if AI can do pretty much anything, what remains worth being taught at universities and colleges? Not many tended to the most pessimistic answers to that question, but that didn’t settle all fears about what institutions are meant to be teaching with respect to skills in using AI. As the excellent James Bessen wrote in his excellent book Learning By Doing: the Real Connection Between Innovation, Wages and Wealth, it’s hard to use education as a vector to improve skills during technological revolutions. Put simply, education depends on codification (someone’s got to have written a textbook, right?) and when technological change is happening too quickly, there’s no time available for codification. (Higher Education’s AI Future - Usher - 2025, p. 3)
Perhaps there’s a role for Whiplash here…