USask law professor Michael Plaxton, one of Canada’s very heavy hitters in evidence law and statutory interpretation, has been gazing into the abyss lately. He is, of course, not alone. On Wednesday morning he remarked on Twitter: “I know it's unfashionable to catastrophize about AI, but, yes, it is an extinction-level event for the university as we have come to know it. Honestly, why should governments pay for students to go to university just to walk out no more educated than when they came in?”
In a matter of months, student use of artificial intelligence has become ubiquitous in higher education throughout the civilized world. No field of study is unaffected, but for the traditional humanities and the law, the problem of how to examine students does warrant the language of “extinction.”
Of course, universities won’t wink out of existence altogether, but the shape of the modern humanities education, whose fundamental purpose to manufacture potential creators of meaningful and original literature, will have to change. In the world now threatened and perhaps doomed, students enter a university and attend large survey classes whose size may number in the hundreds. They’re exposed to the basic methods and classic texts of a subject, and they’re expected to prove mastery of the material by scribbling written exams and short papers, many of which are destined to be graded by graduate students or even fellow undergrads a little further along in the cursus. (“Back in my day, we didn’t need AI: we had TAs.”)
Survivors who navigate onward find the classes growing smaller, the required papers longer, the expectations for originality and literary ability higher. Eventually you find yourself in the advanced undergraduate seminar, which is a very small group of people who discuss texts and issues on their feet, as equals, and who share the burdens of lecturing and teaching among themselves. In its modern form this is all a bit like starting out on a factory floor and finding out how high you can rise within a corporation — which is, of course, what modern universities are.
The threat from AI is to the factory-like part of the humanities education, the part in which students are expected to produce readable and informed texts which can be graded quickly. Every undergraduate how has wide-open access to an assistant that can fake this, instantaneously and convincingly, at zero cost. The education part of an education has been automated, and lots of young people are not shy about taking advantage. (Not long ago it was controversial and a little offensive to suggest that most of the economic value of a university education lies in social signalling and self-assortment as opposed to knowledge acquisition. Today’s students, or many of them, seem to take this conclusion for granted.)
The inescapable implication is that the seminar format will have to flow downward, making low-level undergraduate education more personal, more oral, and probably more expensive, although AI does offer opportunities to smite rather than expand administrative bloat. All higher education may come to resemble an industrial apprenticeship more closely, and universities may have to be more open to doing away with classes in some contexts, and handing out credentials in a subjective way.
Professor Jones gives you a reading list; you tackle it in your own time using whatever robo-help you like; and if you can convince old Jones in a 90-minute face-to-face conversation that you know your way around the Seven Years’ War pretty well, you pass.
Prof. Plaxton himself appears to be drifting in this direction, but he acknowledges that a system of oral testing will give us oral students who may not be able to contribute to legal scholarship. And if those students depend on AI from birth to graduation, they might not be able to put together a legible statement of claim when they walk through the doors of a real law firm.
Heck, from what I can tell of the legal profession this is already a big problem. Indeed, it’s a long-standing issue that undergraduate education doesn’t do anything to teach humanities students how to write well per se: you’re just thrown in the drink, and you either sink or swim. Well, now everyone’s wearing water wings.
I don’t see how the 200-person survey class can easily survive unless AI itself takes over the grading and instruction of AI-assisted students — and at that point the whole exercise becomes vaguely nonsensical. A lot of people blurt out that survey classes could still involve handwritten exams in sealed rooms covered in tinfoil, but even as AI evolves at super-speed (while probably remaining insane), handwriting itself has been dying out in slow agony. It seems impossible to me, in middle age, that I could survive the burden of handwritten exams that I actually went through in dinosaur times: you might as well ask me to go throw a few pitches in a major-league baseball game.
— Colby Cosh
