The cost of university in Canada is typically under $10k/year for tuition...and those are Canadian dollars.

I went throught the UK system and left secondary school (high school) having done linear algebra, second order ODEs and even very basic contour integration. UK standards have dropped since (they were dropping even when I was at school) but go look up maths and further maths A'level papers from the late 1980's and you can see what was covered. We did specialize to just 3-4 subjects in the last two years of school but the maths I learnt at university started with PDEs and vector calculus. Indeed, the maths O' level (taken two years before A' levels) that everyone going to univeristy for any subject contained basic calculus.

You'd be amazed at the academic heights people can reach if you make that the required standard.

I think it depends a lot on the subject. I do not see much evidence that the STEM fields have lost value much at all in top universities, at least in Canada but also from interactions with colleagues in the US and UK. Certainly the content is new (science has advanced considerably) and we are all dealing with lower educational standards in schools meaning incoming students are less prepared but ultimately, at least in physics but also in many other technical STEM subjects, I do not see any evidence that good universities have in any way become "scams". Indeed, many of us do still think that linear algebra is fun, so fun in fact that along with basic calculus it should really be taught more in schools rather than universities.

As a physics professor I'd say you do not need to predict anything - I think we are already there but for slightly different reasons. It's not that using AI to cheat has rendered such degrees worthless (although I agree that is happening too), it is more that AI itself has rendered such degrees useless because most of the skills you learn from a liberal arts degree vs. a STEM degree are those that AI is now replacing.

That's always a safe bet given technological progress but I do not see current "AI" technology as being much of a threat to STEM fields because ultimately our fields concentrate on understanding concepts and using that knowledge to do things that nobody has done before or apply those concepts to new situations. Current "AI" does not understand concepts at all, it is a predictive text engine who can parrot its training data to make it sound like it understands concepts but really does not and, because it relies on its training is not great at coming up with completely new things or dealing with new situations.

Actually I think that is a bad way to use AI.Having it write an outline that you then flesh out is backwards compared to what we call "AI" can do and while you may be able to get away with that in less technical subjects, it is much less likely to work in the sciences, particularly the hard sciences.

Current AI is nothing more than a text prediction algorithm. It does not understand concepts. This makes it a very poor choice to write outlines since it will miss details, get concepts wrong or even just hallucinate rubbish. Worse, knowing and assembling concepts together to make the outline is typically the high-level knowledge skill that writing reports/essays etc. is supposed to be testing so this arguably is cheating.

Where AI excels though is in copy editing. So the best way to use AI that I know of and that I tell my students to use is to write the first rough draft of a report and then use AI as your own personal copy-editor to edit for clarity and style. You still have to check that it has not done something stupid but, since it is just a predictive text engine that knows which words sound good together, if you give it the concepts and knowledge in text you wrote it is very good at re-expressing them better than you did.

However, the real effect of AI so far has been that far more weight is now put on assessment under exam conditions where you cannot use AI. So I do not know about college, but I am very confident that you can't cheat yourself through a subject like physics at university with AI but you could use AI to cheat yourself out of a degree.

It's impoosible to answer that accurately without knowing which beach you are referring to. However, you should be aware that coasts are affected by more that just sea level rises. In some places land is rising and in others it is sinking which can either increase or entirely offset any effect of sea level rise. Then there is erosion vs. deposition: come coast is being heavily eroded while elsewhere, like deltas, material is being deposited. Also steeper beaches will see far less effect than beaches with very shallow slopes where a small change in sea level vs. the land corresponds to a large horizontal displacement. So with no details it is impossible to explain why a beach may seem unchanged because there are many reasons why that may be the case.

Equally simply seeing a beach get more and more inundated does not necessarily mean that sea levels are rising either. However, there is little reason to doubt sea level rises though. We know the globe is warming, we know water expands with increasing temperature once it is above a few degrees above zero and we can measure the rise directly itself. So the physics is extremely well understood: we know exactly why this is happening and we can measure it happening too using satellites to measure changes in sea levels over large areas.

I suspect it was exactly what also drove so many Brits to vote for Brexit - the previous winner of "biggest own goal" a country has scored. It was not that they voted for the crazy stuff it was that they were voting against the alternative. If people strongly reject the platform you are putting forward and believe the alternative platform looks better, or at least less bad, they may well be inclined to overlook the red flags or assume that they will not be as bad as they are.

I mean let's be honest here - how many Canadians thought Trump would be an existential threat to us and would actually consider annexing us if elected? Given that, I suspect that many Americans who voted for him did not think Trump 2.0 would be as utterly insane and dangerous as he has turned out to be.

No, but I do remember the great beer bottle fiasco of 1996. My colleagues on LEP were not happy because they lost a lot of beam time.

I'm not the one arguing that electronic computers have not replaced any low level jobs...or as you claim you wanted to write...only a few specialities. If you had any sense, let alone common sense, you'd know how daft that statement is. I mean the list is huge: in addition to human computers and secretaries they have replaced travel agents, switchboard operators, bank tellers, cashiers and so on.

At this point either you are just trolling or frankly you are only a few steps away from joining the flat earthers.

Making more things per person than was possible before. For example, in the past you might have had say 10 people doing spot welds on car bodies making 100 cars/day. Today you can have those same 10 people monitoring and maintaining 100 robots making 1,000 cars/day.

Sorry but since mindreading is not yet possible I can only read what you wrote and, even this attempt to justify it frnkly fails. Computers have replaced millions of jobs worldwide and many of those were mental e.g. there are far, far fewer secretaries now than there were due to computers replacing them. Computers regularly monitor and oversee a huge variety of industrial processes reducing the number of people who would otherwise be doing that etc. Also the number of human computers was not as small as you suggest because those who did need them needed a lot of them.

Trying to claim that low-level mental work has never been automated is just stupid: computers have been doing that for year. What is different now is that higher-level professional and low-level creative jobs are starting to be replaced. If you'd tried to argue that you might have had a point.

If that is the really case then the medical profession have clearly defined the range that counts as typical far too narrowly and are treating what is actually a perfectly typical human as somehow "divergent" which leads to wasting medical resources.

However, I suspect your later reason is correct: people cannot correctly self-diagnose themselves. My brother was offically diagnosed with dyslexia when he was a kid and the doctor who made the diagnosis told my parents that it was uncommon for her to find someone who was really dyslexic. Apparently most of the kids she saw were not dyslexic, they were just not very bright.

That happens all the time when dealing with anti-matter in particle physics labs. However, antimatter is so hard to make that the energy released is not even enough to make a decent cup of tea and threatening someone with luke warm tea sounds more like the plot of an episode of Downton Abbey than a techno-military-thriller.

It was very much low level - or at least as low a level as mental work can get. Rather than algebra they were used for numerical calculations. Pay was minimal and they were not allowed to deviate at all from the prescribed method.

Really? Look up where we got the name "computer" comes from. There used to be teams of people called computers hired to do calculations for companies until all of that was automated by electronic computers.

The view that I think most of us follow today, for want of a better term, a modified Copenhagen. Nobody bothers with observers, instead we care about interactions. So a quantum system can be in a state that can provide two (or more) outcomes when interacted with in a particular manner until that interaction happens after which is it in one of those possible states. Whether someone sees this happen or not is irrelevant, what matters is whether the interaction happens.