One thing that I've noticed as I've gotten older is that the introduction of calculus has slowly moved to younger and younger students. I suspect the tools are partly responsible for this. Less time on basic math and algebra.
When I first started calculus, I was furious at being taught Newtonian Physics and some bits of chemistry without calculus. It's a stupid bunch of equations you have to learn, which Newton worked out from calculus. I'm glad people are getting it more often together now, but also just a bit jealous at the same time.
A calculator is a tool that replaced the slide-rule or Abacus - no one contended the Abacus replaced teaching or teachers. Ditto an iPad which is effectively just a fancy calculator in this context.
Similarly Youtube didn't replace teachers - it afforded remote learning and correspondence courses a new medium for transmission, recording, and playback of teaching.
More to the point none of those were trained on a corpus containing the history of human pedagogy, were capable of inference, or of generating dynamic learning resources based on best-practice models with inherent self-correction and pedagogical reinforcement mechanisms.
This line of reasoning makes sense, but also I would say that a lot of technologists who are interested in education realize that they have to design something that wouldn't just give the answers away because that's not the point of learning. That seems like it can be pretty difficult to accomplish with LLMs because I bet if a student keeps pestering them, they will give up the answer or give a clue that makes the problem way too obvious.
So usually the claims about replacing tutors like in this article come from a place where they usually give a caveat that maybe for highly motivated and ambitious students, they can figure out how to accelerate their learning with AI. But then that undermines the whole argument of transforming education if it wouldn't work with students who are average or below-average in their academic achievement.
I didn't. People who think they're learning from YouTube are mostly not learning, just thinking they did. I watched someone design a common-base amplifier. Can I design a common-base amplifier now? No, I can't. I now have a slight awareness of what one does, but I couldn't design it.
And at your standard of "learning", 95% of students don't learn anything anywhere. I also align with what you must think of as "true learning", but at that standard, most people are "mostly not learning" at regular schools and unis.
Sounds like there are too many white collar employees and not enough white collar jobs. The market can pick and choose, wait for the perfect candidate to pop up.
> But a lot of humans don’t want to step on others’ toes or be perceived as acting out of line.
It's conditioning. In all organizations above a certain size (> 100 people), stepping out of line receives an official reprimand. Someone always complains. Receive enough reprimands and the person is terminated. People learn to stay in line because they've been punished whenever they step out of it.
Unless the organization really truly rewards that behavior. Which is rare.
The senior-most people (VPs, founders) often say they want it. But it’s the middle managers who will stab you in the front in revenge, while staring you in the eye. And if the VP doesn’t step in, they are endorsing the outcome.
The legend of Richard Montañez and inventing Flaming Hot Cheetos itself is not supported by facts, but the underlying story of someone low level who jumped the chain of command and contacted executives at the company seems to hold up. Which means there's at least one organization out there for which it's true.
In most cases, they are only useful to other scientists in their field, which does mean that they are useless to the general person until they show up in the form of a new commodity.
Others have chimed in on cost and size, I'll chime in on power. The 8x 5090s will require a dedicated datacentre grade power source. The Mac Studio runs on a plain jane wall socket.
This guy doesn't think deeply about any problem, possibly because he has never had to and probably because he has never wanted to. He would probably make a good residential plumber.
You must not be a home owner because good residential plumbers are definitely out there solving the “hard problems” that techies love to bloviate about every day.
Literally the author of the comment I responded to? Do you not know how to read?
Let me deconstruct it for you.
His words:
He would probably make a good residential plumber.
would probably make a good residential plumber
probably make a good residential plumber.
make a good residential plumber.
a good residential plumber.
good residential plumber.
It seems unfair to conflate the rationalism of Berkeley, Locke, Russell and Hitchens who hold critical thinking in the highest regard, to AI maximalists, who seem to be using rationalidm mainly as a cover for their own pet ideas on social reengineering.
The former is mainly about being true to the scientific process of evidence-led discovery, while the latter is... whatever it is (but rational it is not). From a critical thinking perspective, there is no evidence to suggest the current form of AI could achieve superintelligence, and mechanisms that could enable ASI have not been discovered yet. Their perspective, on the other hand, is far more activist.
I think most people who are familiar with proper Rationalism are able to tell it apart from the subject of present-day movements. Those that aren't are right to criticize the harms that they see.
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