Three interesting links on AI and higher education

The one I found most interesting: "The Class of 2026". This piece offers an extended analogy of what the future of higher education will be to what Henry VIII and Gutenberg did to the British monasteries. With the important proviso that change to higher education will probably occur more slowly than many people forecast--it's what history suggests and is consistent with a view that entrenched special interests rarely give up quickly--I think this piece's forecasts have a good chance of coming true. I especially like the forecast that "Professors, in this model, become more like personal trainers. . . . This is more or less the Oxbridge tutorial model used at Oxford: the tutor doesn’t lecture the students, he suggests reading material for them, and then discusses it with them in depth in order to teach them how to deepen their own understanding on their own."

Related: "Will the university survive AI? Education is close to becoming a sham" and "Teachers Are Not OK".

A final note about "AI will change everything" predictions: I am old enough to remember when computers finally succeeded in beating the very best human chess players and lots of people predicted the Death of Chess. Who would play when a computer could always win? Well, I am not going to take the time to do a study of chess's relative popularity before and after, but I can say people are still playing chess, there is still a world's championship, and, interestingly, the game has changed somewhat, with more emphasis on "non-classical" chess games like blitz. One might call this clever, evolutionary adaptation rather than the forecast extinction.


"Revisiting the Great British Bicycle Bubble of 1896"

A useful reminder about how quickly some latest-and-greatest technologies deflate.

The bubble inflated quickly, with share prices in British bicycle companies tripling in the space of months in 1896, even as the number of bicycle companies expanded more than five-fold.

But then a flood of low-cost American bikes invaded the market, and the mood soured. 


"Capitalism Is the Real Target"

Another fine piece by Clifford Asness.

What explains the outpouring of protest against Israel and the concurrent hatred toward Jews from a virulent subset of kids, professors, and outsiders on elite college campuses? One answer, one key answer, isn’t to be found in the Mideast but rather in the human heart and how human beings explain the workings of the world to themselves. That answer is “capitalism” and those who hate it.

This conclusion is vigorously supported by Thomas Sowell.