Tablet use in classrooms is bad enough. I want my kid to be able to focus throughout his life, not be a phone zombie.

/s

The "kids these days" trope is as old as time, and its no more true this time around.

That's why religions and the military prefer young recruits.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tec...

What does “technical literacy” mean?

I think it might be more helpful to look at this as information literacy, or at least roughly speaking a higher degree of “Internet smarts”.

Scanners and copiers are in that weird phase of product life where they’ve been mostly eliminated as core computing needs at home, but still see widespread business use since business will always be the long tail on fully digitizing.

I think it’d be prudent to be specific, because for whatever degree of literacy or smarts or whatever you call it is true about teens in the information environment, the technology through which they experience that environment inches closer and closer to pure magic from a layman’s perspective.

We now have a whole generation of teenagers that grew up with iPhones and I have seen exceptionally poor average technical ability.

When we were coming up you had to install modem drivers to get online.

I don’t think I can imagine anything more delusional than a parent, handing their kid an iPad so they will go away and thinking that they’re also preparing this kid for a career in computers.

I'm struggling to square that with teens forming long lines to buy an overpriced energy drink promoted by a couple of YouTubers and scalpers successfully getting over £100 for bottles.

I'm sure some of them are better at installing adblock software than their parents, are harder to convert for ecommmerce because they need to borrow their parents' credit card and may be immune to online ads that are targeted at people very unlike them, but the idea that this generation is the first one immune to advertising and use Tiktok despite it's engagement metric hacking and follow influencers despite them being product shills is no more true than the "kids these days" meme.

They might be aware of privacy, and less into buying random crap(Although that might be because they spend their money on the food instead of plastic junk, which harms your body AND your wallet), some reason the tech skills seem to be getting left behind.

The trendy thing now seems to be going back to vintage stuff.

I'm almost a bit jealous, if their lives are so amazing that whatever they're doing somehow seems better than focusing 100% on STEM, which was like, the ultimate life goal for a decade.

This. is. total. horseshit.

I guarantee that you could randomly sample 1,000 people across America age 42-48 and 1,000 people age 15-21, put them in front of a multifuction machine (printer / scanner / copier) and the 15-21 year olds wouldn't have a fucking clue. Hell, Bloomberg ran an article about it.

And the reason this is important is because iOS and Android and tablets don't run the business world - laptops, MFPs, and Windows does.

That was about one year after the computer rooms got rid of their Acorn RISC OS machines.

That era of Mac OS may well be dead and gone, but so is that era of Windows.

So, don't worry, the phones and tablets aren't what's going to make your kids into attention addled zombies — neither will the AR glasses, though I'm not so confident about the inevitable brain implants let alone the equally inevitable DIY gene engineered pseudo-Ophiocordyceps.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem

For kids that are curious and want to learn - access to something like gpt-4 is amazing. All I had were guides like Eric S. Raymond's how to be a hacker that I had stumbled onto while trying to learn. It was so much harder to learn programming back then if you didn't know where to start and nobody around you knew about it.

With gpt-4 you can just ask and get examples.

My little brother is doing some form of machine learning in grad school currently and when I saw him last around when ChatGPT was starting to become a mainstream talking point we discussed a lot about how immediately going to something that can answer a question (e.g. how do i write code that does X) is tempting but, can be a bit dangerous when we offload our own ability to reason through something to an external entity.

Shouldn't we be fostering thinking patterns that allow for creativity and innovation when given very little, versus fostering a sense of "oh I can always get the right answer to a question whenever I need it. So why bother with building a general mental problem solving framework for myself"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog...

Does anyone care that the head of the art history department did his phd on Picasso, taught two full semester courses on him and I know more about Picasso’s life than probably 99.9% of the general population?

Doubtful…

But I do know things that never made it into the search engines (I’ve looked) and this knowledge is locked up in a (probably) retired professor and the few percent of students who actually listened to his lectures twenty-something years ago.

Now everyone assumes that if it isn’t in google it doesn’t exist and have very little idea how to find information outside of what’s contained in its “record of all things”.

Depends on what the difficulty is. I remember when I started to learn programming back in 1991, I was learning from books. These books were very expensive and I could only afford a few of them. I didn't have access to a library because I wasn't in any school or university. I was a musician with a side job at a theatre box office.

My main problem was that many of the explanations and examples in my programming books left some questions unanswered. It was even worse with maths, which I also tried to learn at the time. I got stuck a lot. If I'd had access to something like stackoverflow or Google, I could have progressed much much faster.

