Hacker News Reader

Comment by a2ff6eeb0 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

The important thing is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.

If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).

And imagine the staggering power that already gives OpenAI et al. Hundreds of millions of people _doing whatever they suggest_.

It’s not ‘even the learned how to learn’.

It’s the exposure to feeling under pressure, creativity of the mind etc - the less you expose a human to ‘suffering’ the more useless they become.

These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.

Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.

Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.

You need some baseline knowledge to be able to gauge the correctness of answers you get from AI and to be able to ask the right questions. Removing homework and exams seems very short-sighted.

We could also drop school altogether and just make sure every kid has an LLM-connected device that's voice driven. They wouldn't even need to learn to read and write -- that's old school.

update: this would make universal education free! because MegaCorp would happily give/support the devices free of charge (in exchange for ads being inserted into the responses)

If we actually manage to create superintelligence that makes human mental labor unable to compete economically, can you give me a reason that humans should value education? I personally think there's some inherent fun in learning, but that's not a reason to impose my hobby on everyone.

I think we're working very hard to build a world where there's no real reason for education.

> I think we're working very hard to build a world where there's no real reason for education.

I don't know who you mean by "we", certainly not "me". But yes, the MegaCorps are indeed working hard on this, because they want to be the ones to provide the devices. And governments would be happy too so long as they're aligned with MegaCorp because it solves the "citizens' access to much information results in critical thinking that might be critical of us" problem -- a problem China solved with their GFW and censorship.

"we" as in this society.

Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.

(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)

Humans aren't going to be doing a better job of thinking and creativity in the long run compared to AI; there's fun in doing it for yourself, but that's not a great reason to force it on everyone, rather than just those who find it fulfilling. There'll be plenty of people who still think and create as a hobby, but if the AI can cover the creativity that the economy needs, why not let it?

I'm pretty sure people will consume the creative output of AI, since it'll be better able to make things catered to precisely what they find interesting. Human creativity is on its way out.

> We also don't know how to use flint and steel to start fires any more.

Tell me you weren't a Boy Scout without telling me you weren't a Boy Scout.

you know we let social media companies cause massive harm over 2 decades; but clearly, this will be deifferent!

Why one would care? Look at your comment from two days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363319

> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.

Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.

Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366313

You gotta pick a lane with your rah-rah-ism.

I believe 4 things:

1) We're building a tool that can make toil of every kind obsolete. We're not there yet, but I'm watching it happen in real time.

2) The fact that it works so well economically means that it's inevitably going to take over. Humans simply won't be profitably employable, and this will happen sooner than you think.

3) The takeover could lead to a utopia, where nothing is needed of anyone, and you could do what you want when you want it.

4) Humans are likely fuck that up, and it's worth doing what you can to end up in the group that benefits. Sipping wine on the beach isn't mutually exclusive with a great deal going to the winners.

I do not believe that human brains are magical, and I think that they can be surpassed with manufactured brains.

Concerns over equitable the distribution is doesn't affect the value of skills.

I get it, there's a strong anti-AI vibe here because of point 4. I'm somewhat worried, but I'm also really excited about the possiblilities, and I don't think we can avoid going to a fully AI future no matter how anti-AI you are; we can only figure out where to set the dial on how the rewards get shared.

Points one and two are irrelevant to my comment, but that’s fine. I don’t expect any thoughts to be spent on whether not to deploy that stump speech.

What doesn’t make sense in points 3 and 4 are that the AI takeover is lead and powered by vile cretin scum who, in their former more honest days, were gleefully announcing the end of labor power. Being lead by them, how could it lead to “utopia”? Well, there are two possibilities that some AI evangelist might bring up.

1. It’s the volition of the AI that could lead to the “utopia”—they/it simply take charge after some threshold

2. No, it is still human-lead

This point (1) conflicts with your own point (4) though; the all-powerful (or converging on at least) AI is foiled by human sins? How?

The other point (2) conflicts with my point about how it is the vile cretins who are in charge of AI.

All powerful? nah, just better at thinking than humans are, and shaped by the way that they were produced. Humans still carry the stamps of where they came from, for example the fear of snakes[1]. AI will probably have an "instinctive" liking for people, an an "instinctive" respect for human law, to the degree that the initial training set them up for it.

Utopian and not is a gradient, not a dichotomy, and where we land on the gradient is a matter of how things shape up in the next several years.

https://www.smu.edu/news/archives/2012/thomas-headland-mothe....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com