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Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by modeless on Friday February 03, 2023 @02:24AM (#34638167)
AI is going to make education way better and more affordable too. Personalized 1:1 tutoring in any subject for the cost of running a model.
Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by newqer on Friday February 03, 2023 @02:51AM (#34638400)
This would be such a godsend when I was in school. When there was no "click" with me and the teacher, I just zoned out and flunked the class. A teacher that is custom made is really a game changer.
Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by TuringTest on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:24AM (#34638658)
The problem is that AI will not provide 1:1 tutoring; mentoring will be a luxury limited to the elite classes. The large majority will get the education equivalent of personalized ads.

The true insight and guidance that a good mentor can provide, based on the specific needs of the student, is already rare in academia but still possible - everyone remembers that brilliant teacher that made you love a subject, by explaining it with insights you could never have imagined. This will be missing in AI teachers (though it opens a career for online mentors who monitor students' learning and supplement it in areas where it's lacking).

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by throwaway4aday on Friday February 03, 2023 @11:18AM (#34643150)
Yeah right, just like the elite are the only ones that have access to the courses from all the top universities, every book ever digitized, and software and hardware that allow you to operate a business out of your home now.
Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by TuringTest on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:01PM (#34646960)
You seem to have missed the part about having a qualified human mentor guiding you through so that content.

It will be hard to impossible to build career as a teacher with all that free content as a competitor, unless you're an extremely talented teacher who can sell your services to the wealthy.

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by throwaway4aday on Friday February 03, 2023 @04:04PM (#34647675)
Even now ChatGPT is pretty close to being able to tutor someone in a subject. You could build a product around it that would work off of a lesson plan, ask the student questions and determine if they answered correctly or not and be able to identify what part of their knowledge was missing and then create a lesson based around explaining that. It would need to have some capabilities that ChatGPT doesn't have by itself like storing the progress of the student, having some way of running a prepared prompt to kick off each lesson, and would probably require fine tuning the GPT model on examples of student-teacher interactions but all of that is well within the capabilities of a competent developer. I wouldn't be surprised if we see such a product come out in the next 12 months.

The great thing about a chatbot style LLM is that it can answer questions the student has about the lessons or assigned content. That's most of what a tutor is there for. It won't be as good at making modifications to the curriculum but you could work around that with some smart design e.g. evaluate the students response, if it's not great then expand on the lesson and ask more questions about the content to find out which parts the student doesn't understand then expand on those or provide additional resources as assignments, test and repeat.

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by TuringTest on Saturday February 04, 2023 @11:16AM (#34655515)
If you think mentoring can be replaced by answering a few questions and pointing out where they went wrong or what popular articles to read next, I'm afraid you don't know anything about what constitutes good mentoring. It's all about transmitting a point of view from life lessons learned from human experience, and an AI chatbot has nothing of that.

What you describe is the "learning equivalent to personalized ads" that I was talking about as the only option available to poor people.

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by throwaway4aday on Saturday February 04, 2023 @02:06PM (#34657095)
Fine, looks like you won't budge on your opinion. You don't have to use these things if you don't want to but I look forward to having an even better service than things like Khan Academy or Udemy which I already get great value from.

I wasn't saying the AI tutor would recommend articles by the way. If you were creating a learning platform you would have some custom produced videos and text lessons that you could use. There are also plenty of free or open source materials that could be used like open courses or public domain books. I don't know why you're stuck on "personalized ads".

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by moomoo11 on Friday February 03, 2023 @03:59AM (#34638904)
Maybe but honestly any time I think about education I get depressed. People in developed countries seem to be regressing.

People don’t read, don’t value deep knowledge or critical thinking, and shun higher education.

I’m sure someone will find something to say in response, but the truth is that outside our tech and $$$$ bubbles most people don’t value these things.

AI will just become a calculator. A simple tool that a few will use to build amazing complex things while the majority don’t even know what the ^ means.

As long as the next generations want to be rappers, social media influencers, or YouTubers, the more we are screwed long term. Growing up in the 90s everyone wanted to be an astronaut or a banker or a firefighter. Those are far more valuable professions than someone who is just used to sell ads or some shitty energy drink.

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by nloum on Friday February 03, 2023 @06:54AM (#34640000)
It took a thousand years for European barbarians recovering from an empire (Rome) to evolve civically into nations enough to colonize the world. Most developing nations were colonized by empires recently. Give them another thousand years and see what happens. The only thing I think they need is time and being left alone.
Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by pjc50 on Friday February 03, 2023 @07:53AM (#34640408)
The problem is that back about 1900 we still thought that "natural philosophy" would help us find meaning and purpose in the universe. Then we took the universe apart and failed to find it. Moreover, we're much more capable of destroying ourselves and others, almost to the extent of that being the default.

The 21st century has a quiet moral void gnawing at it.

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by throwaway4aday on Friday February 03, 2023 @11:10AM (#34643021)
I don't think there is any regression. There are certainly economic realities that have changed over time but the general distribution of people who have an interest in education or entrepreneurship probably hasn't changed. The 80/20 rule comes to mind here. Most people in the 1800s weren't starting railroads or running factories, they were doing the labour of building the railroad or working in a factory.

If AI does anything I think it will make lower skilled and disinterested people more capable by acting as a 1 on 1 and minute by minute guide. They may not seek this out themselves but I imagine quite a few jobs could be created where a worker is paired with an AI that walks them through the tasks step by step making them capable of operating at a much higher skill level than they would have before. At that point good manual dexterity and an ability to follow instructions would be all you need to perform a job, no training or education required.

I realize this can be a bit dystopic but it could also be eutopic if society is organized in such a way that everyone benefits from the productivity increases.

Re:Exclusive Q&A John Carmack’s ‘Different Path’ to Artifici... by Yoric on Friday February 03, 2023 @04:35AM (#34639150)
Retraining at the age of 50 or 60 because your entire sector has been replaced by AIs will be hard, though.