I do think that getting stuck and being forced to figure something out the hard way is sometimes useful. But more often than not I didn't get stuck because the material was actually difficult or because I was solving difficult problems. I got stuck because the one and only explanation available to me was imprecise or incomplete. All I needed was the same thing explained with slightly different words to clear up my misunderstandings.

On the whole I think learning these things today is immeasurably more productive. People are a lot less dependent on luck or money. You don't need to be one of the lucky few who has access to good teachers. You don't have to buy expensive books. Everyone has access to excellent online tutorials, documentation, source code and to thousands of competent professionals willing to help for free. It's absolute heaven. Back then it was hell.

Think about most of the stuff you have really learnt over the course of your life, was it from sitting in a classroom with information being spoon-fed to you, from reading a Wikipedia article?

Or was it because you had to search hard for the information, try and fail before you succeeded?

My bet is that your learning comes from the lather not the former.

Good teachers that I have had would point you in a direction and then give guidance or even question you instead of just telling you the answer.

It’s doing the problem set, but also being able to check the key. Basically a private tutor or TA available at all times.

Without that you can’t get a tight feedback loop.

The most effective use of these systems will not be copying the answer, it’ll be trying to do it and then asking when stuck.

It is absolutely not true for most people. Most people need a human guide to show them the way. I am living this now with my two kids, both of whom need instruction (and also help from mom and dad).

Caveat, of course, this is an extreme power tool vis a vis human development, and as such, can do just as much harm as good depending on it's use. This is why it's so damn important that we keep this stuff open source - if it's behind walled gardens, you end up with _actual, real shadowy cabals effortlessly manipulating all of everybody_, a thing that you may or may not be convinced exists already but guaranteed under those circumstances.

Truth of the matter is that many teachers know the curriculum, but if you ask them a basic question, they won't answer the question with nearly the same depth for example Feynman[1] would have. Now educators with both the ability and depth of knowledge of Feynman is clearly a very limited resource. LLMs may just change that since they can be given the depth with relative ease, the rest of the owl is making them good educators as well.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36GT2zI8lVA

https://blog.khanacademy.org/harnessing-ai-so-that-all-stude...

It's expensive, it's not prohibitive unless you're not willing to increase education funding at all. Which implies that what we're spending now "should be enough." I don't think we've ever done the basic homework here.

54.5 million school aged children in the US. Average $50,000/yr tutor salary. Total cost per year would be 2.7 trillion.

National Defense is 767 billion. Education is already 677 billion. Net interest is 475 billion. We're already more than half way there, inside of a nation with $25 trillion GDP.

I fail to see anything "prohibitive" about this.

I hate to have to say this but GDP isn’t the absolute upper limit for government spending. I know they tell you that every dollar of government spending is equal to $2 of increased GDP (or some equal bullshit) but that doesn’t mean GDP is an open checkbook for the government to drive the economy. At some point someone has to generate actual value for them to appropriate for their political ends.

This is the only time I’ve ever wanted the AI to generate a reply for me but, alas, that’s not in my current skill set.

Brazil and Zimbabwe found this out the hard way, but a lot of people really don't understand how times can be hard when the numbers keep going up because they neglect to consider inflation and the government has an interest in managing down the real numbers and mumbling something about "greed" while they enact policies that effectively create huge, regressive taxes.

What happens if they have two or more children? What if they want other jobs? What real bearing does this have on the fundamental problem?

> I hate to have to say this but GDP isn’t the absolute upper limit for government spending.

I didn't suggest it was. I'm showing that if you want to have high value education, it would become about 10% of the total economy. Does that seem "prohibitive" to you?

> At some point someone has to generate actual value for them to appropriate for their political ends.

And educating children has no value?

> This is the only time I’ve ever wanted the AI to generate a reply for me but, alas, that’s not in my current skill set.

Well, some educations have no value, I guess.

Obviously, as a cost cutting measure, we will pay $50k per child to each of the parents.

> What real bearing does this have on the fundamental problem?

I don’t actually understand what the problem is we’re trying to solve here, honestly.

Give them all an AI and call it a day.

What is your reasoning for believing this would improve outcomes?

> I don’t actually understand what the problem is we’re trying to solve here, honestly.

Really? We spend a lot on education. Our outcomes are demonstrably sub-optimal. There's no correlation between amount spent in a classroom and classroom outcomes. There's obviously a large flaw in the entire model.

> Give them all an AI and call it a day.

