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Using a phone translator is fine for being a tourist or maybe for short business trips. It's super inconvenient if you want to live and work somewhere where they speak that language, though.

You need to have your phone on you all the time, otherwise you can't communicate. There is always going to be at least one clause worth of latency in each direction of translation due to differences in word order and semantics, so you'll be at least a sentence or two behind the conversation - whereas if you learn the language, you're interacting in real time. Also do not underestimate the goodwill that comes from being willing to learn a language - people recognize that it's hard, they're going to be much warmer to someone who spent over a thousand hours to reach B2 in their second language vs. someone who downloaded an app instead of putting the effort in.

Near real time speech-to-speech machine translation is super cool if you're a tourist visiting a country for a couple weeks, or an employee visiting a factory in a country you don't speak the language. It isn't a replacement for learning a language, though.

Some subjects are necessary building blocks to more sophisticated tasks. The AI can teach the building blocks and leave the task of building to us.

Coding, for example, is just a small subset of the tasks necessary for software engineering, which in turn is a small subset of the tasks necessary for SaaS company.

We can break down human endeavors into subjects that are "AI teachable" and without ever needing the AI to be able to use them in a sophisticated fashion.

We already do it like this, but with humans.

Are you arguing some stuff is un-teachable or that some stuff is human teachable and not AI teachable.

If the former, how are people learning unteachable moments right now.

Well I've never learned a language in order to be the best at that language, or the only person who can speak it.

If you only want some basic communication, sure use a translation app, but learning a language is also about learning a culture. Learning about new music and literature and poetry that you'd never otherwise get exposure to.

It's like asking what's the point of learning a musical instrument when I'll never be a great musician.

It's to benefit myself so what would be the point of just getting a translation. They're never the same.

Well, for instance, because hearing other languages and translating them is not even the primary use-case for knowing a language. It would take a suite of purpose-built AIs, and the knowledge and ability to use them in-situ, to replace knowing a language.

AIs can also teach us to do things they cannot themselves do, for instance you could have a driving-test tutor. It could teach you a lot of things, despite us not having full self-driving AIs.

I think you're imagining something like chess. In order for an ai chessbot to teach me chess as efficiently as possible, that bot is probably superhuman at chess.

That's not necessarily the case. A good tutor can be more "curator" than "creator of course content"

I can learn math by reading existing math textbooks. Imagine having an ai that is able to judge my knowledge of that math and assign reading or problem sets accordingly. Imagine an AI that is compelling to talk to and keeps me on task given my stated learning goals.

None of that requires superhuman anything.

Would I still want to learn linear algebra even if the frontier of math is being advanced by some super intelligence? Sure, why not? Isn't the frontier already being advanced by many people smarter than I am?

I generally agree, in the long term there will be far less need for teachers, as there will be less need for human jobs to be taught.

However, creating many individual systems which are better than a human in a specific area each is very different from one unified and integrated system which combines all of them. The latter will take a lot longer to achieve. Until then there is value in teaching humans.

Is this not the same as human teachers?

In the language example, people still want to learn to read/write other languages despite many translators being available. The tech to teach might be less sensitive to latency than the skill in humans, or it might be very expensive, or it might be useful to non-tech-literate people.