Technology

Au contraire. AI is pretty good at helping understand and explaining, you just have to do the work yourself and verify everything it tells you. Which is exactly what university is mostly about. After enduring the hardship of working through every detail you really understand a topic. The problem in university is often access to somebody to ask questions and the most successful researchers are usually not the greatest at teaching which results in a lot of research and figuring it out yourself. I had to get my engineering degree the hard way which taught me alot, but it was about 15% harder than necessary.

I'm currently learning how to calculate the weight a set of beams can take safely. I'm obviously working with proper sources, but being able to clarify things makes the learning so much less frustrating. And its basic stuff like is mm^3 = (mm)^3 = (10^(-3))^3 * m^3 or is it a single 10^(-3) * m^3. Turns out the qualifier contains the dimension of the unit by convention, so the first solution is correct. Now try looking that up without asking someone or reading in primary sources for hours. AI can not only explain how and why it is but also give you a reference where to check that in a primary source which cuts down the time to properly learn by alot.

At university I never understood people that got the exam from last year to learn how to solve the problems by heart as to avoid learning to understand and instead studying to pass exams. Those people not only haven't understood why they are there in the first place but are also trusted to build bridges and buildings later on. Which is kind of unnerving.

The same applies to people abusing AI to cheat. They might have a few or a lot of human lives on their conscious in the future. They are not there to understand but to pass.

That's just the usual routine of externalising costs while extracting benefits, maybe it's just a very blatant example.