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This is cool; finally, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.

I’d be interested to see how Google’s LaMDA compares on this task (currently available in private preview).

One of LaMDA’s unique (afaik) features is a fact-check system that edits the main LLM outputs, to reduce bullshitting. This seems particularly important in an educational context where impressionable young minds are talking directly to the LLM.

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An ePrimer has a few components: the book itself, a Ractor mentor, a curriculum that includes Ractor paid milestohes, and scientufic metaphor stories that are the rubric and scaffolding. It might also include the VR or AR components that supply the immersive context. I've taught this in a master's level Metaverse course at a NY university.

Notably, we see two models for uses of the Primer in The Diamond Age. The one everyone thinks of has a single human Ractor on the other side, who takes a genuine, nigh-parental interest in the student's development over a period of years. The others... don't have that, and the outcomes diverge.

You've been teaching The Diamond Age? Fiction?

Not really. The Duamond Age" is referenced as a template, but it is not required reading.The main components of the course are 1) writing a Ractive, 2) designing a Paper Theater for the Ractive, and 3) designing the set for the Paper Theater. The object is to continue the existing workflow for media with apropriate extensions for the Metaverse. The work is done in teams of 3 people with continuous reviews by team members. An underlying goal is to teach a collaborative media design process. Our view is that collaboration is the main leverage component of the Metaverse.

It’s a good point. I think we can easily imagine GPT writing (in ascending order of cost) speech synthesis actions, mechanical Turk scripts, custom actor interactions. (With the “tool script” for actuating each becoming progressively more complex.)

A Primer framework could make these pluggable. Also the curriculum could be pluggable and either generated or ingested from existing courses.

I guess the mapping of curricula -> scripts is probably the hard part, and what GPT-N (for some N not much bigger than 4) could most interestingly help with.

Recall that what made the Primer so effective in Diamond Age is that it had access to enormous external financial and human resources. The later copies that raised the Mouse Army and did not have those resources were (intentionally) not great liberators like the original.

Right but they did very effectively program an army of young minds to obey the principles of the learning system's creator.

One major takeaway from The Diamond Age is that being in charge of the learning system is an incredibly powerful position.

Don't hear so much about Khan Academy anymore, could you get an LLM to make new content in their style while also transmitting your desired values?

'Course, we've known, "Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever" --Lenin

This is an interesting development; I'd assumed we'd have a robust intermediate stage, where a collection of top-quality works (Books, carefully-chosen video games [think Zachtronics], recorded lectures etc) were made available, convenient, and cheap, in a no-pressure, non-points-based system.

Diamond Age was my first thought when I read this too.

I kinda feel like the GPT4 version will be the curated voice acted version while the LaMDA version is the Mouse Army version.

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