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The greatest risk of AI in higher education isn’t cheating – it’s the erosion of learning itself
(theconversation.com)
this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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Yep. I said as much in a survey by my college.
They had two applicable questions: How can we best utilize AI? and What opportunities does [school] have in regards to AI (or smth)?
I told them: The best opportunity is to spearhead the effort to maintain human-focused learning. Offloading cognitive work to a machine is going to impair the learning itself and even the ability of the students to learn at all. Isn't learning the point of an educational institution?
The world has gone mad and it's making me mad.
I love that you said that and to bring this back to a deeply political point, the entire framing of AI assumes we have a severe shortage of human minds that are not being used to anywhere near their full potential.
You can't argue that enhancing two college students with 10 academic AIs is necessary because there aren't enough prospective students while we simultaneously cast immigrants back into the ocean as they try to immigrate to our countries and attend our universities to start lives they could never have imagined back home for whatever reason does it really matter 99.999% of the time? You can't argue the use of AI is necessary because we just don't have enough intelligence when there are homeless everywhere who are given no outlet by society to use their minds productively despite abundant evidence that structuring society this way only hurts ALL of our potential for intelligence both individually and collectively.
You can't argue that we need to pursue intelligence as a virtue over all else, whatever the hell that means anyways... and then ignore the incredible dehumanization so many people feel in their workplaces and that materially diminishes their potential for applied intelligence in a collective organization.
I am disgusted by this bifurcation of our valuing of human beings and our valuing of intelligence irrespective of how cool and interesting the idea is in the abstract of a sentient computer. I love Data, but Data would be shitting on all of the computer science focused people I see featured prominently in society and who are given billions and billions of dollars to piss away in vain cathedrals of bullshit. Data wouldn't have time for this, he would be out punching AR-15 toting ICE thugs in the face as they were attempting to kidnap children because in the end it is always children that are the source of intelligence, after all if adults already knew how to do it then it wouldn't be labelled the accolade of intelligent in the first place right? The thing with intelligence is it just takes a bit of time and care... something these "masters of intelligence" seem to have a pretty artificial understanding of.