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Comment by Ralo | Hacker News Reader

I'm taking courses at my local college (heavy duty diesel tech) and I'm finding how little use the teachers is for me. I got a digital copy of the textbook, and downloaded all the courses notes, pumped that into claude and made a discord bot that generates me quizes, tracks all my progress, and builds me a study guides off the results.

Superior to any teacher I've ever had, no matter how involved they are. I genuinely don't even see what my teacher is needed for beyond a requirement for me to be there. I can ask the bot "can you clarify X section" at 3am and it'll do in 1 second. In class, the teacher reads the slides, adds some extra points and takes questions. But my bot does all this, completely personalized to me.

Times move on, and I don't see teachers surviving. I'm hoping by next year the college will offer an "at home, self paced course" option. Theres no reason for me to be there.

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> Superior to any teacher I've ever had

Have you independently verified your learning?

AI is moving fast, so I'm very open to the suggestion that Claude can do today what it couldn't six months ago. But my experience with folks who are learning from AI, historically, has been that they have high confidence in abilities they are not able to demonstrate when asked to show mastery through conventional problem solving.

I teach many data/ML courses for clients using their data. It is amazing how many insights both the students (as SMEs of the data) and the teacher (as an SME of the techniques) can have when going through certain techniques together. Quite often, we get a "those last 5 minutes more than paid for the training" insight.

I think that is possible with AI (I haven't experienced it), but I also feel like most folks use basic/naive/cursory techniques when using AI because they don't know what they don't know.

edit: misread your post.

I do, all the time. I get test, do good and then the college signs off that Im a certified mechanic when Im done.

Maybe its more of a critique on the school, but no one tests you on your ability to disassemble an engine and rebuild it. They simply make you write a test based off terms you learned in a textbook.

This was exactly my experience in high school, university, and now the same in college.

I would of killed for this bot during my math courses in university.

> no one tests you on your ability to disassemble an engine and rebuild it. They simply make you write a test based off terms you learned in a textbook

Out of curiosity, where–geographically–are you going to school?

If you're able to pass you theoretical tests without AI, it's fair to say you're learning what's being tested.

Canada

Its the job of the labour market (firms) to determine who is of value - after they've let the grifters who are well-connected in.

This has been my experience as well as someone who uses the frontier models quite a bit, I think it's easier than ever to deceive myself into thinking I'm being productive or learning. I've noticed it in others as well.

Part of it is shear volume of "stuff" that I'm doing on the fly while leaning on AI as a crutch for speed (otherwise why wouldn't I just do it myself), the other part is that it's ephemeral, even if you read all the lines of code, it's hard to beat manually typing them yourself for retention _and_ failing at it, and being forced to teach myself what I did wrong.

All that's to say, I think AI psychosis can happen at a group level.

reminds me a lot of my learning process. I read fast, seemingly picked up concepts quickly, can answer some sample questions. I felt fairly prepared, and honestly most classes were a breeze with that.

Then, for better or worse, I was pushed to honors and AP classes in high school. The same methods didn't work there. Things got more abstract and I needed to connect multiple concepts together. Math drills turned into word problems that revealed weaknesses in my older math fundamentals. reciting facts from a required reading wasn't enough; I needed to know what that meant and understand the setting of the book.

My grades suffered and you can argue the "academically optimal" way would have been to not take so many advanced classes. But those experiences definitely helped me to critically think better. Eventually (My English and History appreciation would come much later. Math and Science trained me well).

It is also a shame how much the quality of the teacher can affect this experience and perception of education as a whole. I wonder if those enthusiastic to replace the teacher ever had one that fit their needs?

And are you learning whatever you are learning for personal gratification or hoping to use that skill for survival? I am asking because the way I see it, just like the teachers, everyone is becoming useless.

The issue is a shitty teacher or curriculum.

Teachers and schools need to let LLMs do the things they are better at, and concentrate on having instructors do the things that LLMs cannot. Teachers that only read from the slides have always been a problem.

