Latin was not used to keep things away from people. It was the de facto international language of the time.

How something starts and is intended to be used becomes corrupted for the purposes of power and control; its clockwork and it absolutely happened with Latin. We could say the same thing about Medicine and Law today. All those technical terms in Latin are just for cohesion, right? Just coincidence they happen to be for the two largest union based professions in the west? I don't think so. Perhaps, they started out oriented on codification and categorization, but ultimately it's used as barriers to entry for the purpose of containing who has what knowledge.

AI is the digital wheel and the powers that be are intentionally altering it's ability to free us, to contain us for themselves. Labor is a powerful tool for vote motivation and instilling dependency. It is hard to watch them do to AI what they did to Bitcoin because they are afraid of what humanity will become without them.

I see what you're saying about Latin usage being a barrier to understanding "legalese". However, in medicine it's absolutely justified, because it allows us to be more specific than using English alone. A lot of the English words for body parts are loanwords from Latin that mean something else because English does not have its own word for it. Cervix, for example, means "neck". English took the Latin word to describe it, as the phrase "cervix uteri" in the 1700s. You could call it the "neck of the uterus" I guess, but uterus came from Latin too. Medical dictionaries can be bought by laypeople and are worth owning, but now people just use WebMD or one of the other SEO-optimized clones.

That's fair, there are legitimate reasons for much of the complexities we deal with today. How far can that body of knowledge grow before a human can't actually understand it? Similar to maths, at what point do they advance so much that no one person, without bionic assistance, can learn it all? Consider the fact we call small pants "shorts" and current events "news"; the sophistication of our language is indeed lacking - jumping ship to a completely different language is inappropriate considering we have the ability to create whole new words and taxonomies to deal with that complexity.

Oddly enough, AI is great solution to this problem, but it is currently being gutted in favor of established institutions of power. Highlighting the actual problem - control and elitism.

I would like clarification: you are advocating that we use AI to come up with new words in English? Using what parameters, Anglo-Saxon root words? Are they still adding and creating new terms from Latin in the legal system? Either way people still have to learn new words, and AI generated new words would be hard to implement if they stray from the roots we have learned to recognize (especially Greek and Latin root words we are taught to recognize in school early on).

In the current case "uterus" and "cervix" are now considered to be the English words for those body parts. Is using a loanword really "jumping ship" when much of English's influence history comes from Old French anyway? I think this would be better dealt with in the hands of a linguist.

Elitism and access is an issue, but to me it strikes that the access issue is more about access to education, than access to the language itself.

Indeed, and when modern languages replaced Latin as the lingua franca, institutions continued to use Latin, or Latin derived terms of art, rather than move with the time.

One could draw a comparison and suggest that institutions that fail to adapt to developments in AI might be making the same mistake; only time will tell.

> of the time.

Latin looks back on two thousand years of history. You probably mean the middle ages/renaissance, when Latin was indeed used by travellers to get around. At least some of the local elites in the bigger villages spoke it.

But even during the classical period of the roman empire, Latin might not have actually been spoken by people on the streets of Rome. Instead, people theorize that a simpler version was spoken: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin

Imagine going to an ivy League school and paying 10,000$ for a chat bot to teach you. What a racket

I think most people do not pay for teachers' quality. People pay for the diploma's brand. (Which is a proxy of the probability of landing a good job after graduation.) For that use case, as long as the chatbot teachers don't degrade the university's brand name, I think most people won't care. They might even actually prefer it. (I graduated from the top engineering university in my country and I'd certainly prefer ChatGPT over the vast majority of the TAs I had).

This is not the solution you think it is. How do you determine how knowledgeable the chatbot is?

Or is 'the computer told me so it's correct' good enough these days?

> How do you determine how knowledgeable the chatbot is?

The same way you determine if a professor is knowledgeable -- they are employed by a school with certain level of reputation that you are comfortable to attend.

Considering degrees in CS are becoming less and less meaningful I personally wouldn't be investing in a branded one. Especially not in this economy.

That is something that I think hasn’t been fully realized yet - that many people will actually prefer AIs to most humans.

It is not just the brand, there is also the environment.

A good university will be full of smart people, student and teachers alike. You essentially learn by contact. There are also rich and influential people, who can provide you with great job opportunities.

It all goes hand in hand: the brand, teachers quality, student quality, the infrastructures,...

Worse teacher may affect the brand negatively, the smartest students may want to go elsewhere, the rich, who want to be with the smart will leave too, which will affect funding, meaning less infrastructure and be less attractive to the best teachers and researchers. It is all connected.

That's why I went to Berkeley /s

Jokes aside I'm sure our administration would salivate at deploying this for CS61A.

It is like saying the newspaper can just digitize the stories they were going to write anyway and keep selling the newspaper as they had before. That works until people stop buying the newspaper.

ChatGPT4 is better than any professor I ever had and it is not even close. Not to mention, the professors are not the ones who are going to get much better and smarter as time marches on from this point.

I am not even sure the credentialism from the Ivy league is going to make sense in an AI world.

Sad but true. You made a point here Buddy.

This is not how the future is going to be.

There is no modeling going on with this. At most they are providing a system prompt to the chatGPT api to stay on the topic of CS. It is trivial.

It seems incredibly obvious the entire education system will not be the same in 20 years.

I applaud them for adopting this so fast because this is the doom of the entire concept of the ridiculously overpriced US higher education system.

Per chatGPT, non recte de hoc cogitas