> Anyone who has led a class discussion — much less led students on a tour of Egypt or Okinawa, as my colleagues regularly do — knows that there is a huge gap between solo learning online and collective learning in meat space

One thing this author misses, which I fear, is that it may become less important in the eyes of stakeholders to educate the masses when they have LLMs to do jobs instead. That is, it is fully possible that one of the futures we may see is one where education goes down as it is perceived as not important for most. Yes, meat space education may be better, but who decides if it is necessary?

Maybe vocational schools become more important instead? Jobs where you for all intents and purposes build out the infrastructure for the tetriary industry, mostly automated by LLM.

You may disagree with this, but the key here is to realize that even if we disagree, others don't. Education is also power, there's a perverse incentive to avoid educating people and feeding them with your narrative of how the world works instead. We are very much possibly on the way towards a buy-n-large style future.