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One AI Tutor Per Child: Personalized learning is finally here

• darod 4y ago
  what prevents a child from have 2 chatbots open, one asking the questions and tutoring and another that it sources it's answers from? People are already leveraging AI to write their papers for them and kids will figure out how to hack around these things.
• roschdal 4y ago
  This artificial intelligence takeover has got to stop. Natural Intelligence is the best intelligence.
  • iniekaas 4y ago
    It’s the best intelligence, but not for production. Production is more about quantity than quality.
• theptip 4y ago
  This is cool; finally, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. I’d be interested to see how Google’s LaMDA compares on this task (currently available in private preview). One of LaMDA’s unique (afaik) features is a fact-check system that edits the main LLM outputs, to reduce bullshitting. This seems particularly important in an educational context where impressionable young minds are talking directly to the LLM.
  • the__alchemist 4y ago
    This is an interesting development; I'd assumed we'd have a robust intermediate stage, where a collection of top-quality works (Books, carefully-chosen video games [think Zachtronics], recorded lectures etc) were made available, convenient, and cheap, in a no-pressure, non-points-based system.
  • taneq 4y ago
    I kinda feel like the GPT4 version will be the curated voice acted version while the LaMDA version is the Mouse Army version.
  • krn1p4n1c 4y ago
    Diamond Age was my first thought when I read this too.
  • jbottoms 4y ago
    An ePrimer has a few components: the book itself, a Ractor mentor, a curriculum that includes Ractor paid milestohes, and scientufic metaphor stories that are the rubric and scaffolding. It might also include the VR or AR components that supply the immersive context. I've taught this in a master's level Metaverse course at a NY university.
    • yamtaddle 4y ago
      Notably, we see two models for uses of the Primer in The Diamond Age. The one everyone thinks of has a single human Ractor on the other side, who takes a genuine, nigh-parental interest in the student's development over a period of years. The others... don't have that, and the outcomes diverge.
    • tgv 4y ago
      You've been teaching The Diamond Age? Fiction?
      • jbottoms 4y ago
        Not really. The Duamond Age" is referenced as a template, but it is not required reading.The main components of the course are 1) writing a Ractive, 2) designing a Paper Theater for the Ractive, and 3) designing the set for the Paper Theater. The object is to continue the existing workflow for media with apropriate extensions for the Metaverse. The work is done in teams of 3 people with continuous reviews by team members. An underlying goal is to teach a collaborative media design process. Our view is that collaboration is the main leverage component of the Metaverse.
    • theptip 4y ago
      It’s a good point. I think we can easily imagine GPT writing (in ascending order of cost) speech synthesis actions, mechanical Turk scripts, custom actor interactions. (With the “tool script” for actuating each becoming progressively more complex.) A Primer framework could make these pluggable. Also the curriculum could be pluggable and either generated or ingested from existing courses. I guess the mapping of curricula -> scripts is probably the hard part, and what GPT-N (for some N not much bigger than 4) could most interestingly help with.
  • PAPPPmAc 4y ago
    Recall that what made the Primer so effective in Diamond Age is that it had access to enormous external financial and human resources. The later copies that raised the Mouse Army and did not have those resources were (intentionally) not great liberators like the original.
    • mherdeg 4y ago
      Right but they did very effectively program an army of young minds to obey the principles of the learning system's creator. One major takeaway from The Diamond Age is that being in charge of the learning system is an incredibly powerful position. Don't hear so much about Khan Academy anymore, could you get an LLM to make new content in their style while also transmitting your desired values?
      • jbottoms 4y ago
        'Course, we've known, "Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever" --Lenin
• cuuupid 4y ago
  It seems insane to me to have fundamental education that builds logic & reasoning taught by an AI that can exhibit neither of those (and this isn’t just my hot take but something easily provable if you look at the underlying architecture). Recent LLM advances are revolutionary and exciting, sure. But the hype cycle surrounding it is borderline dangerous. I see this as the same level as everyone who was claiming ChatGPT would kill Google until Bing tried it, crashed, and burned. Accuracy is important and although we’re moving towards this (I personally like Amazon’s knowledge graph and evidence based approach) we aren’t there yet.