Well.. when we invent an actual AI and not some hallucinatory language model, let me know, until then, you're obviously not serious or willing to play fast and loose with something important.

Hard to believe we're struggling to get this right.

I’m more optimistic about tablets and AI, but the word that resonates with me the most here is “experimenting”. I don’t think there’s a guise, eg using learning as an excuse, but I do think that we have to be careful with how we present tech to children, even if it is with an altruistic goal.

So if we shouldn’t experiment on students, how will we figure out how to make these new technologies improve student learning?

My in-laws and parents already are enthusiastic Youtube consumers, mainly because in a very consumable way - they can hear/see how to [Fill in the Blank]. Stuff like changing out the washer in their faucet and feeling confident enough to try to do it themselves with the Youtube video as their crutch/sherpa was a game-changer for them. Otherwise, it falls back to paying $$$ (if you can find someone) to do it for you ... or lean on the generosity of a knowledgeable friend/family member (when they have time to give). Self-empowerment is their preferred choice in terms of shortest time to action at the least cost.

To me, AI Tutors seem aligned with consumability (natural language engagement) and can also provide some confidence to older populations to better "understand" and maybe "do". My dad felt intimidated by Windows because the error and information dialogues were so intimidating in technical speak and worse, they were one-way communicators. The net vibe resulting was:

"Windows is yelling at me that I'm doing something wrong, but I can't ask it a follow-up question to get more context on why or to fill in a hole in knowledge that I have about what TCP is/means. How can I proceed without making things worse". BTW, this is the same frustration people feel with automated customer service flows that aren't modeled to handle a broad enough range of customer inquiries. This next rev of AI engagement has the potential to make this two-way again. And I'll happily be out of a job as resident family tech expert or perhaps just evolving into the AI tutor model trainer for my loved ones.

Tanks for granting old bachelors a moment of yelling "then don't have any!" at cloud.

History suggests that they will always find a way, perhaps not all of them but at least as a whole, as a generation, but are we really exaggerating of we claim that it's worse than it used to be? Every bad turn that had ever happened before has at some point been unprecedented and would have been clearly ruled out before by apppeals to "pessimists are always predicting worse than what actually happens"

Everyone has to learn the lesson for themselves. I can prepare them for it as best I can, however. So I don't really worry about this insomuch as lament the cultural fetish for "more tech = better."

> Every bad turn that had ever happened before has at some point been unprecedented and would have been clearly ruled out before by apppeals to "pessimists are always predicting worse than what actually happens"

I mull over this frequently.

My objection stems from constant tablet use/availability during school hours. Being a tablet zombie in 4th grade is not healthy even if you're only using learning apps. I'd much prefer kids to binge tablets at home for 3 hours after school occasionally than have it at hand 8 hours a day, everyday. If tablets were something that were occasionally trotted out at school for specific tasks: no problem. Assigning kids tablets and making them an integral part of the teaching workflow really bothers me.

This is part of a larger strategy of mine: controlled exposure to high-stimuli things alongside building a full enough life to try to avoid addiction. My kids will eventually play video games (probably not trashy mobile games), use tablets, watch TV (they already do) and eventually, correspond with AI. (I am hoping social media dies a fiery death before they get old enough to think it is actually important.)

Obviously, these are all plans in the abstract. All we can do is give our kids the cognitive tools to see how technology use affects their life.

Isn't that also true of every good turn though?

my high school age kid is able to leverage AI in a way that is augmenting rather than replacing her native intelligence, and accelerating her own learning and integration.

I find these tools are not unlike "smart drugs"—a necessary aid to some, a destructive crutch for others, and performance enhancement for a subset of the already competitive seeking advantage.

Gattaca approaches from an unexpected direction...

(I have joked that encouraging use of AI but forbidding social media, feels not unlike championing psychedelics while decrying stimulants and opioids.)

Now, kids in school are obviously doing educational stuff on their tablets so I see the fallacy in this line of thought. Idk. I feel like staring at a book is better, but what do I know? Maybe the increased engagement from a tablet is worth the downsides?

we're still in the early days of LLMs, this is like making a statement on the potential of social networks in the Usenet era. My guess is we'll see specialized tools of all kinds with LLMs integrated in some fashion, it won't be just giving a kid access to a general LLM model

there are already companies that are able to eliminate LLM hallucinations by giving it access to ground truth facts it needs to conform its answers to. Similar things will be done for education type stuff and other use cases as well

FWIW, we didn't try to use Usenet (or social media) to replace teachers. Still don't today.

