To be entirely honest, I would love to read pg's take on this. He seems like the type of guy who might have expended some thought on this topic, as difficult as it is.
No matter who writes this piece, we need it to move forward.
> Augmenting a parent so their child has a world class tutor is incredible stuff.
So does replacing the underlying meaning of the label tutor, with a cult leader. It is incredible, just not in the way you intended. How will you know the difference if this was done outside your awareness?
Machines are programmed by people you never meet, or can hold to account (in many cases). Many seem to think LLM's are magical replacements for people, they are not.
It seems more like you want to further offload parenting to a blind machine you can't control without recognition of the consequences, while taking away the economic benefit of tutoring as a job at the same time.
The internet raised a lot of kids in the late 80s/90s, many were very intelligent, but became maladjusted from exposure to things on places like 4chan. That maladjustment led to acts that landed some of them in prison, which has become the modern form of slavery.
I think you need to more carefully reflect on both the negatives and positives.
The realist in me is focusing in on the first half of that sentence. The kids are going to get raised by something other than the parents. This will happen globally because no one wants to accept parenting globally has been and will continue to be inadequate. I’d rather many children in say, I don’t know, Afghanistan, get some guidance from an LLM.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/12/10/charact...
LLMs are not people, only people know how to give guidance.
LLMs are chaos and deceit simulacra, and kids are the least biologically capable of discerning omission and deceit especially prior to the age of reason where this isn't possible.
The internet wasn’t really available to most of the public until after the advent of the web in 1994, it certainly wasn’t raising a lot of kids (even in the very loose sense of having some influence through being a medium of direct interaction for them while they were growing up) in the 1980s.
AOL and Compuserve were available and provided access to quite a large number of people starting in 85 iirc, and by 89/90 their free month promotions targeting families made it cost effect for most (they sent out the CDs and bundled them with magazines everywhere, allowed creation of subaccounts, and many businesses reimbursed for the monthly costs as email was really catching on).
It certainly wasn't the web as we know it today, but it was the internet with direct interaction in mailing lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, You've got emails, and other network connected services and even games in the form of muds, all at the blazing fast speeds of the time, 14.4kbps, and its now iconic connection handshake.
CompuServe got limited internet capability (basically, just connecting its on-platform mail to internet mail) in 1989, AOL did so in 1993.
CompuServe (and Quantum/AOL and Delphi and Prodigy and…) were not the internet in any general sense, even though most of them and similar services connected to internet mail sometime between when CompuServe did in 1989 and when the web took over.
> all at the blazing fast speeds of the time, 14.4kbps
No one was doing 14.4kbps in the 1980s; the first modems at that speed were in 1991 or 1992. They would have largely been 2400bps from the mid-1980s; in the late 1980s there were some 9,600bps modems that were really expensive, but they weren’t standard and were rarely encountered.
Some simple system prompting on a local LLM can help you get there on your own believe it or not. A custom GPT on ChatGPT is another option. This will take an active involvement from you, because it’s a pretty much figure it out as you go for all of us.
Augmenting a parent so their child has a world class tutor is incredible stuff.