“I was asking what I thought were reasonable questions: Is the electronic classroom an improvement? Does a computer help a student learn? Yes, but what it teaches you is to go to the computer whenever you have a question, rather than relying on yourself. Suppose I was an evil person and wanted to eliminate the curiosity of children. Give the kid a diet of Google, and pretty soon the child learns that every question he has is answered instantly. The coolest thing about being human is to learn, but you don’t learn things by looking it up; you learn by figuring it out.”

The question is coming up yet again with current LLMs and other AI. The previous waves displaced some people but generally modernized by automation many manual processes. Will this wave or the next or the next one after that be the one that displaces the need to learn altogether such that we are totally dependent on the machine and find ourselves unable to proceed without it having lost our aptitude to lean? Of course there will be people who keep on learning because of momentum or because they have an affinity for the old ways, just as we have hose riders, despite modern transportation, but not enough to sustain the system were the future generation of AI to fail (for whatever catastrophic reason like solar blast, etc.)