[flagged]
Terence Tao a few days ago [1]:
> When we point the AIs at really difficult problems where none of the standard techniques apply, they are still very, very bad, I mean they're just randomly guessing.
Please don't reply saying they'll be proving the Collatz conjecture next week. It adds nothing.
[1] https://youtu.be/svl_1upFpQo (worth watching on the role of LLMs in maths)
And we're only a couple of years in. Their capabilities aren't going to be getting worse over time. These kids will be hitting the workforce after AI has another decade of improvement put into it.
Your broader point is based on a future extrapolation of LLM capabilities that is far from guaranteed to play out, so it sounds like poor risk management to me, even accepting your framing of it purely in terms of value in the workforce (which I don't).
If true, this is a disastrously foolish thing to believe. Education is only going to become more important as supervising increasingly advanced AI agents becomes more difficult. We need people who understand all different domains of human endeavor at the deepest level possible.
I mean, what's the alternative? AI does everything for me and I play Fortnite all day? Might as well plug yourself into the Matrix.
The situation will probably be like with airline pilots. The plane is mostly an automated system, but we simply don't let automation to work through exceptional situations, without human review. Therefore, lots of pilot training (and their presence) is still required.
But it's also hard to guess what exactly skill should the pilots have. It's clear that lots of things from manual aircraft do not translate well to automated.
>In 1997, American Airlines captain Warren VanderBurgh gave a lecture warning about the dangers of autopilot. He titled it "children of the magenta line," after the magenta coloured course line the flight computer draws across a cockpit display. He noticed that pilots were so used to following that line, to managing the automation rather than actually flying the plane, that they lost their own skills to manually fly the plane. This wasn’t a problem until it was a problem.
>VanderBurgh’s concern was not about autopilot itself but rather the complete dependency on autopilot at the expense of the internal knowledge of how it works and the loss of the judgment to know when to use it. In 2009, his warning came true in the very worst way possible over the Atlantic. When Air France 447’s sensors iced over, the autopilot handed a perfectly good airliner back to its crew, the pilots, confused and out of practice, stalled it into the sea.
-https://carlhendrick.substack.com/p/children-of-the-magenta-...
Children Of The Magenta Line -https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
Give yourself a few hours to write out some code in the old way. Can you really tell me that you could not have done a better job with AI in the same time?
Eg, implement chess or poker games.
Or write a component like a Swiss table.
It's not obvious to me that AI produces bad work at all.