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It's the same problem in industry where companies are replacing junior developers with AI. I do think we should keep training young interns and academics even if they're not immediately useful, for the same reason we still have schools.
Fortunately, I think it's easier to align the incentives for academia than industry, and I doubt PhD or postdoc positions will completely go away at least because of this. Although there's a stereotype of the professor who's a genius and talented researcher but hates mentoring and teaching, plenty of genius talented researchers love to teach, and would gladly accept more teaching responsibilities for less research output. "Publish or perish" is the bigger obstacle, but I don't see why citations must be weighed stronger than student outcomes (if anything, the latter translate more directly into profit, because a student who greatly succeeds may donate back), and my understanding is that most tenured professors are already judged by how many PhD students they graduate. If AI makes it so most academics can't meaningfully contribute until late postdoc, I'm confident there will still be plenty of professors willing to mentor them, and if universities can keep funding pure math and social sciences, I'm confident they can keep funding this mentorship.
Disagree. Teaching currently sucks pretty hard because of culture. Students come in with a mindset that they deserve whatever degree they're going for, and it's your job to get them there. The university admin doesn't care about standards, they just want you to pass as many students as possible bc it's pure $ for them. Politics is still dominated by boomers who believe that more years of education automatically means people get smarter. As a teacher, absolutely every incentive pushes you towards just passing everyone while barely even bothering to go through the motions. Which makes the students become even more cynical & entitled: If even plenty of the teachers clearly don't care, why should they?
Likewise, it's pretty hard to miss this development, so the opinion of teaching among faculty goes down. Less people WANT to do teaching, so the only ones doing it are those who get it pushed unto them, which further erodes the quality of the teaching.
It's a pretty impossible doom-loop consuming the universities. The only exception are electives, which are organized by genuine researchers for the purpose of selection, which means that they actually have an incentive to care about standards.
I agree with everything except the doom loop. Teaching right now is seriously flawed, it degraded before but AI is accelerating it.
However:
Even basic general knowledge, some students are intrinsically motivated to learn (it's not basic to them until they learn it), and many teachers like to teach students who are intrinsically motivated regardless of the subject.
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Maybe we finally have a use case for keeping kids locked up in school for 12-15 years. Instead of having them do pointless busywork, we can use that time to get them to a mid/senior level, so when they get to using AI,it will be a bit more than mindlessly pushing a button.
I half-agree. We should teach school students more real-world skills (finance, socialization, avoiding deception) and less general knowledge, and give college students (at least those planing for industry in their field) more internship experience and less theory they're unlikely to use.
But I think entirely eliminating math, science, English (or whatever native language), history, and psychology will cause problems. Without math and science, people won't understand necessary concepts like finance and preventing disease. Without English, people will communicate even worse than now. Without history and psychology, people will vote and understand each other worse than now. I'm sure there are more subjects, including some not commonly taught today, that almost everyone should know the basics of.
We should even be "teaching" work ethic, otherwise graduates will be too lazy to accomplish anything, but I'm sure there's a better way than "pointless busywork" in the subjects mentioned above. Maybe sufficient work ethic can be achieved entirely through physical education; though I don't recommend boot camp levels of exercise, and schools/colleges should accommodate naturally weak/unathletic students, students should definitely have more than the ~1 hour "gym class" in my school where we sometimes didn't even exercise, and compulsory fitness should continue through college.
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