A Modest Proposal

How to save American colleges: an essay.
All higher-education courses could be done online via bots with no need for expensive classrooms, dorm rooms and other physical facilities.

Instead of paying college costs currently approaching $100,000 a year, students could earn their degrees conveniently and inexpensively from the comfort of their own homes. Moreover, they would be given access to bots that they can use to take tests and write any essays required by the instructor bots. The students’ test answers would no doubt be perfect, and their essays would be persuasive and error-free, which would allow all students to be given A grades without having to disrupt their lives by attending classes, listening to lectures or reading. 

It's a clever idea, which we are likely to adopt more completely than we like to admit.  

5 comments:

james said...

If an organization is growing, you need to hire more administrators to administer the growth.
If it is shrinking, you need to hire more administrators to manage the decline.
If it is holding steady--you've no doubt seen the situation where replacing one experienced person requires two or three inexperienced people to do the same work.

E Hines said...

The WaPo piece seems, at least superficially, to be satire.

Even so, maybe we could have bots write the news outlet articles, anchor the news production on television, and perform the opinion production, also.

I'm not sure we'd see any degradation relative to the product currently produced. We should see, though, a reduction in subscription costs. And if the bots wrote their own ad copy for the news outlets, those might actually get more entertaining.

Eric Hines

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@ E. Hines - one of my favorites. Always ask "Compared to what?"

E Hines said...

Always ask "Compared to what?"

Indeed. And that's importantly different from "What about...?"

Eric Hines

Anonymous said...

Replace instructors with instructor bots?

Someone is going to learn how to code.

I don’t see a down side to this proposal!