[vondur]

Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI. However, the layoffs happened at some of the CSU's where enrollment numbers are drastically down. I think Sonoma State is having a really bad time getting students and CSU Dominguez Hills has always had issues with attracting students compared to nearby CSU Long Beach. I'd imagine at some point these campuses may end up on the chopping block.

[snapetom]

I briefly attended a CSU in the 90's and this was well discussed even back then with predicted population declines. There's just too many CSUs. You'll always need the ones like Stanislaus and Bakersfield to serve their communities and it turns out, they're the ones doing ok. However, there's too many in LA and SF, and the situation is not helped by housing costs in those cities. SFSU itself has had -30% enrollment in the past 10 years.

The CSU system is going to have to to make tough consolidation decisions soon because you can't have declining urban and suburban campuses at the same time.

[jimbokun]

Maybe they can open a campus in Texas where all their residents are moving to.

[readthenotes1]

That would probably chap the hide of many a Texan.

Vanderbilt University opened a franchise somewhere in California recently. The politics aren't that different though so won't be too much of a shock

[nradov]

What exactly does it mean to be "against AI"? Like they don't want students to use AI in coursework? Or they don't want CSU administrators to spend money on commercial AI services? Or the Computer Science faculty don't want to teach about neural networks and linear algebra?

[altairprime]

Sonoma-area rent (this college is in Rohnert Park, south of Santa Rosa and east of Sebastopol) spiked by a thousand dollars a month or more after the 2017 fires destroyed several square miles of homes, and the city planners chose to let the single-family home district rebuild as low density rather than rezoning the now-bulldozed land as medium or high density. That campus used to be packed before it became impossible to live in the area, but afaik rents never came back down through when I left a couple years ago, and I think? enrollment dropped off a cliff as the graduating classes discovered they couldn’t afford to get jobs in the area. Presumably losing a state college that specialized in medical professionals in the city next door was worth it to Santa Rosa to preserve those atomic family homes, but locals were livid and it was the beginning of the end for me there (or else I would have been one of those students enrolled these past two years).

[vondur]

I don't think you can just appropriate the property that burned down and then build high density housing. I'd imagine the people probably want to rebuild their homes and move back. There's probably other land that can be used for more high density housing.

[skybrian]

I’m usually pretty YIMBY, but I would make an exception for a place that just had a catastrophic wildfire. (That is, unless something’s been done to lower the wildfire risk.)

[altairprime]

Sadly, they were not then YIMBY in any other ways after that missed opportunity, either.

[skybrian]

What I mean is, it seems like people should moving away from places with high wildfire risk? If so, building more housing as YIMBY encourages is counterproductive. Instead, they should disallow building there.

There are similar arguments about building housing in a flood zone.

Instead, we should be building more housing in safer places.

[altairprime]

As it turns out, insurers agree on the risk under today’s management practices and are simply ending service to the entire state rather than be compelled to insure the people living in unmanaged forest zones (i.e. all of western and northern California).

In that specific area of Santa Rosa, now that it’s burned it won’t burn like that again for a few decades — it’s not like SoCal LA where it goes up every ten years like clockwork due to chaparral — and it turned out that no one had been enforcing “safe distance around home clear of brush and trees” and so it’s probably now the lowest wildfire risk city in the entire state to build homes in as a result: proper code enforcement, safety protocols, and a case study of how fire spreads through blown embers, dry roofs, wall-adjacent bushes, and open vents.

The fires reached all the way to the highway and very nearly jumped it to burn towards the ocean and they were prepared to sacrifice the entire eastern half of the city to prevent that, because Marin and Sevastopol refuse to thin their trees and it would have spread in a single day to all of North Bay if they let it cross. (And, yes, even Marin deserves not to be razed by fire, however much ire they’ve earned!) So it turns out that building homes near any forest is a bad idea if you’re not also thinning out the forest with selective logging, and as a result the entirety of Northern California and Western Oregon are more or less ‘places with high wildfire risk’. It doesn’t have to be that way, but certainly it will be until leaders grow a spine and stop capitulating to the existing homeowners.

