AI Turbocharges Education

The verdict on AI and intellectual development is far from in

The anti-AI Butlerian jihadists have been trumpeting an extremely dubious study that AI, specifically, ChatGPT, is making those who interact with it less intelligent.

AI can speed up the completion of menial tasks and boost productivity, but it might also be making us dumber — or so suggests a new study by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University.

Researchers surveyed 319 knowledge workers to examine how and when they rely on AI to perform work-related tasks, and how and to what extent that impacts their own perception of their critical thinking abilities. The outcome? The more the workers tapped AI for help, the less critical thinking they did.

The study further notes that reliance on AI changed the way workers enacted critical thinking faculties, shifting their focus towards “information verification, response integration and task stewardship” in such instances.

Conversely, the more surveyees leaned on their mental faculties, the more critical thinking they had to do.

AI “tools appear to reduce the perceived effort required for critical thinking tasks among knowledge workers, especially when they have higher confidence in AI capabilities,” the researchers write. “However, workers who are confident in their own skills tend to perceive greater effort in these tasks, particularly when evaluating and applying AI responses.”

First, this very piece is misinformation. The study didn’t test intelligence, or even for quantifiable knowledge, it merely examined how people worked.

And the idea that “critical thinking” is necessary or even desired in a society that was literally telling everyone to shut up, trust the fake science, and inject the transhumanist depo-juice into their veins less than two years ago is risible on its face.

“I’m just ever so worried about your critical thinking skills.”

Given the evidence of the last five years, the more “critical thinking” that can be offloaded to machines incapable of being swayed by rhetoric and emotional manipulation, the better.

Meanwhile, AI is observably and materially enhancing the objective results of students utilizing an AI tutor as part of their education.

A Texas private school is seeing student test scores soar to new heights following the implementation of an artificial intelligence (AI) "tutor."

At Alpha School in Austin, Texas, students are placed in the classroom for two hours a day with an AI assistant, using the rest of the day to focus on skills like public speaking, financial literacy, and teamwork.

"We use an AI tutor and adaptive apps to provide a completely personalized learning experience for all of our students, and as a result our students are learning faster, they’re learning way better. In fact, our classes are in the top 2% in the country," Alpha School co-founder Mackenzie Price told "Fox & Friends."

This would be more meaningful if we knew where their classes were before. Did the test score percentiles rise from 80 to 98 or from 96 to 98? But either way, it’s clearly not reducing the intelligence, the critical thinking, or the mental stability of the students, the Butlerians’ fears notwithstanding.

Which tends to suggest that even anti-homeschooling governments are going to need to significantly alter their negative stance toward homeschooling if they don’t want their children to fall even further behind.

AI is going to supercharge homeschooling

The end result, I suspect, is that AI means the end of conventional mass-schooling as we’ve known it for the last 175 years.