In my old man yells at cloud moment: I'm pretty sick of experimenting with technology on kids under the guise of learning.
Tablet use in classrooms is bad enough. I want my kid to be able to focus throughout his life, not be a phone zombie.
Tablet use in classrooms is bad enough. I want my kid to be able to focus throughout his life, not be a phone zombie.
The "kids these days" trope is as old as time, and its no more true this time around.
That's why religions and the military prefer young recruits.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/27/gen-z-tec...
What does “technical literacy” mean?
I think it might be more helpful to look at this as information literacy, or at least roughly speaking a higher degree of “Internet smarts”.
Scanners and copiers are in that weird phase of product life where they’ve been mostly eliminated as core computing needs at home, but still see widespread business use since business will always be the long tail on fully digitizing.
I think it’d be prudent to be specific, because for whatever degree of literacy or smarts or whatever you call it is true about teens in the information environment, the technology through which they experience that environment inches closer and closer to pure magic from a layman’s perspective.
We now have a whole generation of teenagers that grew up with iPhones and I have seen exceptionally poor average technical ability.
When we were coming up you had to install modem drivers to get online. In windows 95... with no internet to check on a how-to.
I don’t think I can imagine anything more delusional than a parent, handing their kid an iPad so they will go away and thinking that they’re also preparing this kid for a career in computers.
I'm struggling to square that with teens forming long lines to buy an overpriced energy drink promoted by a couple of YouTubers and scalpers successfully getting over £100 for bottles.
I'm sure some of them are better at installing adblock software than their parents, are harder to convert for ecommerce because they need to borrow their parents' credit card and may be immune to online ads that are targeted at people very unlike them, but the idea that this generation is the first one immune to advertising and use Tiktok despite it's engagement metric hacking and follow influencers despite them being product shills is no more true than the "kids these days" meme.
They might be aware of privacy, and less into buying random crap(Although that might be because they spend their money on the food instead of plastic junk, which harms your body AND your wallet), some reason the tech skills seem to be getting left behind.
The trendy thing now seems to be going back to vintage stuff.
I'm almost a bit jealous, if their lives are so amazing that whatever they're doing somehow seems better than focusing 100% on STEM, which was like, the ultimate life goal for a decade.
This. is. total. horseshit.
I guarantee that you could randomly sample 1,000 people across America age 42-48 and 1,000 people age 15-21, put them in front of a multifuction machine (printer / scanner / copier) and the 15-21 year olds wouldn't have a fucking clue. Hell, Bloomberg ran an article about it.
And the reason this is important is because iOS and Android and tablets don't run the business world - laptops, MFPs, and Windows does.
/s
For kids that are curious and want to learn - access to something like gpt-4 is amazing. All I had were guides like Eric S. Raymond's how to be a hacker that I had stumbled onto while trying to learn. It was so much harder to learn programming back then if you didn't know where to start and nobody around you knew about it.
With gpt-4 you can just ask and get examples.
My little brother is doing some form of machine learning in grad school currently and when I saw him last around when ChatGPT was starting to become a mainstream talking point we discussed a lot about how immediately going to something that can answer a question (e.g. how do i write code that does X) is tempting but, can be a bit dangerous when we offload our own ability to reason through something to an external entity.
Shouldn't we be fostering thinking patterns that allow for creativity and innovation when given very little, versus fostering a sense of "oh I can always get the right answer to a question whenever I need it. So why bother with building a general mental problem solving framework for myself"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is_Google_Making_Us_Stupid%3F
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/07/is-goog...
Does anyone care that the head of the art history department did his phd on Picasso, taught two full semester courses on him and I know more about Picasso’s life than probably 99.9% of the general population?
Doubtful…
But I do know things that never made it into the search engines (I’ve looked) and this knowledge is locked up in a (probably) retired professor and the few percent of students who actually listened to his lectures twenty-something years ago.
Now everyone assumes that if it isn’t in google it doesn’t exist and have very little idea how to find information outside of what’s contained in its “record of all things”.
Depends on what the difficulty is. I remember when I started to learn programming back in 1991, I was learning from books. These books were very expensive and I could only afford a few of them. I didn't have access to a library because I wasn't in any school or university. I was a musician with a side job at a theatre box office.
My main problem was that many of the explanations and examples in my programming books left some questions unanswered. It was even worse with maths, which I also tried to learn at the time. I got stuck a lot. If I'd had access to something like stackoverflow or Google, I could have progressed much much faster.
