15 hours ago, MigL said:

I'm not a Luddite; I was building 8 bit computers in 1979, programming Z80 assembly, faithfully reading BYTE magazine ( and Steve Ciarcia;s hardware column ) along with Microprocessor Report in the University library, and waiting for the micro-computer revolution which came 15 years later.

I had a discussion with younger students and one of the things that they noted is that they feel unequipped to navigate the whole social media and now AI landscape as they lack the knowledge gained compared to folks who grew up in the "before-times".

6 hours ago, dimreepr said:

I said we'll lose students as AI improves, so the pathways will reduce but the quality of students will increase bc they will stand out, thinking beyond the typical AI answer.

What is happening now is the opposite. Quality of students goes down, number of folks going through the system increases. Few, if any imagine being able to outperform AI.

On 2/20/2026 at 5:59 AM, Markus Hanke said:

I think the best case scenario would be that it strengthens one’s ability to ask the right questions.

I cannot stress how important this is in what concerns both pedagogy and scientific methodology.

There are very interesting comments on societal and economic derivations, but I'll make no comment on that because I don't feel competent enough.

AI should, and will, be included at some point in education. It's simply a matter of time. New standards for exams will have to be put in place. The further forward the field will develop (and it will), the truer the previous two statements will become.

Taking up on suggestions from others, one (among many) possibilities would be something like,

a) Verbal (oral or written) examination merely to probe the student's mind in order to simply see if they've gained a reasonable grasp of the subject

b) Exploration with the AI tool to see that they actually are able to formulate significant questions, clarify context, and highlight nuances, as well as follow up answers, by refining the prompt

c) Presentation of results again in a verbal (oral or written format)

Needless to say, the worst-case scenario would be to start using AI as some kind of oracle, which too many have been doing for some time now.

Edited 8 hours ago8 hr by joigus
minor correction

13 minutes ago, joigus said:

AI should, and will, be included at some point in education. It's simply a matter of time. New standards for exams will have to be put in place. The further forward the field will develop (and it will), the truer the previous two statements will become.

There are part of curricula already. However, I do feel that there is a disconnect how some educators and especially administrators frame it and how it affects learning in practice. Essentially there is an emphasis on academic misconduct and plagiarism to counter the use for entirely AI-generated works. And then promoting beneficial uses. Yet quite clearly, we can see that it has little (positive) impact.

15 minutes ago, joigus said:

a) Verbal (oral or written) examination merely to probe the student's mind in order to simply see if they've gained a reasonable grasp of the subject

That is already the case, though oral is problematic for large classes and usually has a high level of complaints regarding subjectivity. Furthermore, there is strong administrative push to let students pass, which is a long-standing problem. Essentially if too many students fail, the assumption is that the prof is at fault, rather a decline in learning abilities. This has led to at least a decade of grade inflation.

17 minutes ago, joigus said:

b) Exploration with the AI tool to see that they actually are able to formulate significant questions, clarify context, and highlight nuances, as well as follow up answers, by refining the prompt

18 minutes ago, joigus said:

c) Presentation of results again in a verbal (oral or written format)

These are already being done, but frequently if you poke them for more details (see a) we can see massive gaps. Together with a system that disincentivizes failing students (largely because of tuition) and the fact that students fail at building basic skills, there is not a lot material to work with.

The easiest ways for educators is to go with the flow and we are already seeing that in high schools and increasingly at universities. Thus, the overall issue here is how do we disincentivize the easy ways of using AI and promote the better ones. Students frequently do not see the benefit in wasting their valuable time on social media by doing homework or exercises.

19 minutes ago, CharonY said:

There are part of curricula already. However, I do feel that there is a disconnect how some educators and especially administrators frame it and how it affects learning in practice. Essentially there is an emphasis on academic misconduct and plagiarism to counter the use for entirely AI-generated works. And then promoting beneficial uses. Yet quite clearly, we can see that it has little (positive) impact.

Let me concentrate on this point, because somehow it's the closest to my heart. An important aspect of scientific endeavour consists of (or at least implies) interacting with other minds. I think putting AI to good use would entail facing the student with interacting with other working minds. It is conceivable (and very understandable) that educators need to develop the necessary criteria to extract pedagogical benefits from this. IOW: I want to see your interaction with the automaton mind.

A. N. Whitehead (as reflected in my signature) once wrote: "Civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them". This goes to show that the problem in a general context is not new. The question we face now is a new one: What about the important operation being thinking itself? Can we perform thinking without thinking about thinking? I think we can't. We must think about this new machine thinking, and refine the criteria. That's all. And nobody says it's easy.

1 hour ago, joigus said:

An important aspect of scientific endeavour consists of (or at least implies) interacting with other minds. I think putting AI to good use would entail facing the student with interacting with other working minds. It is conceivable (and very understandable) that educators need to develop the necessary criteria to extract pedagogical benefits from this. IOW: I want to see your interaction with the automaton mind.

An issue is that AI is not a human mind. It does not think like one and it mostly simulates. Avi Loeb has dubbed it "Alien Intelligence" to make the distinction.

I agree with the majority of the posts here. AI has its uses, but clearly some groups are weaponizing it to destroy society.

And the data centers, the only reason I can think of why they need to be built is to control Trump’s middle defense. Maybe it will also work on asteroids.

It is like the irony in Mutual Assured Destruction where more bombs make us safer. Let’s have a computer that learns (rips of your intellectual property), can make thousands to your one to insure you work more productivity. Your job is more productive and the more AI can do the more job security you have.

4 hours ago, joigus said:

I cannot stress how important this is in what concerns both pedagogy and scientific methodology.

The following may be an unpopular opinion, but I’ll say it anyway.

When I went to school, we spent the first five years of math education doing pretty much nothing else but pen-on-paper arithmetic. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division…over and over and over again, with increasingly large numbers and more decimal points.

Since I left school 30+ years ago, never even once was I in a situation where I in fact had to do pen-and-paper arithmetic, at least to the best of my recollection. I’m unsure if now I even remember how to do it. The reality is that we live in the Information Age, and it’s a skill that’s basically never needed anymore. Of course one needs to have an understanding of what those operations mean, but being proficient in working out 6537.45/765.44 by hand on paper has kind of lost its relevance, IMHO. I think it’s enough to spent at most a year on this.

On the other hand, had we gone further on the upper end, beyond single-variable calculus, perhaps into differential equations, calculus on manifolds etc, it would have been very helpful.

Just my personal opinion. You can crucify me for it :)