A Lack Of Creativity Is Not The Problem—Greed Is
The rise of artificial intelligence, specifically deep learning and large language models, in recent years has given the illusion that there is an epidemic of intellectual laziness in young people especially. It seems that just a hundred years ago, unprecedented innovations were springing up quite often thanks to creative entrepreneurs and inventors who truly wanted to contribute to society—Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin to name a few. Since humans haven’t gotten dumber in the past century—in fact, according to the Flynn Effect we’ve actually gotten smarter; that is, if you consider IQ as being telling of intelligence (I don’t think it is)—why aren’t there groundbreaking inventions happening anymore that make our lives easier? I think there are two reasons for why it seems like this is the case, when that isn’t the complete story.
As a high school student I’ve noticed that the reliance on AI to do assignments front to back is simply insane—I understand the use of AI to help and teach math and/or other topics, but plugging the entire assignment in without doing anything at all yourself does seem to be more and more prevalent in the clssroom, and it’s only getting worse. By the way, these are the kids, my generation and the generations that follow, that will make up the majority of the workforce in a decade or two. Imagine an economy where no one actually knew what they were doing; it’s whoever can use AI the best to get real-world problems solved in a mediocre way, leading to mediocre results. Take the computer science industry as an example. Millions of students who go to school to learn how to program often get through with heavy assistance from ChatGPT or Copilot. Then, they complain about not being able to get a job. Many of my friends who are real computer scientists, as in they actually learned what they were taught in university, told me that it’s only impossible to get a job in computer science if you didn’t truly learn what was taught during class, and you wasted your time by not completing projects during your downtime.
I also think another plausible explanation is societal expectation to “walk the well-worn path.” Risk is often not a positive word in many millennial’s minds, especially if their kids are the ones taking the risk.
