Seventy percent of college administrators and faculty worry artificial intelligence, also known as AI, will reduce the perceived value of a bachelor’s degree. They are also concerned that it could contribute to an increase in youth unemployment.
The adoption of AI has led to increased company growth in employment, revenue and profits. When AI impacts only specific tasks within a job, actual workers can focus on activities where AI is less capable, such as critical thinking.
AI will also likely eliminate low-skilled jobs within the next 10 years; however, the economy could still add 2.3 million jobs.
What does the future of the U.S. look like with the advancement of AI?
Positives of artificial intelligence
“Exposure to AI is the greatest in higher-paying roles that involve information processing and analysis.”
Companies that use AI grow faster because it helps them develop their employees in the areas where AI is not capable.
AI is also being embraced in the classroom.
Lori Kendall, professor at Ohio State University, teaches an entrepreneurial class at the official College of Business. She encourages her students to use AI as a learning aide and to critically examine their original work because “they’re gonna use it anyways.”
Rachel Gervaise, an undergraduate student at Ohio State, used AI to gain a deeper understanding of a topic by creating questions and tests to see what she needed to focus on more.
Kendall says if we don’t use AI then we won’t stand out in the competitive job market. “The job market is changing right underneath your feet,” she said.
Ravi Bellamkonda, Executive Vice President of Provost at Ohio State, spearheaded the university’s new AI initiative requiring all undergraduate students across academic disciplines to learn and use AI tools.
Music professor, Tina Tallon, prompted her students to use AI to improve their music due to this initiative. Her student and Tuba instructor, Will Resh, used AI to analyze airflow into her instrument over thousands of repetitions. The data will help guide students to play the perfect note.
Another student who is a music education graduate student studied how babies acquire musical knowledge.
She spent hours combing through home recordings of research subjects listening for moments of parents or caregivers humming or singing around the infant. Now, AI does that for her.
“If we critically examine the tools that we are engaging with and are actively involved in the development of them, then I think we can do some pretty incredible things,” Tallon said.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, thinks AI could help cure most cancers, prevent Alzheimer’s and double the human lifespan.
He theorized that we can be 10 times more advanced in the medical field if our top scientists are paired with AI.
Negatives of artificial intelligence
Mandi Woodruff-Santos, founder of MandiMoney Media, said the “job market is kinda trash right now. It’s really difficult for people who have many years of experience, so it’s gonna be difficult for college kids.”
U.S. unemployment rates for young people ages 16 to 24 has been trending downward in percentages since the pandemic due to the adoption of AI.
AI-exposed jobs have led to the decrease of availability for entry-level jobs that involve automated tasks such as the following:
- Management analysts
- Computer & information research scientists
- Accounting & auditing
- Secretarial & administrative work
- Sales
- Customer service representatives
Amodei said that AI could wipe out half of all white collar entry-level jobs and spike unemployment 10-20% in the next one to five years.
This means that workers would be struggling to find a job to sustain their income level. Lower average income would lead to lower tax revenue and negatively impact how much the government spends on social programs.
What would be the implications for this potential crisis?
Will there be another government shutdown due to this?
Free use of artificial intelligence in politics
A government shutdown could occur due to Democrats and Republicans potentially disagreeing on the regulation of AI.
Republicans and Democrats can use AI to influence the audience of their ideals. Their messaging can become propaganda that leads to people being misinformed about a topic.
The Capitol Riots occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, after President Donald Trump spoke on how fraudulent the 2020 election was that year. He told his supporters to protest then-President-elect Joe Biden’s victory “peacefully and patriotically.”
There was injustice according to their collective perspective. However, their protesting quickly turned into a riot. The Capitol Riots got as chaotic as the Black Lives Matter protests were in 2020.
The election results were not going to be overturned because they were not fraudulent; however, when people are unheard, this is what happens.
This situation is what Martin Luther King Jr. meant when he said that riots are the language of the unheard.
People can’t protest indefinitely because of the reactive and unsustainable nature of a group of people gathered for a cause they believe is not being supported.
Trump told the crowd to protest the results of the 2020 election, but why would those election results be fraudulent?
Has it happened before? No, so why would it happen then?
He told his supporters reasons why the election results were fraudulent and an exhaustive fact check from PBS contradicts that conspiracy. Trump’s constant verbiage of “fake media,” “radical left Democrats” and “Big Tech” added to his agenda pushing his narrative of how fraudulent those election results were at the time.
Trump even tried to pressure BJ Pak, U.S. attorney, into claiming fraud in the 2020 election results after calling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to do the same.
That rally was a way for him to push his agenda rather than peacefully transfer power to Joe Biden.
What is stopping the government or the Trump administration from using AI to influence more people to believe in conspiracies like this in the next presidential election cycle?
How artificial intelligence affects young students
Another negative of AI is reduced brain activity and memory retention for students in schools and colleges.
Using AI as a tool can help us learn, but without regulation, students will eventually depend on it for essays. For example, essays give students the opportunity to critically think about their prompt and actually learn about the prompt, but if they exclusively use AI to write out their thoughts and ideas for those essays, they are not using their critical thinking skills and will not actually understand the topic.
Charlie Gedeon, university instructor and UX designer, said in a TEDx talk, “The biggest revolution AI is bringing to education is highlighting the system’s failed incentives.”
The education system focuses on results more than the process of getting to a certain result. This focus is why students write one draft with the help of AI to get an A+ unlike writing multiple drafts to get a “C” without AI.
What would be the implications for this? Could AI eventually replace teachers?
The bottom line, what are students supposed to learn with AI?
An overdependence on AI can be an issue especially when students take assessments on the information they were supposed to learn in class. For example, there is a trend of poor results as students are not retaining the information due to their AI dependency.
How we should use artificial intelligence
We need legislation to regulate AI especially when it comes to education. We need our youth to learn and enhance their critical thinking skills to solve future world problems.
X is a great example of this as it has a policy that users cannot use inauthentic activity on its platform to mislead other users. There should be verification systems put in place for every piece of content that will be displayed to people.
This concept is a great opportunity for the government to set up a new department of experts in the AI field that can detect AI.
Arizona State University President Michael Crow says AI will speed up learning and should be viewed as a tool that can help us learn a topic faster.
Charlie Gedeon said that we need to do the following:
- Distinguish and understand what AI is good for and what it is not good for
- Use AI to assist thinking rather than doing your work
- Make a habit out of verifying info from AI
Ideally, this new legislation of AI detection should be taught in schools so students can learn how to do it independently. They should learn how to use AI detection tools, what AI looks like, what we can learn from it and more issues surrounding the topic.
Featured image: Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash
Edited by Abbigail Earl & Nancy Martin
