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Comment by ori_b | Hacker News Reader

Banning it in classrooms isn't going to fix things, not when adults are broadcasting to students that (in the actual words of Sam Altman) "intelligence will be too cheap to meter", that (in the words of Darius Amodei) half of white collar jobs will be gone by the time these students graduate school, and so on. If intelligence is too cheap to meter, mental labor is a losing proposition. We've also spent decades emphasizing STEM and de-emphasizing arts and culture. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?

So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.

Even if the people building this world are wrong -- not all students are equipped to call some of the wealthiest people in the world complete bullshitters. Not all adults are ready to call them out as bullshitters, for that matter.

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> If intelligence is too cheap to meter, selling your mental labor is a losing proposition. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?

The ban is for elementary school. I don't know about you, but when I was 11, what motivated me to go to school definitely wasn't the idea that I could monetize my intelligence later on.

11 year olds don’t want to go to school.

What is your point? Are you going to subject your parenting to their whims or are you going to be an adult and discipline them into doing what is right for them?

Granted, an 11-year old who doesn't want to go to school is already symptomatic of many years of failure of parenting, but 11 is such a young age and there's certainly plenty of room to stimulate their curiosity. What kind of an adult would deliberately raise their children to know so little of this world?

lol how many kids do you have?

I’d argue education (especially those early years) is less about making them good white collar workers and moreso making them well rounded people. Education has value beyond monetary gains

"intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.

What makes you think school students are being told that? I've heard that they are told everyone will be using AI to help them write.

> "intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.

They’ve always been metering AI access (whether this is meaningfully intelligence is a separate question), but that doesn’t prove that there isn’t some time in the future where it won’t be worth metering, only that if there will be, it isn’t here yet.

OTOH, it is still worth noting that from a a consumer-of-the-service perspective, the trend is for more metering, not less (even if that is due at least in part to the rollback off unsustainable subsidies and not to the fundamnetal shifting what is sustainable farther from unmetered access.)

Do you think they're too illiterate to read what industry leaders are saying? I assure you they're not.

Hm maybe I was sheltered or something but I was definitely not reading what industry leaders were saying when I was under 13. I don't think I really even knew who industry leaders were at that time...

I was definitely reading articles online by the age of 13. This is not exactly a small part of the discourse.

I'd expect, at this point, it's rather hard to avoid hearing about AI and its impact.

it'll start to raise the question of not only is college not worth it, but why should we even have compulsory education through high school? (just think of all the money we could save aka spend on the military instead)

rising tides lift all boats

school wasn't compulsory for most of human history. private schooling was the norm, and private school, like now, was very expensive. as a result, most people worked physical jobs and gained limited skills beyond this.

the idea of public school where everyone had a fair shot of developing skills for knowledge work was an extremely progressive concept in the beginning. what you're asking is the impact of undoing this. many states are essentially trying this through private school vouchers funded by public school dollars.

i think is a very unfortunate regression; unfortunately, it takes a generation of change for impacts to realize.

> what you're asking is the impact of undoing this

I was being sarcastic. But this could become a serious question: in the (near) future, if academic skills no longer matter for the vast majority of jobs, then the State's responsibility to fund public education will be called into question -- maybe it would stop at 14 when kids can read/write and do basic math. If you want more, do it on your own dime.

I hope not, but we already have the Trump WH trying to chip away at public education - and that's without AI in the picture.

I would not build my philosophy on the marketing talk of a well-known impulsive liar. Sam, by his own admission, does not even know that much about LLMs, but he is so good at sales that somehow people take what he says for gospel anyway.

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