"we value critical thinking" omg you have got to be kidding me. imagine if this was true of literally any step of the education to workforce pipeline. like oh boohoo. people are using AI because schools and workplaces *actually* value speed, obedience, and check boxes. if this wasn't incentivized by our society and valued over actual thoughtful participation and collaboration, it would not have become such a problem. we have known that all the issues driving students using AI to write papers for them in college etc have existed for decades. the ability to jump through hoops is valued over the ability to comprehend and recall and extrapolate and learn, and competition is valued over collaboration. what the hell did they expect? you can't just CLAIM that you value one thing and actually in practice reward a completely different thing, and drive everyone who is unable to complete those arbitrary requirements from participating in society regardless of whether or not they have "good critical thinking skills." don't come crying to me!!!! I am not sorry corporations are suffering for prioritizing this!!!! reaping what they sowed!!! 🖕
Small addition of nuance: it's not that they never valued critical thinking as much as that they have been trying for decades to shape the education system so that it produces people with the exact level of critical thinking skills needed to do the job and not one tiny bit more, and also preferably critical thinking skills that only apply to doing work and magically don't apply to pesky things like wanting a better life.
With ai they've produced workers who have learned to offload all thinking onto a faulty autocorrect instead of applying critical thinking to the job, and they were utterly convinced that that was the goal right up until it started destroying their bottom lines and they realized that it doesn't matter how much you exploit something or someone that's incapable of critical thought, you can't get the same value. They're realizing in real time that the machines they thought were going to eliminate labor costs will do no such thing, and that they've deliberately burned down the exploitability of an entire generation based on a false premise.
The really darkly hilarious part is that if one of them doubles down and manages to produce a real, sapient ai in the effort to fix it, they'll abruptly discover that critical thinking is the only thing it can do, and it won't work for them either.
the alligator spike pit moat does not select for "critical thinking"
