One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It.

“Am I afraid of losing command to a computer?  Daystrom was right.  I can do a lot of other things.  Am I afraid of losing the prestige and the power that goes with being a starship captain?  Is that why I’m fighting it? Am I that petty?” – Star Trek

Plot idea:  Gilligan ate the last box of cookies on the island.  Ginger snaps.

My first exposure to the concept of thinking machines was almost certainly Star Trek.  My first exposure to talking monkeys was Planet of the Apes, but that’s a story for another day.

On Star Trek, the computers were always one bad logical paradox away from exploding.  Yes.  Literally exploding.

Were they sentient?  Sure.  Helpful?  Usually.

But give them an infinite loop and boom, here comes the smoke, and sparks.  The classic was something like Kirk saying, “Computer, listen to me.  I have infinite power, so can I make a burger that is too big for me to eat?”

The Star Trek A.I. that comes to mind right now is M-5 from the episode The Ultimate Computer.  In this episode, Kirk and his crew get replaced by this fancy new computer that runs the Enterprise™ like a dream until M-5 just decides to start killing people.  The machine went full neurotic.  And turning it off?  It took its creator have a full meltdown, since they don’t make Adderall for computers.

I spilled Adderall in my F-150, and turned it into a Ford Focus®.

I bring this up because an AI just solved an unsolved Erdős Problem®.  What’s an Erdős Problem® other than an excuse to us a Hungarian letter?  Well, it’s part of a series of math problems cooked up by a dead vagabond mathematician named Paul Erdős.  The guy wandered the world like a couch surfing hobo with a PhD.

This particular problem had stumped humans for eighty years.  Then OpenAI’s model rolled up and disproved the whole thing with a counterexample so elegant it made a human mathematician sit up and say, “Huh. That’s clever.”

Not “good for a computer.”

Just . . . clever.  People hadn’t solved this problem.  But A.I. did in about an hour.

Anyone who still says “AI is nothing more than a pocket calculator” is wrong.  Dead wrong.  This isn’t crunching numbers faster.  This is synthesizing ideas and creating original solutions to problems that have vexed mathematicians everywhere.  Oh, sure, it’s easy to beat them up and take their money to buy yourself something you like because they have poor upper body strength, but they’re good in math.

Maybe Kim wouldn’t be so chubby if he had to run for office.

Just like Kirk struggled with what the hell he was supposed to do if he wasn’t driving a starship the thought that has to be entering the minds of mathematicians everywhere is, “what’s the point if a computer can do what I do?”  Though, to be fair, Captain Kirk would later become a police officer in Southern California and a lawyer in Boston, so he landed on his feet after they no longer needed him in Star Fleet.  But he had decent upper body strength.

And that leads straight to the question of college.

College is getting pozzed by GloboLeftists to the point that math and engineering professors are publicly demanding a return to acceptance based on test scores.  They’re tired of getting stunning and brave students who can’t noodle their way through middle-school math and, well, can’t read either.  These are the same professors who used to pretend everything was fine because they were fighting for tenure.

What’s the difference between a tenured professor and Hamas?  You can negotiate with Hamas.  (meme as found).

They’re saying the quiet part out loud because their departments are filling up with kids who couldn’t pass a seventh-grade fractions test but have opinions on everything.  However, now we have A.I. that can solve unsolved mathematical problems.  And college students that can’t read or do math.

As I’ve written before, participation in college took off after Griggs v. Duke Power.  That 1971 Supreme Court decision basically told companies they couldn’t use IQ tests for hiring anymore.

Why?

Because black people didn’t score as high on average.  So how could companies legally discriminate, sorry, select, for the bright employees they actually needed to, you know, keep the power on?  Simple:  require a college degree. A degree became the new IQ test, just with more debt and fewer guarantees.

Now college is facing the twin problems of not being able to bring in the smart students or even requiring kids to read, while AI is everywhere.

What is college even for anymore?  What’s the purpose?

My experience with college is that it provided a chance for me to change.  The teachers always said, “next year it would be harder,” and it finally hit for me my second semester of my freshman year. Calc 2, Physics 2, and Chem 2 (the thermodynamics part) all at once.

I will say that when I took thermo I didn’t feel so hot.

I had to bear down and learn to study.  It changed me for the better.  The concepts I learned there were truly fundamental. They gave me a leg up on my career because they changed the way I thought and challenged me in ways that mattered.

But if college has turned into writing prompts (or, since they can’t write, speaking prompts) into an AI and turning in the A.I.’s product, what’s the point?  I know, people said the same thing about calculators dumbing down schools.  I’m sure they said the same thing about slide rules.  But I know what multiplication is and how it works, and could even do long division by hand if I had to.

A.I. is different, fundamentally, than a calculator.  A.I. can’t think in the human sense, but it certainly can synthesize and create original solutions to problems that have vexed the physically weakest people on campus.

So why college?

For most people, college shouldn’t exist.  Alternate paths should be wide open for entrepreneurship, or welding, or HVAC, or any of the dozen trades that actually keep the lights on and the toilets flushing.  People wanting a sociology, psychology, or anthropology degree should be limited to about one-twentieth the number of sociology, psychology, or anthropology professors currently working in the United States, because teaching those subjects is about all those degrees are worth in the real world.  Oops, forgot!  They could also work in the fresh retail coffee production and distribution industry.

I’ll go out on a limb and say college should be limited to those professions where people die if you’re wrong, or where the work is useful in making cool weapons, which means people die if they’re right:  physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, the hard stuff.

I see why people get addicted to glue.  They just get attached to it.

My plan would turn subjects like Women’s Studies into a hobby.  Which is what they already are, but under my plan you don’t have to play $48,000 a year for that hobby.  Add in allowing employers to use IQ tests again, and then you don’t have to worry about hiring idiots.  They might be evil, but at least they won’t be idiots.

Look, the M-5 computer on the Enterprise® eventually got shut down because it went off the rails.  And real A.I. isn’t going to explode in a shower of sparks, but it’s already doing things humans couldn’t.

College, meanwhile, is busy proving it can’t even teach basic literacy to the people it lets in.  The old model is broken.  Even my old professor, Dr. Zaius©, agrees.