Once we have consumer level AR, our personal AI could take 'physical' (really just visual) form that follows us around.

These days, though, I'm beginning to wonder....

A better comparison would be literally any sci-fi book where everyone has a personal AI. Spider Robinson's Stardancer trilogy is the first one that comes to mind.

Kids being kids are going to try really hard to get them to go off the rails.

Nope:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children

Kids that want to learn or have parents that enforce standards still excel. There are things a school can do to also enforce standards, but those things are not being done. The opposite appears to be happening.

So instead of going after the things we know work—either because it's outside the scope of what a school can address, or because it's far more expensive than we're ever going to pay—what money we do spend just chases a bunch of unproven and unlikely-to-succeed garbage, basically.

Schools are like the patient who needs a heart transplant, but can only afford healing crystals.

Yep, but increasing the number of teachers 2-3x is indeed politically impossible. Guessing that'd mean like 30-60% higher spending on education (you'd also have to increase wages to attract enough qualified workers, in addition to having way more teachers on payroll, and it'd be a years-long process), which ain't happening.

I'm imagining the infinite amount of weird model tuning that'd be necessary to ensure only some students learn about white flight depending on what state, county, or school district they're in.

Because it's definitely not easier with 2 lines of code. Not at all.

I mean, you could say that about human teachers too. I don't think they need to be perfect to be useful. In the end, as Peter Thiel opined in his book, the future is humans and robots working together on solving bigger and bigger problems. A teacher working with AIs that tutor kids and then managing that relationship and the relationship with the parents, etc. while also being the adult role model that kids will always need will remain.

Sounds just like humans to me.

Primary school, some people showed up to explain blood donation, showed and told us they were putting a bag of fake blood up the teacher's sleeve and would take from that rather than from our actual teacher, and yet when the fake blood went into the collection thingie the kid next to me screamed "they're killing her!"

Same school, show-and-tell, astronomy textbook showing the circular orbit of a moon at two different points of the parent planet's orbit around the star. "This is a picture of a mouse".

Secondary school. Main teacher and replacement teacher cover the same passage of a sort story, one interpreting the word "patronised" as in "patron" the other as in talking down to people whose intelligence you underestimate.

A-levels. Philosophy. What even is knowledge anyway? Tripartite definition. Example given was "shaggy" dog, one of the other students stifles a laugh at the double entendre.

But to your core point:

> the technology we bring in to the classroom has to be well understood and directed in order to be effective

Yes, absolutely.

But it's deeper than that. When this tech is flawless, we will have to ask ourselves: "What is school for?"

After all, being flawless in this context means it already knows all that can be taught, so why not just have it do the work related to those things instead of putting humans through ever longer school years so they can do the same things less well?

This isn't the first time technology has forced such questions; my generation never had to learn how to starch clothes, shoe horses, look after a tinder box, or send and receive Morse code.

If an AI is wrong about one thing you'll have the same bias over entire generations, once a full generation is skipped it's very hard to go back

That's why we need diversity, political pluralism, &c. because not many things are inherently "true", it's all about nuance, personal perception, mitigation, ...

> "What is school for?"

Socialisation, experiencing new things, general culture, deciding where you want to go in life, &c. Many things you learn in school aren't used for jobs but for day to day life and for the well being of society

If we take that out and replace it by "kids in front of screens" we're in for a massive and quick change with potential deep and long lasting effects.

By the way keep in mind a shit ton of jobs aren't even close to being automatised, and a shit ton of jobs aren't done by people sitting in front of screens

Sounds like intellectual monoculture? If so, I absolutely agree. Already a problem with respect to many thinking it's unpatriotic to suggest their country is anything other than "the good guys", or blasphemous to ask if their religion is anything less than the actual truth of the divine, and AI can extend that to every single topic.

(Oh hey, another possible Great Filter for the Fermi paradox).

> Socialisation, experiencing new things, general culture, deciding where you want to go in life, &c. Many things you learn in school aren't used for jobs but for day to day life and for the well being of society

Do we need schools for that, or will kids learn the same by messing around in multiplayer Minecraft or whatever the zeitgeist is?

> If we take that out and replace it by "kids in front of screens" we're in for a massive and quick change with potential deep and long lasting effects.

Sure, but that's going to happen regardless. Too many other things are changing also.

So why make it worse? Why gives kids tablets for things we know don't need tablets, and where a device is more of a distraction?

