ChatGPT

 I saw a business news article today that said ChatGPT caused a 48% decline in the stock price of Chegg, an online education company and whose stock I used to own (just a little bit, not much, during the 2021 "ALL SPECULATIVE STOCKS ARE GOOD STOCKS" era). In hindsight, of course, it seems obvious that would happen, considering online education is kind of reliant on students and their drive to learn. Chegg was a company that provided homework help, digital and physical textbook rentals, textbooks, and online tutoring. It reminds me of SAT classes when I was in high school: Yes people take them to get a good score on the SAT, but did they really help? Maybe there was some quantitative results, but I have to think some of that was because students who paid the money for SAT classes actually buckled down and studied after spending money on the classes, not necessarily any brilliant techniques that SAT classes taught. As with almost any subject, SAT can be figured out on one's own, and someone studying on their own with the right drive (no distractions, just pure studying) is likely able to work more efficiently and skip the stuff that classes teach which you know already and are good at. It really epitomizes the American education system: everything taught in schools and written in textbooks can be learned on one's own, schools are just a way to instill a culture of learning. 

More concerning is this ChatGPT that is taking over everything; looks like homework help is just the first step. I remember in high school how many essays I spent countless hours on rereading and getting the wording just right, adding in different sections that I had found.....well, now the high school students are just using ChatGPT to write their essays. And the joke I hear among teachers (maybe not much of a joke) is that they grade those papers now using ChatGPT too to. So the whole exercise is pointless, it's ChatGPT evaluating ChatGPT's work. While I somewhat envy those high school students' ability to escape endless hours of mindless typing into their computer, I feel like most high students won't use the extra time wisely to hone skills in other areas, it'll just get used up on social media, internet, and other addicting pursuits. See the thing with iPhones and ChatGPT is that our technology is getting so much better and smarter, but it has an inverse relationship with students' intelligence, as in students are getting dumber by using the iPhone. Why learn languages if you can just use the phone to translate everything? Why learn to write and use proper grammar when ChatGPT (or Grammarly) writes everything for you? Why learn anything when the Internet contains everything you need to know already? That's the really scary thing about ChatGPT is not that it's taking over some fringe startup companies like Chegg; it's that students are actually using ChatGPT to replace all of their learning needs, it's the latest shortcut in a world of shortcuts available for the new generation of people that makes life easier in the short term but likely will have consequences later in life regarding working hard on something, developing patience, and most importantly, the desire to learn. That's been one of the best gifts I've ever gotten from reading books in my youth and actually doing those papers, reading the assigned readings from school: I desired to learn about them and hone my mind. Let's not lose that.