One of the reasons TA work is sometimes (AND OFTEN NOT) repetitive lower-skilled tasks is bc these are training tasks for early career scholars. If we automate them and eliminate the positions associated with them, we are explicitly gutting the future of these fields.
ESPECIALLY for any institution that serves many first generation minority students who are less familiar with institutional norms like (*checks notes) AN HBCU
Remember MOOCs... the idea was going to be that it was ok that your professor was a video (or dead) because the professor would be the Best Professor, preferably from Harvard, +
and then there would be these really active TAs who needless to say could provide all the human contact needed but could never themselves become the professor (because there could be only one, Best, professor).
An old friend does world-class conservation work on famous buildings. She likes to point that she went into massive debt for grad school to teach her lost arts like: thatching roofs, stacking stones for walls, other things that were once widely taught to apprentices who couldn’t read.
I'm pretty sure the powers that be are fine with gutting these fields, just as they're fine with replacing everything and everyone they can with AI as that will lower their cost/increase profit (poor or even dangerous quality issues won't matter after full deregulation). 1/2
of course, once everyone that can be replaced with AI is replaced with AI and all that's left is the super rich ruling class & the rest of us stuck in poverty, who will be left to buy their cheaply made goods/services? 2/2
This feels like it should be grounds for disaccreditation. You can't replace education with "we'll help you Google it" and then charge money or give out degrees.
To be fair, a lot of programs take on graduate students they know they'll never place into a permanent academic position specifically so they can have them teach or TA Intro courses.
Of the many not-repetitive high-skilled tasks I performed as a barely-paid undergrad wrangler, telling them to shut up because their questions are irrelevant was not one.
Dumbest possible timeline. Imagine a carpenter using an AI apprentice. We wouldn’t be able to build buildings in a generation because the information is not able to be disseminated through example.
If this nonsense continues, we gut all fields and society because many students won't have basic skills needed in most jobs or to be competent citizens. Being a TA isn't something a computer can competently do, either. So many in education clearly don't understand how learning works.
Spot on!
Reminds me of a video of a robot that can carry nails across a construction site. Several people commented how great it was because it was performing a "useless task".
I disagreed.
There is value in learning to take nails from point A to point B other than just getting them there.
