Well, yours truly actually talked about the degradation of skill in
Falling by the Wayside, a paean to the death of the liberal arts education yours truly participated in back in the day.
Waxing poetic, I wrote, ...
Yours truly was an English Major back in the Pleistocene :) though I never learned how to write with any degree of proficiency until meeting up with
The Elements of Style, the masterwork by Will Strunk and EB White, a slender volume of wit and wisdom everyone should read over and over again to become competent in an art form requiring one to have the ability to make thoughts coming from one's mind comprehensible using only words on paper to make it happen. The value of the humanities, in my opinion, is the ability to make connections, to see relationships among seemingly disparate ideas as this is the start point for all creativity no matter what the discipline shaping the creative act may be.
The losing of the humanities, along with the inability to read and write cursive, leaves the world a little less interesting and vital as we move toward a reality increasingly driven by tech and AI.
With this in mind ...
ChatGPT was released two and a half years ago, and we have been in a public panic ever since. Artificial intelligence can write in a way that passes for human, creating a fear that relying too heavily on machine-generated text will diminish our ability to read and write at a high level. We’ve heard that the college essay is dead, and that alarming number of students use A.I. tools to cheat their way through college. This has the potential to undermine the future of jobs, education and art all at once.
The Titanic is indeed headed toward the iceberg, but the largest problem — at least at the moment — is not the college essay, the novel or the office memo. It’s computer code. I realized this last year when I was teaching a course on A.I., language and philosophy. When I asked my students how they use chatbots, one told me that whenever he has a spreadsheet full of data (such as results from a lab experiment or information collected from a survey), he was trained in high school to write a quick bit of code to parse and analyze that data. But now, he told me, he just throws the spreadsheet into ChatGPT, which analyzes it more quickly and requires him to do almost nothing.
That’s when it hit me: A.I. is just as much a challenge to numeracy — our knowledge and ability to use mathematics and reason quantitatively — as it is to literacy.
And this ...
It looks like the "learn to code" push is backfiring spectacularly for those who bought in.
As Newsweek reports, recent college graduates who majored in computer science are facing high unemployment rates alongside the increasing probability of being laid off or replaced by artificial intelligence if and when they do get hired.
In its latest labor market report, the New York Federal Reserve found that recent CS grads are dealing with a whopping 6.1 precent unemployment rate. Those who majored in computer engineering — which is similar, if not more specialized — are faring even worse, with 7.5 percent of recent graduates remaining jobless. Comparatively, the New York Fed found, per 2023 Census data and employment statistics, that recent grads overall have only a 5.8 percent unemployment rate.
While folks who majored in fields like anthropology and physics fared even worse, with unemployment rates of 9.4 and 7.8 percent respectively, computer engineering had the third-highest rate of unemployment on the New York Fed's rankings, while computer science had the seventh — a precipitous fall from grace for a major once considered an iron-clad ticket to high earnings and job security.
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