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Comment by Brian_K_White | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think it's funny?

It's not the new calculator nor the new index.

The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!

Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).

You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.

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How do you not recognize that it’s a new tool that will materially shape how people work 10 years from now? For most office workers, I guarantee they will interact with it more often than a calculator.

Consider a CS student applying for a programming job but saying “nope, I absolutely won’t use any AI to code” - do you think they’ll be a competitive candidate at most companies? It’ll be like an Excel-sceptic financial analyst: you can do it by hand, but you won’t be able to compete.

I recognize that many people will treat it as such.

In the context of child education, it doesn't matter at all if it will "materially shape how people work in 10 years".

The skills needed to keep up with those "material changes" fit in one thrice-a-week elective in one semester, akin to a touch typing or Microsoft Office class. It does not need to saturate every class on every topic for every year.

But what happens when it does saturate education that way is that students no longer absorb the foundational knowledge and process skills that we need them to bring with them as they become our colleagues and neighbors some day. That's very troubling.

Childhood education is not a checklist over generating history papers and trigonometry proofs by whatever means possible. It's a means of inducting young people into a functional society by conveying them civic, art, and technical knowledge and inspiring them to discover that learning is something they can do throughout their lives and that it makes them more capable.

Indisciminately letting them skip that process by asking the magic blathering box for all the answers as soon as they're asked gets in the way of that.

"In the context of child education, it doesn't matter at all if it will "materially shape how people work in 10 years"." is fundamentally wrong.

It absolutely matters. That's the entire justification for why society spends what it does on education: to enable individuals to contribute to society when they grow up.

K-12 education is not supposed to be a liberal arts education in the classics. It's already drifted too far away from imparting useful life and employment skills.

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