alt Hacker NewsReplace ‘CTF’ with ‘high school’ or ‘university’ and you’ve described the total slow motion collapse of education; the only saving grace is that most of it requires in person presence.
We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part. LLMs can be wonderful teachers, but the temptation to just tell it ‘do it for me’ is almost impossible to resist.
Replies
Everything we've learned in the last 10 years is telling us that computers do not help human education in the slightest. We remember better when we write with pen and paper. We learn better with whiteboards and paper books. The simple answer: Remove most computing from education entirely. Blue composition books, pencils, whiteboards is what trains humans. Calculators are helpful perhaps but it is quite possible that slide rules are better. We need humans that can critically think from first principles to counter the recycled information generated by AI.
Wonderful teachers that give unreliable information with total confidence?
They were a forcing function for skillz and they no longer are. We need new forcing functions for skillz or we will become WALL-E blobs.
Well, they were ostensibly forcing functions... ten years ago everyone was paying the exchange student to do their homework and assignments for them, and that guy was paying his cousin back in his home country, but the whole thing is a bit more efficient now.
I found this interview [0] on the subject of AI in CS education on the Oxide & Friends podcast very illuminating. Of course, Brown University CS != All education, but interesting angle nevertheless.
[0] Episode webpage: https://share.transistor.fm/s/31855e83
We've already had consolidation of education for a while now. Even before all the edutech courses, there were Youtubers educating better than many university professors. 10-15 years ago students were already skipping lectures and just showing up for tests.
> We’ve figured out the human replacement pipeline it seems, but we haven’t figured out the eduction part.
No we have not.
"Education is just a CTF for the valuable flag of a credential. In this essay I will --"
The best frontier LLMs can't solve 4th grade math homework yet. Don't hold your breath on that collapse of education.
(Real mathematics problems, not American-style ""math"".)
Education is also figured out. You just need to learn, do and practice for yourself. Telling the agent "to just do it for you" is tempting, but it's not learning. You need to be deliberate when you're trying to actually learn and internalize.
Also, you could spin up your own educational agent with very strict instructions on guiding the user instead of just doing the work. Of course you can always go around it but if you're making an effort to learn, this is a good middle ground.
We are interviewing for a software dev role and we made the first round in person to prevent cheating. The gap between people who learned pre ai vs post is immense. I had a dev with supposedly 3 years experience and a degree in software who wouldn't have been able to write fizzbuzz without AI.