I know we are barely adapting as educators to a post-COVID world, and some of us never adapted (because we die). And now, there is something worse coming to make us adapt again. And then another and another thing will come. As Alvin Toffler said, the shock of the future will put humanity in a constant situation of having to adapt to a new time as if it had traveled to a completely new culture.
At least in the United States, the amount of college students will decrease drammatically. A student who has been passing classes using AI-generated content without accountability will be disengaged with harder and harder classes until dropping out. If the habit started in high school or middle school probably won't ever dare to try college. Also, the student who got accustomed to have a machine write the boring stuff for them won't be psychologically ready to embrace challenging situations. Those will be students with poor coping abilities to stretch their comfort zones.
AIs can respond to almost any question even if cleverly crafted. AI has keen critical thinking, overflowing creativity, the ability to read information if we input the right wording, and the ability to self-correct errors. Tasks impossible to respond through AI will be so difficult for the average students ending in losing motivation. Handwriting tasks will be time-consuming and, again, the AI-infused student will ask themselves: why should I have to do this, if the machine does it for me? The student who has been following a course through ChatGPT will fail in-person exams. All of this will lead to new drop-outs. In general, the lazy student won't find a way to feel challenged, and will drop out eventually out of boredom.
The college population will decrease dramatically, and officials will blame the demographic cliff, leading to college professors to just adapt to the new wave of college closures. Spelling and writing, crafting paragraphs, constructing a sentence, and searching for vocabulary will be like calligraphy, obsolete skills. Writing courses will disappear, and will be replaced by Creativity courses where students will be praised if they come up with something an AI can't. Error will have an enormous value and it will be even praised as an achievement. As Dav Pilkey suggests in his comic about Cat Kid Comic Club, honors will be awarded to the worst-written assignments. (I already provide secret extracredit to poorly written essays.) Reading error will be like listening an old LP, where we enjoy the background noise as part of such vintage experience.
College and secondary school will collapse together as a single thing. Companies will train their workforce from childhood. Using the talent hunt model as in sports, companies may be recruiting their developers, coders and analysts in elementary schools. They will be taken to the company's school since a young age to learn everything from math to science and writing while gradually specializing in the skill needed for the company.
AIs will be slowly eating us from within like a silent cancer. When we realize what it has done to us, we will have a mass of citizens who don't know how to think. Like Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," there will be a mass of people doing various jobs with very low pay and will be almost like animals. This is when the newly-created system will be in danger. The new elite that will be created will be thirsty of the savage and the incorrect, and will hunt for it as the lost paradise.
And let me tell you what will happen with research. The lit reviews will disappear because all will be replaced by a data-based that shows the summary of results. You will produce a new paper for such database without having to write anything, just reporting the findings. However, there may be a new research genre closely related to fiction where research will depend on the worse yet most innovative wording ever. Those will be labeled on the Internet. If your findings were inocuous and your writing was boring, your research will disappear in this new world.
To summarize with.... Oh no, this sounded so ChatGPT.
