Education and Generative AI

You don’t solve more with more. You solve it with less.
—Caspian Keyes, Pantheon

I recently came across an interview of Stephen Cuunjieng regarding education and economics. Here are my thoughts about it.

Two years ago, I spoke about this topic in AI Asia Expo 2023, in the panel about Artificial Intelligence and Education. The key to fixing the system is to invest more time and energy into improving the education system.

In Information Technology (IT), this is so prevalent. I’ve said this many times and I will say this again: the use of Generative AI (Gen AI) is erosion of Common Sense. The moment an educator uses it, they have already waived Critical Thinking and resigned to Idiocy.

Here’s how it works: The professor uses Gen AI for his lessons and exams. The students use Gen AI to answer the exams. The professor uses Gen AI to check the submitted exams. Lather, rinse, repeat. It invariably results to unemployable nincompoops.

Gen AI systems fail because these systems don’t know what is right or wrong. This is a classic demonstration of Gödel Incompleteness Theorem. The passionate promotion for Gen AI is inversely proportional to the knowledge of how they work.

Interestingly, 99.99% of the people who talk about «Artificial Intelligence», including the ones that I know, don’t even have the slightest idea of what it is. I see them talk in conferences, symposiums, and seminars, but they’re all pretending to contribute something of value. They’re all just echoing what they read or watched, online. They get stumped when I ask them basic questions about CS.

The entire field of Information Technology moves at a rapid pace. Your knowledge this month, may become obsolete next month. That is the reason why educators are the bottlenecks. Professors will always be lagging behind industry standards if they’re not part of the industry, which is usually the case. They’re not actively engaged in projects, contributing to (open source) software development, and participating in invention and discovery. What they’re teaching in schools have no viability outside the institution.

Most of the applicants that I interview for technical positions fail. Within the first five minutes of the interview, they’ve already demonstrated complete lack of knowledge of the things they have written in their CVs. Almost 50% of the applicants use CV generators. The other 50% put fillers—lots and lots of false information.

Most of what is being taught in school is a tiny subset of what is functional and usable outside. This, then, creates the illusion of competence and talent. And of course, educators couldn’t care less about it.

Then we have cybersecurity «experts» who does not even know how to write low-level programs. What we have are script kiddies who rely on tools and services to fake technical competence. These wannabes don’t even know what bit shifting is.

As long as you’re not implementing it, you don’t understand it. If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.