[concordDance]

Honestly, a future where diplomas are just noise and employers stop caring about them and thus young people stop wasting years of their lives "learning" something they don't care about sounds like a huge improvement.

LLM cheaters might incidentally be doing society a service.

[dsego]

They will only learn what's needed to "get the job done" for whatever it means at that moment, and we could potentially see more erosion in technical abilities and work quality. You don't know what you don't know, and without learning things that you don't care about, you loose the chance to expand your knowledge outside of your comfort zone.

[DrillShopper]

> They will only learn what's needed to "get the job done" for whatever it means at that moment

I graduated university around the turn of the century, long before the current AI boom started, and the majority of my classmates were like that. Learning the bare minimum to escape a class isn't new especially if you're only taking that class because you have to because every adult in your life drilled into you that you'll be a homeless failure if you don't go to college and get a degree. The LLMs make that easier, but the university, if the goal wasn't just to take your tuition dollars to enrich a vast administrator class instead of cover the costs of employing the professors teaching you, could offset that with more rigorous testing or oral exams at the end of the class.

The real lesson I learned during my time in university is that the two real edges that elite universities give you (as a student) are 1) social connections to the children of the rich and leaders in the field that you can mine for recommendations and 2) a "wow" factor on your resume. You can't really get the first at a state school or community college, and you definitely can't get the second at a state school or community college, despite learning similar if not the same material in a given field of study.

It hasn't been about (just) the learning for a long time.

[chipsrafferty]

This, but also learning is like the mental equivalent of lifting weights.

It's not so much what you learn, but that you train it hard.

[Mbwagava]

I don't think diplomas have mattered for decades, at least in tech. Let's not pretend anything improved with the introduction of chatbots.

Annyway, any advantage is entirely offset by having to live in a world with LLMs. I'd prefer the tradition of having to educate retarded college graduates. At least they grow into retarded adults. What are we gonna do about chatbots? You can't even educate them, let alone pinocchio them.