Ex-Google exec says “Higher education as we know it is on the verge of becoming obsolete”

Tarifi himself graduated with a PhD in AI in 2012, when the subject was far less mainstream. But today, the 42-year-old says, time would be better spent studying a more niche topic intertwined with AI, like AI for biology—or maybe not a degree at all.

“Higher education as we know it is on the verge of becoming obsolete,” Tarifi said to Fortune. “Thriving in the future will come not from collecting credentials but from cultivating unique perspectives, agency, emotional awareness, and strong human bonds.

“I encourage young people to focus on two things: the art of connecting deeply with others, and the inner work of connecting with themselves.”

Even studying to become a medical doctor or lawyer may not be worth ambitious Gen Z’s time anymore. Those degrees take so long to complete in comparison with how quickly AI is evolving that they may result in students just “throwing away” years of their lives, Tarifi added to BI.

“In the current medical system, what you learn in medical school is so outdated and based on memorization,” he said.

Tarifi is not alone in his feeling that higher education is not keeping up with the shifting AI tides. In fact, many tech leaders have recently expressed concerns that the rising cost of school paired with an outdated curriculum is creating a perfect storm for an unprepared workforce.

“I’m not sure that college is preparing people for the jobs that they need to have today,” said Mark Zuckerberg on Theo Von’s This Past Weekend podcast in April. “I think that there’s a big issue on that, and all the student debt issues are…really big.

“It’s sort of been this taboo thing to say, ‘Maybe not everyone needs to go to college,’ and because there’s a lot of jobs that don’t require that…people are probably coming around to that opinion a little more now than maybe like 10 years ago,” Zuckerberg added.

Moreover, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that his company’s latest AI model can already perform in ways equivalent to those with a PhD.

“GPT-5 really feels like talking to a PhD-level expert in any topic,” Altman said earlier this month. “Something like GPT-5 would be pretty much unimaginable in any other time in history.”

For existing AI-focused PhD students, the private sector jobs pipeline remains strong. In fact, in 2023, some 70% of all AI doctoral students took private sector jobs postgrad, a jump from just 20% two decades ago, according to MIT.

However, this increase has some academic leaders worried about a “brain drain” that could result from too many experts electing to work at tech companies—versus staying back and teaching the next generation as professors.

Henry Hoffmann, the chair of the University of Chicago’s department of computer science, recently told Fortune that he’s seen his PhD students get courted for decades—but the salary lures have only grown. One student with zero professional experience recently dropped out to accept a “high six-figure” offer from ByteDance.

“When students can get the kind of job they want [as students], there’s no reason to force them to keep going,” Hoffmann said.

You get punished financially if you pursue it so why fucking bother?

Plus, you can always become an instant millionaire by masturbating on OnlyFans.

I'm only interested in such takes after these AI experts manage to solve the Interpretability Problem.

Universities are churning out people who can’t even wipe their own ass. Higher education has been a joke for some time - degrees that are worthless and extreme debt.

And others are learning

Higher Education served a useful purpose, up until about 2010.

After social media, the world economy changed,

College degrees are now going the way of the dinosaur.

What r5 said

Predictions on when the AI bubble bursts?

Predictions on when the AI bubble butt bursts?

I’m okay with doctors memorizing shit. I think you need to be intimately familiar with all the moving parts to understand the organism as a whole.

I’m not anti-AI in medicine at all, but I believe doctors still need a repository of medical, biological, and chemical knowledge to apply (and actively question) artificial intelligence, at least for now and in the relatively near future.

Few people actually get jobs based on their undergrad majors. College has become a basic requirement like high school was a few generations back. Graduate education (especially for professions like doctor, lawyer, pharmacist, etc) is what will get you a job

I worked hard in college to get my Bachelor's degree and them an MBA. That was way back in the 70s when a college degree (at least some of them) actually prepared you for a good work life. But many years later, after having hired hundreds of college graduates I finally came to the belief that most college degrees were becoming worthless and most people would be better off going to a technical college. At least they would actually learn how to do something.

$100 MILLION signing bonus??

Become a chef, I can't see AI preparing food.

Everything is about to become obsolete. It's a thing. We must deal with it, but I think we all know we won't until it's too late.

There’s a new long-form article in The Atlantic about how fast AI has completely upended and hollowed out the academic side of what a college education even is.

Excerpts:

“A college senior returning to classes this fall has spent nearly their entire undergraduate career under the shadow—or in the embrace—of generative AI. ChatGPT first launched in November 2022, when that student was a freshman. As a department chair at Washington University in St. Louis, I witnessed the chaos it unleashed on campus. Students weren’t sure what AI could do, or which uses were appropriate. Faculty were blindsided by how effectively ChatGPT could write papers and do homework. College, it seemed to those of us who teach it, was about to be transformed.

