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Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)?

Last September, Tyler Austin Harper published a piece for The Atlantic on how he thinks colleges should respond to AI. What he proposes is radical—but, if you've concluded that AI really is going to destroy everything these institutions stand for, I think you have to at least consider these sorts of measures. https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2025/09/ai-colle...

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I was pretty interested until I got to this part:

> Another reason that a no-exceptions policy is important: If students with disabilities are permitted to use laptops and AI, a significant percentage of other students will most likely find a way to get the same allowances, rendering the ban useless. I witnessed this time and again when I was a professor—students without disabilities finding ways to use disability accommodations for their own benefit. Professors I know who are still in the classroom have told me that this remains a serious problem.

This would be a huge problem for students with severe and uncorrectable visual impairments. People with degenerative eye diseases already have to relearn how to do every single thing in their life over and over and over. What works for them today will inevitably fail, and they have to start over.

But physical impairments like this are also difficult to fake and easy to discern accurately. It's already the case that disability services at many universities only grants you accommodations that have something to do with your actual condition.

There are also some things that are just difficult to accommodate without technology. For instance, my sister physically cannot read paper. Paper is not capable of contrast ratios that work for her. The only things she can even sometimes read are OLED screens in dark mode, with absolutely black backgrounds; she requires an extremely high contrast ratio. She doesn't know braille (which most blind people don't, these days) because she was not blind as a little girl.

Committed cheaters will be able to cheat anyway; contemporary AI is great at OCR. You'll successfully punish honest disabled people with a policy like this but you won't stop serious cheaters.

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You don't have to agree with his precise solution, in fact I'm not sure whether I do. But this is within the universe of things we could be considering, if we really do think AI is poised to destroy education as we know it.
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Yeah, this proposal is likely straight up illegal.
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> Then the social paradigm needs to change. Is everyone just going to roll over and die while AI destroys academia (and possibly a lot more)?

My 40-some-odd years on this planet tells me the answer is yes.

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>What he proposes is radical

It sounds entirely reasonable and moderate to me.

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It's neither reasonable nor moderate, which is why it'll never happen.
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Well, we are already rolling over and dying (literally) on everything from vaccine denial to climate change. So, yes, we are. Obviously yes.
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In the US it is dying off.

Not so in plenty of other countries. Hopefully US reverses the anti-science trend before it's too late

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These movements are growing in every western nation. The trend has been growing over decades. It would be nice to see it reverse but seems unlikely before calamity.
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It’s a deliberate process powered by rightwing and capitalist interests designed to create a dumber, less educated and more distracted population. A war as stupid as the one with Iran would not have been possible three decades ago. As ill-advised as the Iraq war was, Bush at least spent months explaining the rationale and building support for it, successfully. Now that’s not needed.

I saw interviews with young Americans on spring break and they were so utterly uninformed it was mind-blowing. Their priorities are getting drunk and getting laid while their country bombs a nation “into the stone ages”, according to their president. And it’s not their fault: they are the product of a media environment and education system designed for exactly this outcome.

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I was there for that war. Kids weren't listening and didn't care back then either. If anything, Gen Z is the most politically-aware generation we've had since we started keeping track.

Trump doesn't have to justify a single thing because the billionaires behind him know that every last bet is off and their very livelihoods are at risk, and his entire base of support up and down the chain are either complicit or fooled.

What the world does when they finally realize Democrats and Republicans are simply two sides of the vast apparatus suppressing the will of the people by any means necessary will be... spectacular.

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I was there as well, the bush presidency lasted my entire middle and high school career, and I got the chance to vote for Obama in my senior year.

I remember things very differently. Everyone cared about the Iraq war, gay-straight alliance was one of the most up and coming clubs, and political music was everywhere. Green Day had their big second wave with American Idiot, System Of A Down was on top of the world, Rock Against Bush was huge, anarcho-punk like Rise Against was getting big.

I'm not a teenager anymore obviously, so it's entirely possible I'm just missing it, but I've seen very little that compares to those sort of movements. On the other hand, most millennials I know are still wildly politically active.

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In 2002, there war in Iraq had large popular support, something like 70-80 percent. It took a few years for people to realize it was based on a lie and was a massive mistake. It was also morally reprehensible, but that part is not often discussed in mainstream US politics.

If you compare that to the current Iran war, a majority of the population is already against it, however the current administration doesn't seem to care much about public opinion, and there doesn't seem to be much that the public can do about it.

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Yeah I was there too and I don’t know what this guy is talking about. Gen X was highly politically active. This was the era of violent in the street anti-globalization clashes like the WTO protests.
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Where exactly because in the Midwest we were very vocal about it. We have tons of military families out there and we were poor enough to feel almost like military service was inevitable if we didn’t get scholarships for school. You know the band NOFX had an album, the War on Errorism that was quite successful based on the fuckery of the bush administration. Punk rock and protest music was huge then.
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Article is paywalled, so perhaps you could just summarize his proposal?
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> At the type of place where I taught until recently—a small, selective, private liberal-arts college—administrators can go quite far in limiting AI use, if they have the guts to do so. They should commit to a ruthless de-teching not just of classrooms but of their entire institution. Get rid of Wi-Fi and return to Ethernet, which would allow schools greater control over where and when students use digital technologies. To that end, smartphones and laptops should also be banned on campus. If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else. Work and research requiring students to use the internet or a computer can take place in designated labs. [...] Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.

You can access the full article at https://archive.is/zSJ13 (I know archive.is is kind of shady, but it works).

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> If students want to type notes in class or papers in the library, they can use digital typewriters, which have word processing but nothing else.

Only, replacing the guts of such a machine to contain a local LLM is damn easy today. Right now the battery mass required to power the device would be a giveaway, but inference is getting energetically cheaper.

> Colleges that are especially committed to maintaining this tech-free environment could require students to live on campus, so they can’t use AI tools at home undetected.

Just like my on-campus classmates never smoked weed or drank underage, I'm sure.

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Are you suggesting we should do nothing if the solution has any flaws?
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This isn't aimed at you, but this strikes me as exactly the kind of divorced-from-the-real-world thinking that academia is pilloried for all the time. This kind of proposal will never happen, I'd basically stake my life on it. Students (and their parents) have zero interest in this kind of anti-technology nonsense, so it's DOA. College isn't compulsory, and those students aren't some captive audience you can do whatever you want with, they're customers. And I frankly doubt that most professors or administrators want this either.
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Some folks need to touch the hot stove before they learn but eventually they learn.

If AI output remains unreliable then eventually enough companies will be burned and management will reinstate proper oversight. All while continuing to pay themselves on the back.

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> There is no history of any sort of long planning

Sure there is. Its the formal education system that produced the college grad.

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… between employees and employers.

The proposal that everyone pay for college until they are in their 40s doesn’t seem viable.

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Maybe, but there is a trend towards more and longer education. More college graduates, more PhD grads, etc.
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Well, the astrophysics situation is special because, as the article notes, there aren't breakthroughs that can be externally verified.

Other projects' success will be proportional to their number of Schwartz' and so it seems unlikely they disappear. But they may disappear for areas in which there is no immediate money.

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