Hacker News Reader

Comment by jolmg | Hacker News Reader

>> Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.

> This is a real question though.

Is it? Why bother to learn how to add 2 numbers when you can just use a calculator.

> Learning means something different than it did in decades previous.

Not really. This is just the acquisition of a new tool. It can possibly be incorporated into education like how calculators were used in the 00s/90s, but you must know how to do the work without the tool.

View on HN

You don't need to know how to do the work without the tool. Knowing how to add two numbers together is not the point. Knowing what numbers to add and why is what you need. Just computing the answer hasn't been an interesting skill in my whole lifetime.

> You don't need to know how to do the work without the tool. Knowing how to add two numbers together is not the point.

Would you really raise your kids to not know how to add 2 numbers on their own?

I wouldn't even raise my kids to not know how to wash their clothes without a washing machine.

Wouldn't want them to be useless on their own, to be dependent on tools to take care of them.

It's fine to use tools to augment what you're able to do, but it'd be a kind of failure of their elders / of their environment to not teach them how to live on their own, independent, or at least dependent on as few things as possible. Tools aren't necessarily always going to be available in their lives. Having options for their life's necessities is good.

It also helps to know when the job's done well. Just because clothes come out of the washing machine doesn't necessarily mean they're clean.

If we're talking:

> Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.

Kind of scary to think of adults that need AI to do their thinking for them, with the adults not knowing how to verify anything and just trust the output.

I mean, my kids can both do mental math because it's something they sort of absorbed along the way. But yeah I don't super value it as something to focus on. I've never done laundry without a washing machine nor would I know how to teach someone how. Though I'm sure I could look it up.

Once smart glasses with displays or just talking to Ai in your earbuds becomes humanly ubiquitious then I believe the game changes. As long as it's 100% correct humans become know it alls.

I hooked up my local LLM with zim-tools and a 120GB copy of Wikipedia. With some very strict instruction it's turned into a bar-trivia machine, it can answer factual questions faster than I can look them up and it's all offline.

The fun starts when you ask it more complicated questions like 'i have a device that communicates with microwaves and draws a maximum of 20mA at 12v, is it safe for use near humans?' It will look up microwave safety, ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, workplace exposure limits and eventually come up with 1/4W is already safe and the device likely is not a 100% efficient microwave transmitter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com