I wrote a rather detailed paper about this with a dozen references spanning the past century for school last year; no AI required, just a handful of luxurious 2500-word days and then an couple more for editing. Best week of the year. Each wildfire costs $100-150M of California GDP in direct and indirect impacts; at $15k/yr fulltime minimum wage, hiring a thousand laborers to carry hand axes into the forest and thin them for a full year — machines can’t traverse and even if they could, machine logging and controlled burns can only happen during 4 months out of 12 — would prevent at least one wildfire (breakeven point) and every one prevented after that would be pure profit for the state economy. You’d think greed would drive them to do it, but apparently it’s anathema to suggest manual labor can solve problems anymore. Maybe someday Santa Rosa or Sonoma County will work up the courage to do it :)

[nradov]

Where are the safer places? Pretty much everywhere habitable in California is at high risk of wildfires and/or earthquakes (plus floods in the Delta region). Instead of placing certain areas off limits a better solution is defensible space and stricter building codes. For example, build metal roofs.

https://www.fire.ca.gov/home-hardening

[skybrian]

If they're all the same, why are there fire risk maps for California showing some places to be riskier than others?

[wyager]

> Yeah, I work at a CSU and the Teacher's union is against AI.

Is this a political coalition thing or is there a real teacher-related reason they don't like it?

[b40d-48b2-979e]

Can one really not imagine a case where the cheating machine being used by students is a bad thing for teachers? Does everything have to be "politically motivated"?

[jwlake]

Its also a teaching machine. There are several classes I had in college I would have killed for ChatGPT to cut through the terrible instruction.

[ares623]

hmm the classic trolley problem

[AnimalMuppet]

There are more aspects than "cheating machine" that could be bad for a college. It could be bad for students, and teachers may realize that.

[wyager]

Yes the a priori most likely reason for the TU to be "against AI" is political. If you know much about TUs this is pretty obvious

[throw4847285]

That is a grotesque misuse of the phrase "a priori." What you mean is, "It's obvious to me." Ok, good for you.

[mold_aid]

AFT is in fact pro-AI

[pesus]

There are tons of reasons AI is actively making the school system worse (amongst many other aspects of society). Immediately jumping to "political coalition thing" seems strange.

[ralph84]

Unions are always against whatever management wants. Then it becomes a bargaining chip for what the union wants. That's how collective bargaining works.

[ashdksnndck]

I think unions in industries where their workers are at risk of eventually getting replaced by AI are pretty universally against it, because protecting the jobs of members is the whole purpose of a union. It’s like how the teamsters are against self-driving cars.

[vondur]

I guess I should qualify that, many professors are ambivalent regarding AI, but some view it as an existential threat to their profession. Most here are scrambling to figure out ways to work around it if not incorporate some AI into the curriculum, since every student has access to ChapGPT and many also have access to CoPilot.

[mold_aid]

Why wouldn't the political coalition of teachers not be a "real" teacher-related reason? It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.

As others note, there are a lot of reasons for teachers to refuse or hate AI, though in my experience most don't know shit about it and just want students to stop using it as an expedient. I, for instance, take a look at the tiny Dell cubes that have barely powered our Windows workstations and hilariously bedraggled Prometheus units and anticipate "well, we can't even afford to update these pieces of shit, so I suppose as a 'Microsoft shop' we'll be on a upgrade path to CoPilot-enabled cloud computing or some bullshit like that, then it'll really be all over" so my primary concerns are infrastructural. But god yeah the AI writing I get, jesus. These kids think they're driving around in the AI equivalent of Lambos, but free tier CoPilot is a used 2017 Chevy Cruze.

[wyager]

> It is not illegal, at this point in time, for teachers to oppose AI for political reasons.

No, but that would make it a "political coalition thing", which is why I asked

[p1necone]

Dismissing opinions you don't like by arbitrarily classifying them as "political" vs "not political" is lazy and dishonest.

[warkdarrior]

> the Teacher's union is against AI

Well, of course. Horse buggy manufacturers and drivers were dead set against automobiles.