If you listen to the prophets of artificial intelligence, a wonderful future begins to take shape: a post-scarcity society where nobody needs to work, all diseases are cured, and human life is changed beyond recognition. Well, unless the machines are “misaligned”, and just wipe us out. At the other extreme, skeptics tell us that AI is just another normal technology: one that will have various important effects, for sure, but that in the grand scheme of things is going to matter less than indoor plumbing or antibiotics. Oh, and that it’s also a giant financial bubble.
I’m neither an economist nor a computer scientist, and I don’t possess a crystal ball — so like most people, I struggle to know what to make of it all (even if my suspicions tend toward the latter). But I do teach political philosophy in a British university, so I have had to wrestle with the impact of large language models (LLMs) in one small domain: higher education. And here, my conclusion is simple. The threat they pose is existential.
However, the reasons for this are not straightforward. As often, reality is complicated. Still, we can make headway by bracketing out the question of what AI means for university research — which will differ dramatically across fields — and instead focus on teaching. Specifically, students who use LLMs to complete their coursework assignments. Ask anybody lecturing in a university today and they will tell you the same: the impact has been dramatic.