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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, had a pleasantly surprising experience with this podcast thing. I tried it out on a few little blogposts I wrote and I was like, hmm cool. Showed my 8 year old son how it was referencing things I wrote.

And he was ON IT. Like, he ran to his room and grabbed a pencil and paper and put down an essay (okay about 6 or so sentences) about Minecraft, had me type them in, and ran the Notebook, and now he's just showing off both to EVERYONE.

(Yes, he understands it's not real people.)

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Can't help but think that your son and his peers are going to fundamentally use AI in such a different way than we do now and do a much better job of understanding it's constraints and using it to it's full potential.

why can't we do the same?

Because kids can afford to spend 14 hours a day playing with an AI. You can't.

I can if I'm asking ChatGPT how to write Makefiles or whatever all day :-D

If I had to defend GP’s argument that I didn’t make, I’d say something along the lines of our fundamental understanding of the world is built on other premises than it will be for the next generation.

Yeah, I’m not making much of a substantial argument, it’s very much an unqualified intuition at best.

Right now there are millions of high school students tweaking and testing different inputs against LLMs for very real consequences: their grades.

Meanwhile I barely trust LLMs enough to write a relatively inconsequential piece of code.

If this version of AI is the real deal, the kids that are really depending on it are going to figure out the breakthroughs, not me.

this is a popular myth but never lines up with reality. studies pretty consistently find that kids are worse at understanding technology’s limitations.

maybe because they don’t have enough prior experience to compare “the new way” with any given old way.

the studies may be flawed in that they look at the wrong age range. I'm sure many people on this site were born between 1990 and 2000. That generation knows how to use computers innately because they lived the most important part of the evolution of the consumer desktop as well as the transition that saw everything and everyone move to the internet. Before all the simplifications and streamlined UIs. Before all the assistants. Before every problem was already solved by someone else.

I imagine that an AI-native generation will be the same, but with respect to AI.

I’d argue the people born 1970-1990 are stronger at that than those born 1990-2000.

I think you have the age range of people who wrote their own MySpace pages versus those in pre-structured gardens like Facebook slightly wrong.

What studies? How long do they run for?

I figured you’d at least need to study the same group for 10 years as they grow up to really tell.

Obviously a 12 year old might not understand the limitations of a technology, but give that 12 year old 10 years of living with it and they’d be better than their parents.

I hope so I guess, but, using it's potential to do what? Our globally connected supercomputers in our pockets are already being used to watch commercials interspersed with videos who mostly are product placement. /yay

It's impossible to say. If we knew that now, then the next generation wouldn't be doing "something different" on a definitional level, because we'd be doing it already.

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