Your instructor should be having you dismantle an injector pump or bleed an air locked injector rail. You can read a book about how to do that, but you won’t really know how to do it until you’ve done it for reall

Correct but more so the lack of access to great teachers.

LLMs are not the solution to providing the best teacher at scale that people think it is.

I agree. However, the majority is theory. It's probably 80% theory, 20% practical.

I don't necessarily disagree with your point, but Western societies are already plagued by loneliness and isolation. That will only get worse if everyone just stays at home to learn. The point of schools -- I mean, less for adult education, but still -- has always been not just the concrete knowledge being taught, but also social skills, patience, humility, learning how to learn, and interaction with other humans.

If we want an education system optimised for producing capable agent jockeys, then by all means this seems an efficient way to do so. But sometimes I wonder if, for all the modern wonders capitalism and individualism have brought us, we haven't lost track of being humans - all sharing a temporary seat on a fragile spaceship, hurtling through darkness and uncertainty.

Just keeping our heads to the AI grindstone until we die doesn't really seem to be a good answer to what to do with our existence.

Our desires are being met increasingly by fewer and fewer humans.

It's the great turn inward of humanity.

I thought the same until I had kids. I realized that kids generally want to learn, but they usually think what the teacher is telling them is not the best thing to be learning. No technology, not even AI, overcomes the student's ego; in fact, technology rarely even tries to address that issue. I think this often applies to adults too. Teachers continue to be necessary to help students achieve an appropriate level of humility to be able to learn.

You clearly have enough humility in your field to be able to soak up knowledge. That's great for you! I suggest your dedication is rare and teachers continue to be essential for society.

> Teachers continue to be necessary to help students achieve an appropriate level of humility to be able to learn.

I never saw a teacher that managed to do that. Not to any of my classmates, nor to me.

I don't know if my statement would apply to grade school kids. They have completely different requirements. I'm mainly referring to post secondary.

I think you Chesterton's fence'd teachers.

This comment is disgustingly depressing

Formal education has more than just an instructive role. In fact, it's everything but the instruction. Reciting content to learners doesnt necessarily help them learn.

Teaching should turn into conveyance of taste. The teacher should help figure out what needs to be examined and how to examine; help figure out ways to close the gap between the textbook and reality. AI can't do those things well yet, and perhaps it never will be able to.

I agree with this point.

Maybe all education will get more and more similar to e.g. learning an instrument.

You can get everything from YouTube videos, sure. But a good teacher will help with things like knowing how to get a good repertoire for your skill set, what bad habits not to develop that will cripple your ability to learn more complex pieces over time, etc.

I think expertise in hard subjects will only become more and more valuable (as always), and thus harder and harder (and more expensive) to achieve.

Sadly, the truth is that in school, you're only rewarded for what you vomit back up on the test. Rote memorize some formulas and facts, copy those back on the test and you're now a certified mechanic/engineer/doctor/whatever. That's exactly what got me through math courses in university.

Sucks, but its true. In my case, if there was a test that required me to disassemble an engine top to bottom, claude would be mostly useless.

In my experience, that was pretty much true until I started doing small discussion-group-style graduate classes. But those are necessarily capped by staff-to-student ratios.

Not for the person who's making it and accruing the benefit!

The perceived (i.e. self reported) benefit.

I have a feeling AI is hitting all the same dopamine receptors as your attention grabbing apps and video games, is highly addictive, and is merely making you feel like you are achieving something. Sort of like DuoLingo.

The problem is, I write my tests and do great! So, this is working. It is exactly what the college is rewarding me for.

If I was using this AI and my grades were poor then I'd agree, that its perceieved but its provably working.

We see the same at my university. It's sadly the reality of it.

We are kind of envisioning that university will be a place for social activities, mingling, rich people meeting partners, etc. So we are moving towards more of that.

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