AI will take over because it is efficient, cheap and nonunionized: Khan Academy serves more than 100 million students a year on an annual budget of about $70 million: “equivalent to the budget of a large high school in many parts of the United States.” Mr. Khan believes that teachers won’t be thrown overboard in the name of efficiency, because teaching is an “essential profession.” But if AI will shortly “automate almost any traditional white-collar process,” why should teachers be spared?
The same goes for university students. AI, Mr. Khan writes, can be trained not to favor college applicants by “race, religion, gender, or age”—but it won’t, because that would be political anathema. AI can also detect the cheating which is endemic in college papers—but that would be bad for the university business.
Though universities will fight to retain their pre-digital monopolies, the writing is on the whiteboard. Why take out a government-issued mortgage on a traditional credential for a white-collar job that no longer exists? What kind of eupraxia would students get from completing a task in which AI did the hard work? Anyway, we don’t need more social workers, gender students and Marxist literary theorists. We need plumbers, nurses and soldiers: people trained to do the jobs that AI can not yet do. Socrates’ father was right: Stonemasonry is a job for life.