I do think that getting stuck and being forced to figure something out the hard way is sometimes useful. But more often than not I didn't get stuck because the material was actually difficult or because I was solving difficult problems. I got stuck because the one and only explanation available to me was imprecise or incomplete. All I needed was the same thing explained with slightly different words to clear up my misunderstandings.
On the whole I think learning these things today is immeasurably more productive. People are a lot less dependent on luck or money. You don't need to be one of the lucky few who has access to good teachers. You don't have to buy expensive books. Everyone has access to excellent online tutorials, documentation, source code and to thousands of competent professionals willing to help for free. It's absolute heaven. Back then it was hell.
Think about most of the stuff you have really learnt over the course of your life, was it from sitting in a classroom with information being spoon-fed to you, from reading a Wikipedia article?
Or was it because you had to search hard for the information, try and fail before you succeeded?
My bet is that your learning comes from the lather not the former.
Good teachers that I have had would point you in a direction and then give guidance or even question you instead of just telling you the answer.
It’s doing the problem set, but also being able to check the key. Basically a private tutor or TA available at all times.
Without that you can’t get a tight feedback loop.
The most effective use of these systems will not be copying the answer, it’ll be trying to do it and then asking when stuck.
It is absolutely not true for most people. Most people need a human guide to show them the way. I am living this now with my two kids, both of whom need instruction (and also help from mom and dad).
Caveat, of course, this is an extreme power tool vis a vis human development, and as such, can do just as much harm as good depending on it's use. This is why it's so damn important that we keep this stuff open source - if it's behind walled gardens, you end up with _actual, real shadowy cabals effortlessly manipulating all of everybody_, a thing that you may or may not be convinced exists already but guaranteed under those circumstances.
Truth of the matter is that many teachers know the curriculum, but if you ask them a basic question, they won't answer the question with nearly the same depth for example Feynman[1] would have. Now educators with both the ability and depth of knowledge of Feynman is clearly a very limited resource. LLMs may just change that since they can be given the depth with relative ease, the rest of the owl is making them good educators as well.
https://blog.khanacademy.org/harnessing-ai-so-that-all-stude...
It's expensive, it's not prohibitive unless you're not willing to increase education funding at all. Which implies that what we're spending now "should be enough." I don't think we've ever done the basic homework here.
54.5 million school aged children in the US. Average $50,000/yr tutor salary. Total cost per year would be 2.7 trillion.
National Defense is 767 billion. Education is already 677 billion. Net interest is 475 billion. We're already more than half way there, inside of a nation with $25 trillion GDP.
I fail to see anything "prohibitive" about this.
I hate to have to say this but GDP isn’t the absolute upper limit for government spending. I know they tell you that every dollar of government spending is equal to $2 of increased GDP (or some equal bullshit) but that doesn’t mean GDP is an open checkbook for the government to drive the economy. At some point someone has to generate actual value for them to appropriate for their political ends.
This is the only time I’ve ever wanted the AI to generate a reply for me but, alas, that’s not in my current skill set.
Brazil and Zimbabwe found this out the hard way, but a lot of people really don't understand how times can be hard when the numbers keep going up because they neglect to consider inflation and the government has an interest in managing down the real numbers and mumbling something about "greed" while they enact policies that effectively create huge, regressive taxes.
What happens if they have two or more children? What if they want other jobs? What real bearing does this have on the fundamental problem?
> I hate to have to say this but GDP isn’t the absolute upper limit for government spending.
I didn't suggest it was. I'm showing that if you want to have high value education, it would become about 10% of the total economy. Does that seem "prohibitive" to you?
> At some point someone has to generate actual value for them to appropriate for their political ends.
And educating children has no value?
> This is the only time I’ve ever wanted the AI to generate a reply for me but, alas, that’s not in my current skill set.
Well, some educations have no value, I guess.
Obviously, as a cost cutting measure, we will pay $50k per child to each of the parents.
> What real bearing does this have on the fundamental problem?
I don’t actually understand what the problem is we’re trying to solve here, honestly.
Give them all an AI and call it a day.
What is your reasoning for believing this would improve outcomes?
> I don’t actually understand what the problem is we’re trying to solve here, honestly.
Really? We spend a lot on education. Our outcomes are demonstrably sub-optimal. There's no correlation between amount spent in a classroom and classroom outcomes. There's obviously a large flaw in the entire model.
> Give them all an AI and call it a day.
