> Why not just connect two shitty models together and tell them to hallucinate to each other and skip the whole need to think about anything.

Western countries have better conditions than much of the world for a variety of reasons, but among them is education and culture.

Raising the next generation to outsource all thinking to AI and form a culture around influencing people 45 seconds at a time will destroy those prerequisites to our better lifestyle, and it will be downhill from there.

You might argue that the AI can be a mentor or can guide society appropriately. That's not wholly untrue, but if AI is "a bicycle for the mind", you still have to have the willingness and vision to go someplace with it. If you've never thought for yourself, never learned anything independently, I just don't see how people will avoid using AI to be "stupid faster".

> Raising the next generation to outsource all thinking to AI and form a culture around influencing people 45 seconds at a time will destroy those prerequisites to our better lifestyle, and it will be downhill from there.

absolutely

up until 2022 I was optimistic for the future

our current big problems: climate change, nuclear proliferation, global pandemics, dictatorships, antibiotic resistance, all seemed solvable over the long term

"AI" however is different

previously all human societies placed a high value on education

this is now gone, if anything spending time educating yourself is now a negative

I don't see how the species survives this new reality over the long term

> You might argue that the AI can be a mentor or can guide society appropriately its a next word predictor trained off datasets.

> Raising the next generation to outsource all thinking to AI and form a culture around influencing people 45 seconds at a time will destroy those prerequisites to our better lifestyle, and it will be downhill from there.

they said the same about tv, youtube and even printed books. short length videos now apparently are the new evil (somehow).

quick question, why was nobody complaining about these exact same "engagement" algorithms 20 years ago? Why only when tiktok short form videos appear? Popularity based ranking was in search engines decades ago but nobody cared then. No cocomelon back then, coincidence?

Teachers:

IIRC, it may be better to have the same number of real humans focussing on fewer pupils. Even when they're using VLMs as assistants.

Students:

While humans max out at a higher skill level than VLMs, I suspect that most (not all!) people who would otherwise have finished education at their local mandatory school leaving age, may be better off finishing school as soon as they can use a VLM.

But also #1: There's also a question of apprenticeships over the current schooling system. Robotics' AI are not as advanced as VLMs, so while plumbing will get solved eventually (and a tentacle robot arm with a camera in each "finger" is clearly superior to our human arms in tight spaces), right now it still looks like a sane thing to train in.

But also #2: Telling who is and isn't getting anything out of the education system is really hard; not only in historical systems like the UK's old eleven-plus exams, but today after university graduation when it can sometimes take a bit of effort to detect that someone only got a degree for the prestige and didn't really learn anything.

>There's also a question of apprenticeships over the current schooling system. Robotics' AI are not as advanced as VLMs, so while plumbing will get solved eventually (and a tentacle robot arm with a camera in each "finger" is clearly superior to our human arms in tight spaces), right now it still looks like a sane thing to train in.

This is the current meta. Today's knowledge workers are propertymaxxing like crazy, and sending their kids to trade school. Well, at least those who see the writing on the wall. The second half of the 021st century will see the rise of the PLIWs [1]. Knowledge work will become extinct. The social order will be:

1. elites: a small aristocracy, who control the access to AI

2. middle class: PLIWs

3. low class: children of today's knowledge workers who couldn't amass sufficient wealth for their kids to become PLIWs. Also called slop-feeders, as their job is to carry out the instructions coming from the AIs without questioning or understanding what they're doing.

________

[1] PLIW = Physical Labour, Inherited Wealth

Would be great if that massive solar flare could hit like tomorrow.

There have always been a disgusting number of people who treat education as a means to an end.

A teaching culture of thinking that all you have to do is graduate students + a learning culture of thinking all you have to do is graduate.

This already was at an 8. Got dialled up to 11 during covid. And somehow dialled up to 21 after ChatGPT.

Normally, broken things can hobble along for a very long time. But the strain is so intense on what has become of education that my current guess is that the chickens will come to roost on this one sometime 2026 to 2027.

that system produced silicon valley, so it cant be that disfunctional

> We can fire both teachers and students at the same time and save money on this whole education thing.

The current US administration has already started this process.

It's a microcosm of the real economy.

We are normalising everything and everyone into information grey goo.

Agree.

Somehow though, this actually might be the best time to for learners, to sit down and engage with topics and don’t be distracted by formal stuff (degrees, grades, points) because the latter is becoming more meaningless with each token being sent down the drain.

>What are we as humans even doing.

We are avoiding work that we don't want to do and therefore saving time, which is precisely what technology promised would help us do.

> and therefore saving time

Apparently we aren't.

I think the whole "school" thing is just a giant filtering mechanism to sort out who gets placed where in society. The idea of learning things is just pretense for the majority of students. It's a giant, intricate sorting hat. Both teachers and students using AI to get out of doing the work just makes it obvious. The thing is, it means we're going to need a new filtering mechanism, because AI is making this one obsolete.

The system we have is now legacy: https://www.ndtv.com/offbeat/student-flaunts-use-of-chatgpt-...

> I think the whole "school" thing is just a giant filtering mechanism to sort out who gets placed where in society.

I think you haven't picked up enough history books if that's the only positive thing you can come up about "schools". But I guess that's what we get after decades of "the economy is the only thing that matters" propaganda, what's the point of history, math, science, when the system just need good little consumerist wage slaves

Maybe get your head out of your history books and take a look around you. The whole thing is a cross between babysitting at the younger ages and allocating who gets what jobs at the older ages. Any purpose the system served previously has been supplanted by this.

You’re painting with such a broad brush that it destroys your credibility.

I'm personally glad my neighbors aren't illiterate and that we share a somewhat common ground truth about the history of our country for example

The problem with your proposal is that people need money to buy food and housing.

Prompting AI is what employers want, they are learning the right things.

A few years ago employers wanted people to make NFTs. Luckily for the most part educators didn't start exclusively teaching kids about how to make NFTs.

Perhaps chasing what employers want at any given moment is not a good basis for an education system.