Shiny new technology is great for distracting from a failure to perform basic childcare like keeping children physically safe so they can learn. And then it's a rhetorical weapon "We can't listen to parents, they don't even want their children to have state of the art equipment!"

Second, the parents are mostly buying the tablets anyway.

Thirdly, about this:

> distracting from a failure to perform basic childcare like keeping children physically safe so they can learn

Pretty much the one kind of safety I can guarantee kids have when using a computer is their physically safety.

And learn what, exactly, given the hypothetical scenario you're replying to here is that the only thing left to learn is being sociable which they can ultimately do best by experiencing whatever medium they will be sociable in as adults, and for all other learning you're just being a nerd like me who learns for the fun of it.

> Pretty much the one kind of safety I can guarantee kids have when using a computer is their physically safety.

I think you're remembering computer lab, or something, where there was a proctor because computers were expensive. Now schools won't expel anyone they label troubled, no matter how much they trouble other students, and they won't protect anyone or let them protect themselves.

> the only thing left to learn is being sociable which they can ultimately do best by experiencing whatever medium they will be sociable in as adults

I don't see social media being so complex that they need all the years of practice to keep up, but I do see forming deep relationships as being essential and social media doesn't do anything to help with that. They'll get there when they do, no worse for not having partaken.

Funny, I'm remembering a summer holiday job 20 years ago, working on a HVAC production line. One of the others there bought a plasma TV for his infant.

It's not all about what teachers are pushing.

Heck, from what I've heard the teachers don't like the tech any more than you do.

> I think you're remembering computer lab, or something, where there was a proctor because computers were expensive. Now schools won't expel anyone they label troubled, no matter how much they trouble other students, and they won't protect anyone or let them protect themselves.

I have literally no idea what this is supposed to be about. Computers themselves are not part of any of the things you just said are bad.

And as I'm asking if the schools are even going to still be relevant, expulsions would carry as little meaning as being banned from owning horses does today.

> I don't see social media being so complex that they need all the years of practice to keep up, but I do see forming deep relationships as being essential and social media doesn't do anything to help with that. They'll get there when they do, no worse for not having partaken.

I didn't specifically say social media, I said "medium they will be sociable in as adults". That might be the traditional forums of the 2005 interwebs style; or soc med; or group chat apps like IRC, Slack, MS Teams as various of my employers have had us using; or video group chats like many of us got used to during the pandemic; or VR environments, be they games like WoW or roleplay environment like Furcadia or Second Life or VRChat, or "serious" metaverse things like whatever it is FB is trying to do.

It can also be going to parks and gyms, art galleries and graffiti walls, cafés and nightclubs. How much of that is part of school anyway?

But even for text, what counts as polite, friendly, professional, intelligent, serious, or severe is absolutely a moving target, so…

that means knowin when they need to be all like yo and emoji wif spellin' that confuses ol fogies like me and missin all the full stops coz that be rude yo yo lol

And of course the fact that such cultural idioms shift arbitrarily and I've stopped caring means that actual real young people will cringe as much when reading that last paragraph as I did when writing it, in exactly the same way I told my mum to stop trying to be hip and with it back in the late 90s.

The school district found the ones who'd push it. If teachers aren't fond of this I hope they fight it themselves.

> It's not all about what teachers are pushing.

Sure, I bought my child a laptop. But I spent time teaching computer skills under the guise of game design, etc, and it wasn't for classwork but for everything else. It wasn't a one-size-fits-nobody cash grab.

> I'm asking if the schools are even going to still be relevant, expulsions would carry as little meaning as being banned from owning horses does today.

I don't care if the violent kid thinks he wins, as long as he's not allowed to spend more time with the non-violent kids. His failure isn't my problem, my kids happiness and success is.

> what counts as polite, friendly, professional, intelligent, serious, or severe is absolutely a moving target,

Not so much, I think, that it needs practice over the years. I've seen people pick up social media with no practice whatsoever and right away seem to fit right in.

> I have literally no idea what this is supposed to be about. Computers themselves are not part of any of the things you just said are bad.

Yeah, it seemed to be a bit of an unguided post. I'm not sure if you don't like that I don't like excess tech in schools, or what. I don't think computers are bad, I think teachers and schools pushing them uselessly is bad.

Whichever side or instance you care to consider, think of the capabilities of someone hell bent for leather on defining what is, or is not, included in an educational curriculum, at the primary, secondary, post-secondary, graduate, or professional degree level, and their ability to influence, overtly or covertly, through persuasion or coercion, what that is.

