Will AI Make Traditional College Degrees Obsolete?

Four-year college degrees are the greatest scam ever perpetrated on the middle class in the United States. The rise in tuition compared to the rise of a starting salary for a college grad is clearly out of sync. The tuition has risen 200% and the starting salary has only risen about 25%. This makes it almost impossible to start an average job that could possibly reimburse that much debt. You can read my in-debt analysis here.

According to a recent report, an online expert believes 90% of online content could eventually be generated by artificial intelligence (AI). To understand how that could be possible we first have to explain the process of neural networks. In order to talk about neural networks, a subset of AI, we have to explain how classical programming works. In classical programming, you have your variables and your operator which is the mathematical sign of the operation you want to perform on your variables.

Example:
4 + 3 = 7 In words 4 + 3 equals 7

So the operator in this case is a plus (+) sign, that's what you code into your program. Then you input your variables (4,3) in your code, then you can call your variables a,b.

The computer outputs 7 as the solution.

Neural networks work differently. You give neural networks the variables from your problem and then you give the solution. In other words, you give it a problem that's already been solved. You have the variables you have the solution for and the problem has been solved. An example would be a football game where you know the outcome because you know the player metrics and you know who won the game. You train your neural network on a number of games, then you would ask a question about a game that has yet to be played, given the player metrics, and ask who will be the winner of that game (solution). In neural networks, the computer programs itself and there's no need for a programmer. The only need is data and I am talking about maybe millions of terabytes of data to train your network on.

As AI becomes more common our computers become smarter while our college grads from all indications become dumber, based on International testing. But when will AI overtake the average college graduate in intelligence? It will be the line when most college degrees are obsolete or will be, shortly in the future. A number of school systems have already banned students from using ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot.

The latest version of ChatGPT was released in November of 2022. There are unsubstantiated reports that there are far more powerful Innovations of GPT 3 that are at least a decade ahead of what is publicly available.

In the fall of 2020, The Guardian had GPT-3 write an entire article to convince us robots come in peace. If you read the article you may become very scared, knowing this was from over two years ago. Today ChatGPT has been used by high school grads to write their college admissions essays. The writing quality is spectacular. The potential college graduate that wants to write for a living has no future. Numerous other college specialties will have very doubtful avenues into the middle class as well.

ChatGPT has also been used to write python code and HTML. Another avenue that has been explored is its usefulness to set up Excel spreadsheets for data science. The most definitive work I found challenges the capability of ChatGPT to complete advanced college work comes from a white paper from the Wharton business school. The professor of an operations management course had ChatGPT answer a number of questions for MBA students.

From his summary:
“Considering this performance, ChatGPT would have received a B to B- grade on the exam.” This is a master's level course in the highly competitive Wharton School of business. What does this say about the average Bachelor of Science student's performance?

From my experience using ChatGPT, I think it can also replace an eighth-grade teacher for precocious students. The students could ask questions about algebra, science, or social work. The one problem is the student would have is to be conversant with colloquial English. During my numerous drive-throughs for fast food, I increasingly find that the human being at the other end of that speaker cannot speak or understand colloquial English, or sometimes understand simple mathematics. This I find very challenging for my ravenous appetite for fast food. yet these are considered the staple of entry-level jobs into our middle-class system.

If university professors are so smart then it would be easy for them to figure out how a college graduate could fit into a world where ChatGPT is so proficient at performing middle-class tasks. It is not only an issue that the software is becoming much more capable, the hardware is also becoming much faster and much more proficient. In other words, the hardware is faster and capable of analyzing more data in a short period of time.

Below I have a graph of Moore's Law which is essentially a type of analogy for how smart computers are becoming. Every two years the number of transistors on a computer chip doubles, this is almost like a surrogate of how smart computers are becoming.

It is not only Moore's law that is predicting more transistors every two years but there's new innovation and computing power called quantum computing.

From a live science article:
“Quantum computing is a new generation of technology that involves a type of computer 158 million times faster than the most sophisticated supercomputer we have in the world today.” Not only is the neural network software becoming more sophisticated but the hardware is becoming faster and more proficient at analyzing data.

Conclusion
With mounting college degree debt, advances in ChatGPT software, and the advent of quantum computing, today's Bachelor of Science student is going to be very challenged to compete against this and obtain a middle-class standard of living in the US. This whole advance in technology definitely calls into question whether or not a bachelor's degree is obsolete in this advanced technological world.