alt Hacker NewsYeah, obviously. We also don't know how to use flint and steel to start fires any more. You wouldn't outlift a crane, why would you want to outhomework an AI? And you can't even argue that this toil is going to help in the workplace, because the workplace is now AI-native, and you can offload everything to AI.
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The important thing is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.
If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).
Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.
(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)
Why one would care? Look at your comment from two days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363319
> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.
Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366313
You gotta pick a lane with your rah-rah-ism.
you know we let social media companies cause massive harm over 2 decades; but clearly, this will be deifferent!
These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.
Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.
Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.