Even under present conditions of proscribed curricula and textbooks, individual instructors, libraries, librarians, and others can go against some imposed dogma to some extent. A world in which only a small handful of AI originators provide the direct interfact between each student and their education is a grim prospect.

I've noted several commentators in recent months discussion a similar situation in terms of popular culture and entertainment, most notably the influence China now exerts over cinema and sport. The notion that AI will continue to be largely a product of Silicon Valley, and subject to US or even generally Western influence, may not be a valid one.

(I don't think that fundamentally changes any of your actual arguments here, it just feels like we're talking about slightly different aspects of how this can go wrong).

You don't read facial expressions, body language, use your body, exchange bacteria/viruses, have body contact, &c. in minecraft

You can't go against hundred millions years of evolution and expect minecraft to replace real life. (see loneliness epidemic, obesity epidemic, depression epidemic), we're smartish apes, not AIs or computers. We're not designed to seat all day, we're not design to interacts with screens

If you can entirely replace education you don't need _school_ per day but you need long term group socialization with people who have different and similar opinions and backgrounds, physical activity, mental entertainment and challenges

The end goal is to live in healthy and collaborative societies, not to be mienscraft basement dwellers

I mean, VRChat can do the facial expressions, video games don't prevent exercise, and there's plenty of ways to share germs if you find vaccines too clinical and high-tech.

And of course, I'm currently using my glowing rectangle to group socialise with with people who have different and similar opinions and backgrounds, for example yourself.

Only for very specific (and IMO useless) definitions of the word "know". Does it matter if the thing a submarine does is called "swimming" or not?

In any practical sense, even obsolete ancestors of this model definitely "know" more French than I learned in 5 years of mandatory school lessons.

That said, regardless of the definition of the word "know"…

> The youth who are critical of capitalism certainly have turned a wary eye on the school system -- after all primary education has been designed to create money makers for corporations.

I don't know what you're talking about here.

The soviet bloc countries were very proud of their schooling system, rightly or wrongly; and conversely corporations don't really get much out of primary education, which is often described as being essentially no better than daycare for slightly older kids.

Alignment failure is still a problem when it's organic brains doing it, regard of what anyone tries to hand-wave with the cliché "common sense". :)

I love when tech people reveal that they have no idea how other humans act and behave.

A middle aged woman who said I had to be lying about being vegetarian because she couldn't believe it was possible for humans.

A coworker who insisted it was impossible to speed up some code in a daily standup, for me to come back to on the next stand up and announce I had sped it up from 15 minutes to 0.2 seconds.

Basically every time I hear the cliché "common sense", the claim being made is somewhere between totally wrong or just misleading in various situations.

My mum was a firm believer in homeopathy, Bach flower remedies, magic of crystals, called herself a Catholic, and had a statue of (IIRC) Vishnu with her collection of books on how to tell your fortune with viking rune stones.

I was exactly the right age for Wakefield's claims about the MMR vaccine to convince me not to get it, and I only got around to doing the sensible thing several years after he was stuck off the UK medical register and (if I understand right) downgraded from Doctor to Mr.

Compare what the British public as a whole say about Boris Johnson with what specifically the members of the Conservative Party say about him.

One of my friends in middle school was completely convinced that all gay men hospitalised each other from every sexual act.

I vastly overestimated my German language skills when I first got here, and my self-estimate of my skill level hasn't changed no matter how much better I get.

My brother was convinced that Captain America was the first MCU film to be released.

My father took several years to realise Google search results had a scroll bar and it wasn't just the top 3 that fitted onto his 640x480 screen. (He became a software developer almost as early as was possible, so that wasn't merely a case "old person can't use computer", unlike my gran who held the mouse at 90 degrees and expected it to do move as if she hadn't).

Every exam question I ever get wrong, every personality I misjudge, every scam I fall for, every troll I am baited by…

I know the LLMs aren't human, but that specific flaw of "can be wrong without realising it, can be convinced by nonsense"? That's human.

Hehe, had to re-read this twice because it hits a little close to home. I ditched maths for Iranian Studies and ended up studying Avesta. I work in tech, but still remember Ashem Vohu by heart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashem_Vohu

Avestan (IIRC, my memory is fuzzy) had some weird similarities to my native language—Polish. Occasionally I'd stumble upon a phrase I could actually understand.

