Week 2 - the more things change...

Week two of classes is in the books, and the vibes have shifted as people settle in. Still lots of people wandering around campus but it's a lot quieter. Gone are the club tables and special events and noisy reunions of old friends after the summer.

So how is the experience any different for me, the time traveler? There are quite a few surface-level changes. Students jam onto the O Train, not the route 117 bus I took back in the day at Carleton. Almost everyone is staring at their phone when they aren't interacting with others (as I am while I take these notes). People isolate themselves further with the big, over-the-ears headphones.

In the classroom, like the room where I have two of my classes, back-row seats are a premium. Not because you can hide more effectively from the prof, but because that's where you can plug in your phone or laptop. Never had to deal with that before... 

And I swear these rooms have the same desks with the fold-up writing surfaces that were standard 40 years ago. I have no idea how I'm supposed to deal with my binder, the textbook, an anthology book and a laptop on one tiny surface.

But that's all on the surface. At a deeper level, there is much about undergraduate life that seems unchanged.

During a break between classes, I joined 3 classmates (all 20 or younger!) who were just killing time. And somethings never change - living in residence can be a social minefield. Money is always tight, but working while at school takes real discipline. The real money is in waiting tables - ideally serving alcohol to rich people. Student loans are a blessing today and a curse tomorrow. 

Maybe the most interesting part came when I asked them about technology, AI in particular. We are all in the class with the anti-AI professor - the one whose syllabus declares the class "will revert to paper and pen" and the "use of digital technologies is prohibited."

Well, so far, close to a dozen students have continued to have their laptops out during lectures and the prof is not saying anything. This may have to do with a shortage of textbooks at the bookstore - which has led to him posting readings on line. And maybe some students have accommodations. But so far, the ban on technology has been honored in the breach rather than the observance.

So I asked my classmates what they thought about the rules, and about AI in general. The consensus was profound skepticism, which made this old guy's heart happy. They don't like LLMs because of the way "it dumbs down everything." They are wary of the environmental impacts of data centers and the pace of investment. And as budding musical performers, they don't see a threat to their livelihoods, at least not yet. (No AI model is going to play the French horn...)

Something else that hasn't changed is the large amount of reading we all have to do for class. It's hard work and time-consuming. I can imagine, for some of my classmates, the temptation to get a LLM to summarize long texts will be immense. Let's see how this plays out over the next few weeks...