Well.. when we invent an actual AI and not some hallucinatory language model, let me know, until then, you're obviously not serious or willing to play fast and loose with something important.
Hard to believe we're struggling to get this right.
I’m more optimistic about tablets and AI, but the word that resonates with me the most here is “experimenting”. I don’t think there’s a guise, eg using learning as an excuse, but I do think that we have to be careful with how we present tech to children, even if it is with an altruistic goal.
So if we shouldn’t experiment on students, how will we figure out how to make these new technologies improve student learning?
My in-laws and parents already are enthusiastic Youtube consumers, mainly because in a very consumable way - they can hear/see how to [Fill in the Blank]. Stuff like changing out the washer in their faucet and feeling confident enough to try to do it themselves with the Youtube video as their crutch/sherpa was a game-changer for them. Otherwise, it falls back to paying $$$ (if you can find someone) to do it for you ... or lean on the generosity of a knowledgeable friend/family member (when they have time to give). Self-empowerment is their preferred choice in terms of shortest time to action at the least cost.
To me, AI Tutors seem aligned with consumability (natural language engagement) and can also provide some confidence to older populations to better "understand" and maybe "do". My dad felt intimidated by Windows because the error and information dialogues were so intimidating in technical speak and worse, they were one-way communicators. The net vibe resulting was:
"Windows is yelling at me that I'm doing something wrong, but I can't ask it a follow-up question to get more context on why or to fill in a hole in knowledge that I have about what TCP is/means. How can I proceed without making things worse". BTW, this is the same frustration people feel with automated customer service flows that aren't modeled to handle a broad enough range of customer inquiries. This next rev of AI engagement has the potential to make this two-way again. And I'll happily be out of a job as resident family tech expert or perhaps just evolving into the AI tutor model trainer for my loved ones.
Tanks for granting old bachelors a moment of yelling "then don't have any!" at cloud.
History suggests that they will always find a way, perhaps not all of them but at least as a whole, as a generation, but are we really exaggerating of we claim that it's worse than it used to be? Every bad turn that had ever happened before has at some point been unprecedented and would have been clearly ruled out before by apppeals to "pessimists are always predicting worse than what actually happens"
Everyone has to learn the lesson for themselves. I can prepare them for it as best I can, however. So I don't really worry about this insomuch as lament the cultural fetish for "more tech = better."
> Every bad turn that had ever happened before has at some point been unprecedented and would have been clearly ruled out before by apppeals to "pessimists are always predicting worse than what actually happens"
I mull over this frequently.
My objection stems from constant tablet use/availability during school hours. Being a tablet zombie in 4th grade is not healthy even if you're only using learning apps. I'd much prefer kids to binge tablets at home for 3 hours after school occasionally than have it at hand 8 hours a day, everyday. If tablets were something that were occasionally trotted out at school for specific tasks: no problem. Assigning kids tablets and making them an integral part of the teaching workflow really bothers me.
This is part of a larger strategy of mine: controlled exposure to high-stimuli things alongside building a full enough life to try to avoid addiction. My kids will eventually play video games (probably not trashy mobile games), use tablets, watch TV (they already do) and eventually, correspond with AI. (I am hoping social media dies a fiery death before they get old enough to think it is actually important.)
Obviously, these are all plans in the abstract. All we can do is give our kids the cognitive tools to see how technology use affects their life.
Isn't that also true of every good turn though?
That was about one year after the computer rooms got rid of their Acorn RISC OS machines.
That era of Mac OS may well be dead and gone, but so is that era of Windows.
So, don't worry, the phones and tablets aren't what's going to make your kids into attention addled zombies — neither will the AR glasses, though I'm not so confident about the inevitable brain implants let alone the equally inevitable DIY gene engineered pseudo-Ophiocordyceps.
my high school age kid is able to leverage AI in a way that is augmenting rather than replacing her native intelligence, and accelerating her own learning and integration.
I find these tools are not unlike "smart drugs"—a necessary aid to some, a destructive crutch for others, and performance enhancement for a subset of the already competitive seeking advantage.
Gattaca approaches from an unexpected direction...
(I have joked that encouraging use of AI but forbidding social media, feels not unlike championing psychedelics while decrying stimulants and opioids.)
Now, kids in school are obviously doing educational stuff on their tablets so I see the fallacy in this line of thought. Idk. I feel like staring at a book is better, but what do I know? Maybe the increased engagement from a tablet is worth the downsides?