Once you hit a problem that an AI cannot solve, it's good to be at least aware of what's going on in the field. You don't necessarily have to remember every formula and every fact off the top of your head, but having an intuition on what facts and formulas there are and where they can be used is immensely helpful.
Imagine you're writing a program in an esoteric scripting language that Copilot doesn't understand, and you need to put a large array of events in order from oldest to newest. If you had to learn this sort of think before, you'll immediately have an intuition that this is called sorting, there are slow (n^2) sorting algorithms and faster (n log n) sorting algorithms and you want the latter, and that quicksort is probably a good candidate to start with. You don't necessarily have to be able to write quicksort by hand, you can look up an implementation online and port it to your weird proprietary language, but the intuition is important.
That sounds like a different thing than I'm saying, and I agree with what I think you're saying.
So, if an AI can answer "what's a fast sort function" with "quicksort, here's some pseudocode: …", that's a related but different question to "write quicksort in [this brand new language you've never encountered before]".
Is like how AI won't take our jobs, but it will take over for each individual task that our jobs are made from.
We didn't just stop teaching children how to read the second that text-to-speech stuff came about, and we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented, and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released.
There is value in learning the fundamentals of things. If you never actually learn algebra, then it becomes effectively impossible to do the more advanced stuff.
TTS from visual input isn't good enough to be an example of that yet. It's good, but not that good.
> we didn't stop teaching basic arithmetic the second that calculators were invented and we didn't stop teaching algebra the second that Wolfram Alpha was released.
And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.
Even if TTS were absolutely perfect, then I'd still maintain my point.
> And yet, my A-level exams 22 years ago required me to have a graphic calculator.
Doesn't that sort of prove my point? Calculators existed and were obviously useful, but they didn't just stop teaching you algebra, despite knowing you had a calculator.
Only if you missed mine about how it is no longer cheating to use one.
I think the disagreement I have is that I think part of the reason calculators are allowed on calculus tests is because they're actually not that useful for a lot of what they teach you in calculus. I had a graphing calculator in my math and physics classes in high school, but most of my work was still done with a pen and paper. The calculator was of course useful for the arithmetic stuff, and it could be useful to sanity-check your work (e.g. to see if the roots you calculated were correct), but I still had to do most of the actual calculus by hand.
Even when I got a calculator with a CAS built in (HP 50G), I would still have to do most of the algebra by hand, and honestly if my teachers had known that my calculator had a CAS I suspect they wouldn't have allowed me to use it to begin with.
That said the uselessness of education is the point. It's a signal that you're willing to do pointless work for future rewards. We may as well replace it with counting beans and it would be just as effective.
For any test where there's an AI good enough to cheat with and cheap enough students can afford it, the test itself is no longer important — it is as pointless as testing how well students can use fountain pens when everyone uses a keyboard for actual work. Or how well they can play chess.
I'm not sure the exact shape of what each model can and can't do, but I am confident that this means they're never be an important "cheating" risk, not even when they're technically capable of it.