Random example I just remembered: "both ears" (again IIRC) sounded like uba ushi /uba uši/ (uba being 2 in dual, ushi meaning ears). Polish used to have dual number, but now retained it mostly for some body parts ( oba == 2). Ears in PL is uszy /ushee/. You'd sound a bit weird saying saying "oba uszy" in Polish, but people would understand you.

Nowadays I just enjoy the fact that Ashem Vohu is one of the oldest phrases I can utter in its original language. (I'm really good at learning and forgetting languages it seems.)

Idk about teaching kids. At adult, or near adult levels... I think these programs may very quickly be a major learning technology. It's good, sometimes, to have optimism. Optimism, even naive optimism, is often conducive to inventing things.

The guardrail should be in avoiding utopic ideas, like designing things for schoolchildren in remote places^. It's too abstract. Too aloof to be a testbed. TED talking windbags have had their day.

That still leaves plenty of room. A program that can produce exercises and lessons on the fly might be very useful. Thinking big is helpful to discovering what that use is.

The Hegelian pendulum of 2023 is hype driven. Hype, anti-hype. Fanboys. Haters. Ping pong.

The disillusionment of digital utopians, as they watched their creations serve Zuck, SBF, Thiel... dropping out in a cloud of ominous pessimism is no solution either.

I concur and I think in terms of children the last thing they need is more (any) technology. They need a solid foundation rooted in human interaction so that they can then leverage these potentially potent tools in effective ways later.

I find it worrying that I see so many techies not understanding this. Especially, because many bigger players in the area benefit from this lack of knowledge. This means that people who don't have time to procrastinate on the orange website are even less likely to understand the implications.

LLMs are excellent plausible bullshit generators, which has many uses, but being factually correct is not their strength. The issue is that even if the factual mistakes are rare, they're really hard to spot. I'm looking for a good, terse, catchy metaphor I could use to explain that to some of my family members and friends.

> We can spend billions on deploying AI all over Africa, or we pay for [...]

Looking back at the conversations I had with founders even I pre ChatGPT bonanza, I'm 100% sure someone's already pitching that idea to someone. I wouldn't be surprised if that conversation started in a marketing department of an ad tech business.

I struggle to see how even the current GPT-4 is any worse than your average human.

How this is dismissed because it’s not 100% perfect (might at add, “yet”) is beyond me.

Now, people seem to miss or ignore that fact, and I think is a very risky path.

I'd say that ca. 8/10 founders who pitched to me an idea leveraging LLMs completely missed that limitation. An example would be something like using LLMs as a replacement for therapy.

> How this is dismissed because it’s not 100% perfect (might at add, “yet”) is beyond me.

Again, I'm not dismissing them, but the current tech behind GPT or LLaMA has no concept of "correctness". These models don't understand what they're saying and this is not a trivial issue to fix.

> I struggle to see how even the current GPT-4 is any worse than your average human.

Where, how, and what do you mean by worse? I'm pretty sure there are cases where I'd agree with you, but this is a very broad statement.

In addition to techies believing LLMs ar emore than bullshit generators they also appear to think humans are incredibly simple machines.

I'm so glad the tech industry is given so much money and power over the rest of us without actually being forced to understand us.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34850890

To me the bigger question is how far can we take them? Ie i get that they just pick likely next words. They're autocomplete on steroids. Yet that simple primitive is shockingly good. Way, way way beyond that i would have predicted is possible for an "autocomplete".

So where is the limit of this autocomplete? Would it be possible to eliminate ~90% of the current errors? Fake math, but would that put us at a more correct version than students typically graduate with? If so yea, it can be wrong at times - but assuming as don't abandon standardized testing/etc, it could still be an amazing tool for interactively learning something.

My hope is that even if it never goes beyond being an autocomplete; if we can improve the training dataset, help it not conflict with itself, etc - that maybe the autocomplete will be insanely useful.

They aren't errors. When the machine generates the text: "Next you'll tell me 2 + 2 = 5" there isn't an error in math, because no math was attempted. It's a success in predictable wording structure.

In fact, that example alone is a super success since we english speaking humans can get a broader context from that statement: You're going to tell me something nonsensical.

I don't get how you say the first part of your comment and then follow up with completely misunderstanding in the second half. Is GPT that enthralling to our brains?

Which is the meat of what we're discussing, right? We steer the auto completion into favorable results. We fine tune how it predicts. All of this is with the goal of a higher success rate and lower failure rate given some conditions.

No?

Both "2 + 2 = 4" and "2 + 2 = 5" are correct statements following the words "I don't think you understand [token]". There are no errors to fix.

