How much of your life do you want a robot to live for you?

This week me and the big homie Chad Dundas got to talking about this story from New York Magazine. It’s about how AI and ChatGPT has already drastically changed the college experience for damn near all students on account of now they can get a computer to write all their papers and provide all their answers and there’s really not much universities can (or want to) do about it.

If you want to hear the entire conversation we had, I would direct you to the CME Patreon (and then kiss you on the mouth for subscribing to us). The gist of it is that we were forced to admit that if we had gone to college at a time when our computers were capable of automatically doing the parts of the education that we thought were bullshit or tedious or unimportant, we probably would have done the same thing today’s students are doing.

(So robots do the work but we still have Post-It Notes?? OK.)

But the obvious question here is if a computer does most of the stuff that gets you a college degree in the end, what the hell does the degree mean? The thing about that question, though, is that it brings up some issues our culture has been trying really hard to avoid for a long time.

I was a TA when I was in grad school, which meant that I taught freshman composition classes in exchange for free tuition and a stipend of about $900 a month. In order to prepare us for this job, the University of Montana gave us a one-week crash course in writing and rhetoric pedagogy just prior to the start of the academic year.

At one point during this class about classes, I remember a second-year TA suggesting that we should be honest with ourselves and just admit that college was mostly about preparing people to be office drones of one variety or another. It was white collar trade school, in other words. People did not like hearing this. We wanted to believe we were shaping minds and churning out more fully formed humans. But then you think about how many people have a college degree in a field that doesn’t have anything to do with their actual day-to-day job duties and you have to ask yourself what the degree really signifies to the modern employer.

I think mostly what it does is tell people you can jump through a series of hoops. You’re at least somewhat organized. You can navigate a bureaucracy when you have to. You have basic literacy and computer skills. You can turn in enough of the assignments and meet enough of the deadlines. You can commit to a thing and see it through. You have some modicum of people skills.

Obviously it’s a different story for more specialized fields. A doctor or an engineer, they better have learned some other stuff along the way. But the marketing managers and sales reps and HR types are out here running around with degrees in history and communications and it’s basically fine.

In the U.S., college has become very transactional. One goal that most universities definitely do not have is weeding out the lesser intellects so that they may grant degrees only to the truly deserving. That’s not in their interests. They’re not at all concerned that you’ll meet a moron with a degree from Ohio State and their credibility with the public will be eroded.

They need steady customers. They help ensure that by moving those customers along at more or less the agreed upon rate and giving them the degree they paid for in the end. It’s like a strip mall karate dojo: if your parents pay the money and you show up to enough of the classes, eventually they’ll give you a black belt whether you can fight or not.

This is not lost on the students. We’ve hammered it into their heads that a college degree is about money. It costs money to get it, and in exchange it opens up more lucrative career fields later on. This is how we sell people on the idea that this is all worth going into massive debt over. That and the implied promise of sex and booze and friendship and drugs.

So if college is mostly about opening the door to higher salaries and better jobs, why can’t you use a robot to do it for you? Especially if it frees up more time for the sex and drugs. The workforce these students will be entering sure seems like it’s really trying hard to figure out ways to use those same robots instead of costly human workers. So why shouldn’t students spend their college years getting better at navigating these new robot tools in the hopes that they’ll get one of the remaining jobs as the AI robot operator for some company looking to replace its middle-aged workforce with AI robots?

I suspect many of us would answer that question with some version of: because it’s bullshit. You’re not actually learning anything if ChatGPT does all your homework. You’re not even learning how to learn, which is a lot of what education in general really is. You are, to steal a metaphor I saw on the internet, essentially going to the gym and using a forklift to move the weights around. Yes, the weights go up and down. In vastly greater quantities and in a fraction of the time. But the process was the whole point. You’ve defeated the purpose by circumventing that.

But that argument only works to the extent that we actually believe college is supposed to be about something other than money. And do we? I mean, some of us do. A lot of us claim to. But trust me, when people hear you’re in school studying creative writing or dance, they can’t wait to point out how dumb that is purely because of what it means (or doesn’t) for future career prospects.

As a culture, we are pretty sure that personal fulfillment and enrichment is not worth very much at all. That shit is for suckers who want to die broke. Oh you studied abstract art and Russian literature? Hope you learned how to say “do you want fries with that” in a few different languages. Idiot.

But then some kids come along who have received that message loud and clear and now are all about the quickest, most efficient path to the degree that turns on the money faucet and we want to act surprised. What about their growth as human beings? What about their work ethic? As if we haven’t spent years telling them, both directly and indirectly, that none of that shit matters as much as having money in the bank.

If our minds rebel at the thought of college students who use AI to do college for them it’s probably because some core element of our humanity shrivels at the broader implication. Life is supposed to be for living. How much of that process can we delegate to a computer before we become nothing more than the meat suit avatars of a robot hivemind? It’s scary how easy it is to imagine a very near future where we have given over total control to those robots and then can’t go back because no one remembers how to do anything for themselves anymore.

One of the primary figures in the NY Mag story is a dude named Roy Lee who ran afoul of Columbia University by showing fellow students how to use ChatGPT to cheat their way through job interviews. When the university got mad at him, he pointed out that Columbia itself has a partnership with ChatGPT’s parent company. He went on to co-found Cluely, a company whose motto is that you’ll “never have to think alone again.” (To which I reply: bitch that’s what thinking is.)

In one of the company’s ads that’s more aspirational than a representation of anything the technology can currently do, a dude (played by Lee) is on a date with a woman while getting prompts and tips from AI displayed on his glasses. Real next-level shit too, like “ask about her art” and “tell her she’s pretty.” This imagines a future where AI follows us around like Cyrano de Bergerac, whispering in our ear some stuff that’ll help us get laid.

Of course, then you think about wearing those glasses on a date with someone else who’s wearing the glasses and then it’s just two computers – or, really, the same computer – talking back and forth using the humans as puppets. And then what’s the point? How long before you outsource all the other parts of the relationship to the robot? And what the hell will it mean to be a person then?