8085 microprocessor. It's a processor from the late 1970s. And it actually was a significant milestone in computing back then. It's been 50 years since then, so why is it a discussion here and now? Well, imagine someone telling you about landline phones today when Apple Vision Pro is the talk of the town. Yeah, you mostly wouldn't care.
That's exactly how I felt when I took such a course in my final year studying mechatronics engineering at the university. You may be thinking, "Well, you signed up for that kind of boring stuff." Uhh, yeah, but it boggled my mind that a totally redundant and obsolete microprocessor became the centre of a course in today's world, when there are NVIDIA's crazy AI chips to talk about.
In other words, I did not like attending that class. Even though I was the head of class, I cringed in my mind every time that I was in that laboratory. I understood the course, but I just wasn't getting why the school thought it was so important to be a course.
I mean, I do get that that concept provides an elementary understanding of how processors work. I am totally cool with that. However, wouldn't it have made sense to at least pay attention to what's happening today in the same course? And that's the problem with some of the education systems today—where I'm from at least.
Here's the catch. I could have sat in the library with my laptop for six to eight hours researching this concept and would have totally gotten the scope of it. Even better, I may even spend way less hours with GPT to the rescue. I just wonder if schools even realise how efficient studying with AI is today.
Literally, I could simply input a good prompt to an AI chatbot and get just about what I need [and more] from a series of outputs. And that goes for many of the courses I studied in school. But hold on a second. That kind of sounds like I'm implying that I should have just been taught by AI instead.
Now, hear me out a second. I do not think in the slightest way that the world should be run by AI or all that utopian/dystopian type of thinking. It's just another tool we should harness; only, unlike most other tools, it's in multiple fields today. I just think that rather than fight against it or put it above our intelligence, it should rather be augmented.
Just like how it is with calculators, where you still think out a math problem but make use of it to speed things up, a similar way is how we can look at AI, especially in schools. Not exactly sure how schools will manage to integrate AI in learning systems, but at least those boring courses wouldn't have to be so boring if they just pimped things up a bit with the technologies today.
Image(s) belong to the author