Hacker News Reader

Comment by Workaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Kids are always the best with technology. The generation in high school right now will be god tier at getting results from LLMs.

View on HN

Not even a little bit. Where I work we regularly churn through kids just out of college and most of them don't have Clue One how to operate anything on their computer.

Yeah, growing up in the 80s or 90s might have had you uniquely well-positioned to be "good with computers", because "the computer that has games and the internet" was (in some sense) the same as "the computer that adults are supposed to use for work".

That's not true anymore in the smart phone / tablet era.

5-10 years ago my wife had a gig working with college kids and back then they were already unable to forward e-mails and didn't really understand the concept of "files" on a computer. They just sent screenshots and sometimes just lost (like, almost literally) some document they had been working on because they couldn't figure out how to open it back up. I can't imagine it has improved.

Very senior teachers and educators have been noting this observation for a decade-plus now. Computer literacy has tanked.

Might have been the case before. But these days, kids are brought up on locked-down content-focused machines (e.g. ipads). They struggle with anything harder than restarting an app.

When my little cousin was three and already knew how to use the phone by himself people were claiming he was gonna be a tech wizard and everybody was talking about digital natives. But when he got to high school he didn't know how to turn a computer on. How useful is it to be god tier at getting results from LLMs, if you have zero clue if the result you got is any good?

How are high school kids that barely know the basics of the topic going to get “god tier” results from LLMs?

I can see how that would seem logical, but imo the issue with it not following the normal trend is the inconsistency and inaccurate results of LLMs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com