Education vs AI

I was a lazy student. I would focus primarily on courses I enjoyed and procrastinate those I did not. Shockingly, I tended to do well in the courses I enjoyed, and not as well in the others.

I had never considered being a developer. As a kid I'd play with Lego Mindstorms, programming them with their block-based language, but I never thought of it as programming, just play. I went to UBC for engineering, a good general-purpose degree while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. First year, everyone has to take a C++ course. Within weeks, I fell in love with programming.

Every assignment was like a puzzle. Staying up late with friends tweaking your code, the eureka moment when you figured out the right pattern or hack to solve something: it tickled my brain in the best way.

The instant solve button

Would I have been the person I am today if I could have solved every puzzle instantly? Without the joy of working hard on a problem, without the serotonin flooding my brain and programming me to like programming, would I have stuck with it?

I recently judged a hackathon at UBC and I asked a lot of the students how they were using AI. They all responded roughly the same:

We know it's better to try without it, but we don't have enough time, and everyone else uses it so you will fall behind if you don't.

Which is totally fair, unfortunately. And I know for sure I would have been using it. Maybe I would have tried first without it, but for how long? I was inundated with homework and assignments, and there is an instant solve button I can click at any time.

And why not, I would have to run my final work through AI anyways! Everyone else is. And if I don't, my shitty hand-written code will be graded poorly relative to all the other projects.

It's a tough one. Personally, I'm just happy I was able to learn programming the old-fashioned way.

What if it's the future?

Obviously I'm conflicted about this, partly because I promised to never lose touch with the ebbs and flows of technology, and partly because I think AI is a transformational technology. I guess these things can both be true: AI may be harmful for learning but also a new frontier for software.

When I was a student I didn't focus much on memorizing code. I could just Google it! After 50 or 100 or 200 times, it would stick. The act of searching, finding, and entering it into your code still forced you to learn, no matter how many times it took. AI custom fits the code itself in a way that would cause a busy student to miss out on valuable understanding.

I used to joke that computer science was mostly about knowing how to effectively Google things, but I rarely Google things while developing any more. Things change, and that's exciting. We are at an inflection point and we need to adapt, but if the last 5 years (Covid, AI) have shown us anything, it's that we can adapt faster than I would have thought possible.

Humans have always built tools to make things easier, and once built, they become the new standard. AI is the new standard, and it will only get better. If the puzzles we're working on can be solved instantly by AI, it's our job to find harder puzzles.