Functionally Illiterate: How to Be Dumb, Fast

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), something is so prevalent and I’ve spoken about this this topic so many times, and I will say this again: the use of Generative AI (Gen AI) for learning is erosion of common sense. The moment an educator uses it, they waive 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.

If you just want to watch machines talk to machines, then give back responses, and the machines confirm the feedback, and you stay in that loop, then you’re have no value as an educator. Why should students still need to pay you, if the machines are already giving them what they believe they need? All that you’d be doing is being a middleman, which the student can bypass since they can talk directly to these systems.

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. 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.

To make things worse, there are clowns everywhere that have popped up like mushrooms. What they do is talk endlessly about artificial intelligence governance, policies, regulations, alignment, assessment, readiness. Seriously? I can’t understand why they have the audacity to talk in front of crowds carrying with them serious faces of pseudo-competence. Artificial intelligence is the compound of the scientific research, the engineering, the tools, the community, and the economy. You can’t treat it like physical commodity found in the supermarket. Of course, the truth is that they lobby policies so that they secure seats of power to control the industry, more than the facade of seminars and conventions.

There are no shortcuts to learning. You still have to pour in the hundreds, if not thousands of hours, in order to get better. If you want to be able to lift that heavy barbell, you have to train to lift it. You have take a special program that will allow you to progressively lift weights, until you reach your goal. Having somebody lift the weights for you will never make you stronger. No amount of training by others, for you, will increase your muscular strength.