of the way there and it requires humans to get the other 20%, regardless of task.

Yes but when AI is completing 80% of the tasks and only requiring deminimus effort from humans to complete it, the jobs for humans will start drying out. And as humans "fix" or "complete" the task to 100%, AI is learning what the human is doing (when companies start using employees to feed training data to AI as many companies have started to do) and iteratively getting better at completing the task to 100%. And, I don't think you're 5 years ago. There's an exponential growth curve happening in the world of AI. Think about the last year and how much more functionality and utility we got from the top two models out there.

They still mostly suck.

No they actually dont. If you've been using the models over the last two years, you know exactly how good they gotten. They're not perfect (and I'm not sure they can ever reach perfection given what LLMs are); however, to say they "suck," just means you haven't really been using the models other than to fix some emails.

Well, we'll see, I've yet to encounter any AI that isn't significantly worse than the human its replacing. Lots of errors and fabrications. Perhaps its good for coding, that isn't my realm, but I expect that within the next three to five years there will be significant pull back from AI, and acknowledgement that its purported capabilities have been dramatically oversold in most other areas.

Adding just today there are reports that Microsoft cutting back on its AI use now that we are entering the stage where it is no longer heavily subsidized. Add in the many public costs and resistance to data centers.

[Anonymous]

Not anymore than a great and comprehensive physical library would have ..Or a great calculator to arithmetic teaching at elementary school

[Anonymous]

I have adjusted my pro models to reply with "I do not know" if they cannot cross verify whatever "fact" they decide to spit out. This has greatly reduced hallucinations but now it routinely "does not know". Which sums up most of the AI hype bs I have encountered

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Most of these kids are unemployed because they haven’t found the job they thought they would have, not because there are no jobs.
I am fully prepared for the possibility that my son may eventually work as a mechanic or carpenter after finishing at a SLAC.

I think I know you - Sidwell right?

Haha nope!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:5 years? I know some top schools will stay around as novelty but overall seems like collapse is imminent. When graduating classes start experiencing increasing double digit unemployment? Seems like that is just around the corner.

There is zero chance of this. For one thing, AI is no where close to ready for prime time. Second, you still need humans to develop content, review fact and oterhwise be creative. Three AI can do things that humans can in the physical world. The fact is, yes, there are tasks that AI can complete, but only 80% of the way there and it requires humans to get the other 20%, regardless of task.

Yes but when AI is completing 80% of the tasks and only requiring deminimus effort from humans to complete it, the jobs for humans will start drying out. And as humans "fix" or "complete" the task to 100%, AI is learning what the human is doing (when companies start using employees to feed training data to AI as many companies have started to do) and iteratively getting better at completing the task to 100%. And, I don't think you're 5 years ago. There's an exponential growth curve happening in the world of AI. Think about the last year and how much more functionality and utility we got from the top two models out there.

They still mostly suck.

No they actually dont. If you've been using the models over the last two years, you know exactly how good they gotten. They're not perfect (and I'm not sure they can ever reach perfection given what LLMs are); however, to say they "suck," just means you haven't really been using the models other than to fix some emails.

The other problem is that most people don't know how to actually write proper prompts. They get garbled information or the model hallucinates. There's all kinds of issues when your prompting is actually the problem. People think asking Claude questions as if you were just chatting with the bot is the way to get a fully fledged answer. It's not. But no one is actually taking the time to learn how to prompt (especially non-coders).