Likewise, i cranked the Temp up for experimentation, and it produced gibberish. The randomizing aspect of which token is chosen after the next was so heavy handed that it literally couldn't even create words. This wouldn't be considered "good" by most people, would it? Would it for you? Technically it's one token after the next, but it's objectively worse at auto-completion than my phone's keyboard.

My point is i think you can have both. Dumb autocomplete, but trained well enough that it's useful. That it doesn't try to say Obama is a Cat. Or that 2+2=5. Yes, there will be edge cases where the weights produce odd output - but that's the entire goal of the LLM research, right? To see how far we can steer a dumb autocomplete into usefulness.

If you're argument is that "that gibberish output is perfect, no errors found" because the program technically ran, and the weights worked.. well, i've got no reply. I can only assume you're referring to the foundational LLM, and i'm referring to the training moreso - a more holistic sense of "is the program working". But if you consider the gibberish working, then frankly most bad programs (crashing/etc) would be "working" - right? Because they're doing exactly what they're programmed to.

Working, or lack of errors, seem to be a semantic, human interpretation. But i'm quite in the weeds, heh.

You could just read the research about LLMs before saying stuff like this.

You can't even seem to grasp that "Obama is a cat" as a statement isn't gibberish. I'm not even trying to convince you that these programs are perfect, I'm just trying to make sure that you understand that these aren't categorical errors and the things you consider successes aren't even happening.

Yea, we're just talking past each other. I believe i understand what you're saying. I on the otherhand, am describing errors in UX.

Your point seems pedantic, tbh. Hopefully by now i've expressed something in the way of convincing you that: for the little i do "know" about these, admittedly not much, it is that they're nothing but pattern predictors. Token outputs based on token inputs. No intelligence. Yet you spend repeated replies which sound effectively like "Stop calling them errors!" when they are very clearly errors in the context of UX.

Your argument, if i understand correctly, is pointless because the goal of the app is to have the LLM prediction be aligned with a human-centric world view. Up is not down, and the LLM should not predict tokens that espouses that. In that context, the LLM replying "Up is indeed down" would be an error. Yet repeatedly you argue that it's not an error.

In my view your argument would be better spent saying "The LLM application as we strive for today is impossible. It will never be. It's snake oil. LLMs will never be reasonably and consistently correct by human interpretation"

I don't know if that's your view or not. But it's at least not talking past me, about a point i'm not even talking about. My frame for this conversation was if we can make token prediction aligned with human goals of accuracy. You saying inaccuracies are not errors "categorically" isn't in line with my original question as i see at least. It's apples and oranges.

I stand by everything i said.

> My hope is that even if it never goes beyond being an autocomplete; if we can improve the training dataset, help it not conflict with itself, etc - that maybe the autocomplete will be insanely useful.

I stand by my first post's summary. Which is "never going past an autocomplete".

You're pedantic, and struggling to move past the fact that something can be both token prediction and still have successes and failures in the user perception. Inaccuracies.

How you write software with such a mindset is beyond me.

I already encountered too many cases of learned helplessness where people just go with whatever the computer tells them, regardless of common sense.

The logical errors in other subjects will be fixed over time. Education is an easy domain because it is artificial by nature.

I can see a lot of people switching to ai homeschooling in a few years

Define “knowing”, and then say why it even matters if an LLM gives a great illusion of knowing.

Are there any real gains in giving kids ipads in classrooms? Did anyone have an actual plan in how such a tool could help kids or is it just “tech good?”

I don't know if this is "better" or what you had in mind as "gains", but it's certainly entertaining for me!

I have three kids, and as far as devices used in education is concerned I become more of a Luddite with each passing day. I have yet to come across any actual evidence that shows children experience a net benefit from additional screen time.

The only exception is our 13 year-old, who currently is recovering from a dislocated and fractured right thumb due to being on the wrong end of a vicious tackle in school sport. He's still unable to hold a pen but found his iPad allows him to do various bits of schoolwork. This - fortunately - is the exception rather than the rule.

Instead, Wikipedia was by far the most important part of my high school education. Nearly everything I learned in my second two years of high school I got from Wikipedia.

I think most people today would agree that Wikipedia is an invaluable part of early education and that it's done far more harm than good. All the fear-based arguments you are making applied equally well to Wikipedia in 2005, and I suspect that in less than 18 years we'll similarly recognize that LLMs or other intelligent language systems are invaluable parts of education.

Wow, and please understand this is not personal, but it must be one of the saddest things I read this decade.