The effort to “Kill the Universities”
“The increasing reliance on AI tools is linked to a decline in critical thinking and cognitive skills, particularly among younger users. Studies suggest that as people offload cognitive tasks to AI, their ability to engage in reflective problem-solving diminishes.” – Live Science
I deliberately belong to a right wing group, because it’s the right thing to do. They all are dear, valued friends, and have been from the start. As a side effect, I get to hear the current right-wing thinking.
I was on a career track to become an academic and the rest of the PhDs in the group know how to read experiments and peruse the halls of google scholar to find sources of information.
But using AI for information sources for discussion in our group is being added. That has become an interesting but alarming experience. I am a dinosaur. I spent my time in grad school happily in the library reading original sources — books and journal articles — because that is all we had. When I travelled, nothing thrilled me more than going to dusty old book stores with ancient esoteric books no one had ever heard of. This kind of searching is the heart and soul of an academic career.
BUT here’s what the powers that be on the right are pushing out as dangerous propaganda: (Remember when you are outraged you might be under its influence.) Kill the universities. They are teaching WOKENESS and the use of pronouns. And that is ALL they are teaching.
One scientist’s relative left his position because he was being forced to use pronouns. That sounds brave, but is it? Why not stay at your post and fight?
I detect a frightening move to kill academia. Why? Is it really all that frightening to have to say “they”? Nope. The real reason is to install AI in everyone’s consciousness…as the authority. Think of it — the only people who can definitively say “that AI bit of information is inaccurate” is an educated person. In fact, in the group I have an academic background in Authoritarianism. Someone looked it up on AI. I said, “That is inaccurate — it is not thorough enough.” They said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” But AI does?
Go one step further. Once the universities are shut down or truncated — and the grants are stopping now — AI will be the authority, then all “they” have to do is change information to what they want. Right now, supposedly, the mistakes and errors come from innocent glitches in the system and from its very internal way it operates — on consensus. In the future? Control all information and the public will be too dumb to discern what is wrong, inaccurate, or incomplete.