The secret to mastery remained unchanged for a thousand years: books, lectures and homework. All of this can be done with pen and paper level of technology.
Given that AI exist maybe we can roll back some of the school/university and just let people do the work and learn while doing?
Yes not for a 7yo but with 18 you could just work and learn what is required or what you find exciting.
Mediocre student that sits through lectures, does the homework and submits assignment on due dates will get a good level of mastery in the subject. The very same student would be totally lost relying only on self-studying - he would not even know what he doesn't know.
I fully admit that for efficient time spend and production of sufficiently educated students it is not effective method.
Companies should be doing their own training for their jobs, and university can be freed up to actually be about intellectual pursuit rather than economic pursuit.
It was companies themselves who created this issue anyways, by demanding degrees for every damn job, regardless of whether a degree could prepare you in the first place, and slashing entry level jobs to almost nothing. Then they started using degrees as a proxy for work experience (and I mean that in the literal sense; "bachelor or 4 years of experience" is common to see in job reqs, despite no bachelor degree actually being equivalent to 4 years of full-time job experience), which just further pushed incoming students to expect that to be the purpose of their time at University.
Universities predate capitalism (despite the author's absurd assertion that they were founded to serve the interests of businesses), and will exist after it, if any humans survive it.
This would be great of course, but the reason that 'what actually happens' is so different than 'what should happen' are the usual economic incentives. How can we change the financial calculations to separate formal education from job training in a way that drives the ship in the better direction.
One way could be to regulate degree requirements to only jobs that really require them like engineering, nursing, etc. Another might be allow student loan bankruptcy if certain criteria are met such such as x number of years below y income.
Make it illegal to discriminate based on degree status in hiring (it's not like anyone is hiring an SWE without doing technical interviews anyways, so if you prove out their skills why does the paper matter?), and you remove both the backdoor socioeconomic discrimination route (which is itself a backdoor route to discriminate against protected attributes), and solve the degree 'inflation' incentive.
If pens and paper are technology then why aren't pen and paper manufacturing companies referred to as "tech" companies
NB. I am not asking what is a "tech" company or how they are different from other companies. I'm asking why call it a "tech" company given that technology is a broad term used to describe far more than computers
Of course, it's a highly selected group of students. I very much doubt it's scalable in the way one would hope.
definitely try out:
galaxy s9 ultra tab (wacom! edit: also, 14.6 inch: bigger than any ipad series)
+ LAMY s-pen
+ paper-feel screen protector
(and optionally felt-tip nibs)
miles better than MPP or AES or other crap: those can't draw diagonal lines without wobbling, thought I was getting parkinsons
The issue you’re describing is a mindset/cultural one, not a technological one.
The same cheating machine can be used as a tutor. Those same cheating students understand, that at the gym, they themselves have to lift the weights to get strong, but that mindset doesn’t carry over to their classes.
Perhaps LLMs are a forklift.
Of course, side effects are a different story.
> Than to put character in him. No one
> Has ever found a way to make a fool
> Wise or a bad man good. If god had taught
> This to the children of Asclepius—
> How to cure badness or a muddled brain—
> What handsome fees they'd earn!"
That was Theogenis from the 6th century BC. I don’t think we’re any closer today than they were back then.
Even they are not very reliable.
The drug-induced ones don't seem to work as well, in my study of anecdotes on the topic, so it may well be that trying to scale up mystical experience would defeat the purpose of so doing.
Before we get ahead of ourselves and hype up AI as a tool for making people smarter, let’s first demonstrate that AI really does help them learn better. Otherwise we risk wasting a lot of time and money on silicon snake oil.
As for proof, I think it’s self evident for anyone who has tried to us it in that way.
If you’re studying math ask it to generate more questions for you to try. If you don’t understand a concept, have it use the Socratic method on you. Learning a language, talk back and forth with it over voice. Writing an essay, have it mark and proofread it and provide feedback based on known good criteria.
Meaning that they didn’t just fail to demonstrate that these supplements could lead to superhuman performance. They didn’t even just fail to demonstrate that they enhance performance. They failed to demonstrate that their overall effect isn’t deleterious.
And yet everyone involved believed quite firmly, based in part on personal experience, that it was self-evident that these supplements would make them better athletes.
A lot of the arguments for AI in education aren’t far off from the reasoning behind the kinds of popular supplements they used in the Enhanced Games. The limits of that style of thinking are demonstrated quite nicely in the 2010 Canadian Medical Association Journal article “Cigarette smoking: an underused tool in high-performance endurance training”: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3001541/
We haven't yet got to the downstream question of what white collar jobs are going to look like in the AI era.
In other words, it made more sense to 'frontload' hardthought and pondering so one was prepared [for whatever may come].
People also thought aqueducts were the best way to move water for thousands of years.
Numerical methods, however, would require at least minimal computing hardware.
I think there should be a guiding principle of using the least amount of tech in teaching any subject, just like principle of least privilege in cybersecurity.
They still do because they still are? I'm hard pressed to think of a better way to move water than creating a gently sloped channel(this includes any pipelines that don't use pumps, by the way) for it to follow from where it is to where you need it. Many places that don't have sufficient local groundwater are still supplied by aqueducts to this day. If you have to pump it, then you're paying for the channel and the energy, which is worse than just using gravity.
And gravity-feed systems are the best way to move large amounts of water. That's even how nature works, and nature moves much more water than humans do.
University impact on careers in the 1980s was materially different than now, and that is still "modern education".
Opposing the AI impact on universities is not equivalent to opposing modern water infrastructure, it's more akin to being opposed to a new water pipe material that is shown to improve flow but have adverse health effects.