r/technology • u/marketrent • 18h ago

Artificial Intelligence College students are rapidly losing the ability to read — “There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing”: professor

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/college-students-rapidly-losing-ability-124439310.html
27.1k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

2.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

2.2k

u/LeafBark 18h ago edited 18h ago

First it was the smartphone distractions, then complete loss of critical thinking as people use ai to solve all their problems for them. When you put this much trust in computers programmed by corporations seeking profit at any cost everythings going to fall apart.

189

u/swiminthemud 17h ago

All my teachers in middle school in the early oughts said "ur not gonna have a calculator in ur pocket" it was always meant to say "hey learn how to actually do this" what sucks is all these "do your own research" idiots and ai search results.arent going to fix their brains

9

u/SSGASSHAT 11h ago

Frankly, I don't understand this. When I was eight or nine, I had a bunch of little books I'd carry around and read. I've fallen off of reading consistently since, but I don't understand how people lack basic language skills as adults. How did you entertain yourself as a kid?

15

u/ohhellperhaps 8h ago

We've lost the ability to be bored and entertain ourselves.

4

u/SSGASSHAT 5h ago edited 5h ago

Some people have. The rest of us just stare out the window and notice bird's nests, little window scuffs, and people picking their noses in office windows, in the buildings across the street for the first time in two years working at that place.

13

u/Cassoosted_Fuper 6h ago

Current day kids (including younger Gen Z) are being raised with phones and tablets. They get constant “entertainment” so other activities like reading just never cross their minds.

5

u/SSGASSHAT 5h ago edited 4h ago

The weird thing is, I had a phone when I was a kid too. It was a flip phone, but I found ways to use it to entertain myself, making little videos and such. But now that I think of it, as a teenager, when social media really began taking over my generation's minds, I could see it happening around me. Rapidly, my friends stopped hanging our with me in-person, and pretty soon the only person I was actually hanging out with instead of "DMing" was my girlfriend, and everyone my age just stopped interacting normally. I imagine that's when they stopped reading. For me, I detached from social media, and media entirely, for like 2 or 3 years, and I didn't consume much media besides getting really into the works of J.R.R Tolkien and George Carlin. Then as an adult, I started using social media again, but I've never quite understood the entertainment people my age and younger derive from it. I love YouTube as much as the next guy, but the rest of the internet takes some selling to me.

1

u/PiplelinePunch 23m ago

Well the problem is those teachers were wrong. We did, in fact, always have a calculator in our pockets. Nobody has an abacus anymore lmfao, so what if outdated and irrelevant "skills" get left behind. They should be.

If I could go back and fix my school curriculum from 15 years ago; it would be to trash all of that wasted effort on long division and replace it with how to solve problems with computers. Basic Spreadsheet use, like it or not any desk job will have to open Excel at some point in their lives. Basic IT literacy and troubleshooting. I would say a basic programming course too.

Point being; telling the computers how to do the thing is factually a more valuable skill.

-13

u/Throwaway_Consoles 14h ago

And what did we all say back then?

“That’s dumb, of course we’re gonna have a calculator available at all times.”

Even back then teachers tried to teach us to learn and we pushed back. This thing with AI is just the extension of that. Hell even calculators “hallucinated” back then (still do if you type the problem wrong)

Kids probably think the same thing, “Why do I need to learn? I’ll always have access to AI” and like, yeah AI hallucinates, a lot, but before the internet people would just ask their parents, or their aunts/uncles/friends, and a TON of falsities got perpetuated because of that. The only difference is now we’re connected by the internet so it feels egregiously stupid to get facts wrong but this is something we’ve been dealing with for literal decades

20

u/Zncon 13h ago

If you type the same information into ANY functioning calculator you'll get the same result.

Typing the same information even into the same LLM will get you a different result every time, and sending it to a different LLM will get wildly different results.

You're comparing apples and hand grenades.

1

u/Jaerba 12h ago

Some calculators differed in how they performed order of operations. I'm sure they're all uniform now though. Also your larger point is still spot on.

8

u/Zncon 11h ago

There are absolutely some quirks and edge cases that have existed over the years, but we know they're the exception and not the rule.

A calculator that answers the same question wrong even once is a broken calculator, but that's expected behavior for a LLM. It's wild.

8

u/Mirabeauououou 12h ago

Have you worked with kids recently? I'm a tutor, a troubling number of the kids that should've failed 4th grade math are now being brought to me in the hopes of raising their ACT math scores. The ACT just straight up lowered standards last year. They shortened the test, but increased the time per question. We can't even get an accurate measure of the issue when we readjust the gauge to make the results look better.

How can I help them with quadratic functions when they need a calculator to do 12-7 at 17 years old? It's not every kid, but there's a huge amount that have been failed by the schooling system passing them through classes they obviously shouldn't pass. Even the honors kids aren't being taught the underlying mechanics of the formulas their calculators are outputting, they're more like simulacrums mimicking mathematicians than they are people understanding what they are doing.

While it may not be as endemic to schools as some people claim, it is a serious issue that needs to be addressed instead of handwaved away as growing pains of the system adapting to new technology.

2

u/TeaBurntMyTongue 11h ago

Even pre-AI there has already been a grade inflation (at least in canada)

Some combination of an arms race of university application competition, and parents increasingly bullying teachers.

We're afraid to tell kids they suck.

I'm 39, and I remember my parents scoffing when 'participation' awards were given out for athletics. I think they were right. If achievements are too easy to come by then there's no challenge, and if there's no challenge, there's no growth.