“But nobody thought it would happen this quickly. Three years later, the AI transformation is just about complete. By the spring of 2024, almost two-thirds of Harvard undergrads were drawing on the tool at least once a week. In a British survey of full-time undergraduates from December, 92 percent reported using AI in some fashion. Forty percent agreed that “content created by generative AI would get a good grade in my subject,” and nearly one in five admitted that they’ve tested that idea directly, by using AI to complete their assignments. Such numbers will only rise in the year ahead.

“I cannot think that in this day and age that there is a student who is not using it,” Vasilis Theoharakis, a strategic-marketing professor at the Cranfield School of Management who has done research on AI in the classroom, told me. That’s what I’m seeing in the classes that I teach and hearing from the students at my school: The technology is no longer just a curiosity or a way to cheat; it is a habit, as ubiquitous on campus as eating processed foods or scrolling social media. In the coming fall semester, this new reality will be undeniable. Higher education has been changed forever in the span of a single undergraduate career.

“It can pretty much do everything,” says Harrison Lieber, a WashU senior majoring in economics and computer science (who took a class I taught on AI last term). As a college student, he told me, he has mostly inhabited a world with ChatGPT. For those in his position, the many moral questions that AI provokes—for example, whether it is exploitative, or anti-intellectual, or ecologically unsound—take a back seat to the simple truth of its utility. Lieber characterized the matter as pragmatic above all else: Students don’t want to cheat; they certainly don’t want to erode the value of an education that may be costing them or their family a small fortune. But if you have seven assignments due in five days, and AI could speed up the work by tenfold for the cost of a large pizza, what are you meant to do?”

Thanks, r17. I've been meaning to read that piece.

"Universities are churning out people who can’t even wipe their own ass. Higher education has been a joke for some time - degrees that are worthless and extreme debt."

Not true, but conservatives LOVE to demonize higher education because they're mad that highly educated people don't tend to vote GOP

"But many years later, after having hired hundreds of college graduates I finally came to the belief that most college degrees were becoming worthless and most people would be better off going to a technical college. At least they would actually learn how to do something."

So all college graduates suck, except for you? You get to benefit from a college education but everyone else has to go to tech school?

This is the conservative mindset - I went to college and I'll send my kids to Yale or Harvard, but everyone else should be a plumber!

Society bout to be interesting as fuck in like 50 years. Will it be an uber technological dystopian on some “In Time” meets “Total Recall” type shit. Will everyone be beautiful but broke?

That article at R17, just confirmed Tarifi's remarks.

Higher (and probably elementary and secondary) education is DEAD.

It's remarkable how totally everyone is swallowing this AI propaganda disseminated by the men who stand to profit from ... AI.

I have no doubt that AI is/will revolutionize virtually everything, but there's also a cottage industry in AI experts making increasingly outlandish statements.

I mean what the fuck does this even mean:

[Quote] the inner work of connecting with themselves.

[quote]Students don’t want to cheat

How terrible it must be for them to be forced into it.

Calculators could be considered cheating as well.

[quote]you can always become an instant millionaire by masturbating on OnlyFans

And voila, your interpretability problem disappears in a puff of cum!

[quote] there's also a cottage industry in AI experts making increasingly outlandish statements.

[quote] I mean what the fuck does this even mean:

[quote] the inner work of connecting with themselves.

He's basically saying what we've been saying here for ages: GenZ and the generations that follow them, have no interpersonal skills whatsoever.

They grew up interacting with video games, and computers, and smart phones, so they lack the ability to relate to ACTUAL PEOPLE on a personal level.

So learning how to connect with, and relate to each other on a human level, would replace traditional education.

Lord knows, this guy probably works with thousands of Incels and other weirdos in his line of work, and he can easily see that they lack even the most basic social skills.

In other words, they're fucking WEIRDOS, and they need to learn how to NOT be weird.

I don’t see how we put this genie back in the bottle. Most people look five to ten years down the road and imagine common industries and practices that will be obsolete. But if you look further, and think fifty to one hundred years down the road (or further) it’s easy to imagine AI making all of it obsolete. All of it, as in just about everything that has historically given purpose and meaning to the human experience. It’s almost too much to comprehend.

and we take the words of a Google exec as valid?

It's like a professional athlete telling everyone to drop out of high school because HE managed to become a multimillionaire with a 9th grade education. Glad it worked out for him.

As someone who teaches mathematical logic and computational complexity at a university, LLMs are *very* far from being able to do things that require creative thinking. Sure, they are replacing technical stuff that doesn't require stepping outside the box and is good with synthesizing large amounts of *already existing* data but not much else. I'd consult it if I wanted to, say, explore the best way to finance purchasing property in my area but not for anything that requires thinking outside the box. This is like the 19th century industrial revolution in the sense that most tedious, mechanical jobs are getting replaced with automation. In the department, we have a chatbot that answers straightforward inquiries from undergraduates but, even in that case, the departmental assistant who's the lowest-ranked staff member of the team, has to read it to make sure there are no hallucinations or inaccurate answers to less straightforward questions not already included in various student manuals.