I was just thinking, "with all the AI media hype, you'd think the opposite would happen."
If "AI is gonna take over the world" wouldn't you want to be able to use such a tool yourself ?
On the other hand, paying the costs of university to have an undergrad wax poetic doesn't seem as appealing as commanding ChatGPT to "git er done" so perhaps there is "drunk on newfound power" factor at play amongst college aged coders.
> If "AI is gonna take over the world" wouldn't you want to be able to use such a tool yourself ?
AI is being marketed as a tool that does not require expertise to wield, so it's unclear to me why you'd think the hype would get more people to go to college.
Anyway, the problem is likely more to do with job prospects. Most CS undergrads I talk to these days are perpetually concerned with the job market; things have not been good for a while now. And this on top of the over-enrollment problem: many schools have been accepting far more undergrads in CS than they could handle for the better part of a decade now, resulting in ultimately poorer outcomes for everyone involved except the upper administration.
Barring significant improvements to either of those issues, reducing enrollment is necessary. But society is not exactly going out of its way to help high schoolers find many viable alternatives, which is really where our efforts ought to focus, in my opinion.
> AI is being marketed as a tool that does not require expertise to wield, so it's unclear to me why you'd think the hype would get more people to go to college.
Because 'marketing' is a communication method intended to maximize sales, not distribute truth.
As to the rest of it, if you want to feed yourself, you're going to need a computer. If you want a job, where someone else feeds you, they are going to need a computer.
Computers are at the core of being able to feed oneself, AI apocolypse or not.
Even the simple act of maintaining a small backyard vegetable garden, to literally feed ones family, benefits from an embedded microcontroller and pumps that release nutrients at the optimal time, in optimal amounts.
The $20 computer is a 10x win after considering material, time, and attention costs.
Which brings up an interesting question ... what percentage of universities use computers to perform marketing in order to increase enrollment ( aka sales ) in order to feed themselves ?
I don't think anything you've said is necessarily wrong, but "using a computer" does not really fall under the purview of a degree in computer science. People don't go to university for CS degrees so they can better understand the fancy veggie-watering timer they bought off Amazon, after all.
I steadfastly refuse to believe that you administer a thorough examination of a person's knowledge of the mechanical workings of an internal combustion engine, or the chemical properties of a catalytic convertor, or the physical properties by which tire tread increases traction prior to letting them drive you down the block to the supermarket.
Your argument grows more ludicrous with each byte you submit.
To your point anyway, knowing these things does not make someone a better driver, nor does not knowing these things make someone a worse driver. They're separate skills, just as understanding how to program has little bearing on a person's ability to operate a computer.
1. "You know your engine light is on, right ?" ... "Yeah, its been doing that."
2. "Whats that noise coming from the front wheel hub ?" ... "I dunno."
3. etc.
You get the idea. One groups vehicles are absolutely better maintained, and quantitatively safer to ride in or drive, and its within my perception, so the 3rd degree interogation is pointless.
The class NP-complete contains the hardest problems in NP. If you pick any problem in NP-complete, all problems in NP can be reduced to it (meaning that a solution to the problem you chose can be used to solve everything in the rest of NP) in polynomial time or “efficiently.” This applies to all of NP, including every other NP-complete problem, so in a sense, NP-complete problems are the same problem dressed in different clothing.
So the reduction to 3SAT could happen in principle, but it isn’t a necessary step.
> Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line.
Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?
> We're aware of this practice in turmeric, where lead chromate has been added to enhance the color
Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.
I thought that individual anecdotes would be less convincing than evidence that "economically motivated adulteration" is an entire classification for such crimes used by the FDA, which was created to prevent them.
Its not hard to find specific examples. 5 minutes of searching will find piles and piles of them.
If you must have a name, Stewart Parnell was convicted of knowingly distributing salmonella contaminated peanuts in 2015. 9 People died. He got 28 years in prison.
You don't have to trust the news either. Just ask around. I know a teacher who has lost two students to surprise fentanyl. I'm sure there are similarly affected people in your community. Unregulated markets are a slippery slope towards deaths by poison. It happens all over the world (but more in places without an FDA equivalent).
It's a thing, it's called food fraud. Happens commonly these days with various spices, which are often cut with metals to increase their weight. Sometimes those metals are heavy metals, which are obviously bad for you.
Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.
But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.
It is not profit motive but public choice economics, from which we see that state actors and agencies act in their own interest. The difference is a defenseless individual being bullied by an overly zealous official who thought she had something to gain by beating up a nerd versus an organization picking on someone their own size.
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