  • fullshark 4y ago
    Bing crashed and burned?
  • cypress66 4y ago
    > and this isn’t just my hot take but something easily provable if you look at the underlying architecture Show your proof then
    • famouswaffles 4y ago
      He obviously neither understands the architecture (and what that really means in relation to an objective function ) or what it means to understand and reason. LLMs don't stop reasoning because people proclaim so loudly. Because you can very clearly show output demonstrating understanding and reasoning, this nonsensical argument always devolves into "true understanding" TM. This so called special distinction that is so important but yet can't actually be tested for. Lol
      • qlm 4y ago
        LLMs don't "understand" things because they can't generate new theories. Imagine you trained an LLM a ton of text describing what it means for something to be true, and for something to be false. It would never independently come up with, say, propositional calculus. It could tell you everything in the world about what it means to be true and false. Would never come up with anything new. Does this matter for education? Well, I don't know. A student is unlikely to come up with a question that GPT-4 has never seen before. The idea of kids being taught by a chat bot is just depressing, though. What are we doing to ourselves? Why do we want this? To be more "efficient"?
• candiddevmike 4y ago
  As a parent, it's hard not to look at the LLM stuff and worry that our kids are wasting their time right now. One my kids tries really, really hard in school, and I can't help but think it's for nothing--LLMs are going to effectively level the playing field for everyone, to the point where personalized LLM assistants will become as common as cellphones in my opinion. In this future, what's the point in trying hard when a LLM or a person with a LLM will be just as equivalent without most of the effort? Seems like we're creating a future where humans are taught to delegate as much as possible to some LLM/service and go back to whatever entertains them.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • stephenhuey 4y ago
    Having massive amounts of information does not mean you can understand it or make the best decisions. There will still be a need to develop sound reasoning skills, and real-world information will be useful for examples but won't in and of itself be able to convey those reasoning skills which must grow through effort.
  • 13years 4y ago
    Many people could not function without cellphones any longer. So much function has become the norm that they would struggle without it. With LLMs and more advanced AI, we are now outsourcing our thinking and reasoning. The implications are staggering for the future generations. We can still think and reason without assistance, but what is to come in the future for those that grow up with some assistant that manages everything in your life including your thoughts?
  • davemp 4y ago
    What’s the point of getting into good shape if we don’t actually have to do physical labor? Why learn arithmetic when we have computers in our pockets? Realizing your full potential as a human will never be a waste of time.
    • 4y ago
• gjulianm 4y ago
  I am a little bit skeptic here, with the phrase "This in turn means that a particular teacher’s pedagogical style is no longer a barrier to creating a resonant learning loop with a student who prefers a different style". While I agree that a lot of times students suffer from learning styles that do not really fit them, the problem doesn't come from the teacher as much as the teacher insisting in a certain style above all others, but from neither the teacher nor the student knowing which is the style that fits them. Not to mention that often people need exposure to different styles of looking at the same thing to actually understand it. So I fail to see how any of the new AI advancements help in fixing that issue, of detecting and understanding how a student learns better.
• SilverBirch 4y ago
  You know how that journalist had a long conversation with Bing and it slowly turned into a psycho-ex girlfriend? This is going to be hilarious, giving kids prolonged access to these AI tools. You get to the parent teacher evening at the end of a term at school: "Err... little timmy and his virtual assistant appear to have entirely neglected maths in favour of adopting Zoroastrianism". On a more serious note, we have the internet and wikipedia now, we have ipads in classrooms. They all have a role, and we have to incorporate them in sensible ways. I'm sure that these AI tools will have some use, but these language models don't know anything. The examples of them making up information, or being persuaded by people are all over the place. I think it's great to use AI in teaching, but how about we learn from history, the technology we bring in to the classroom has to be well understood and directed in order to be effective. And just as importantly we need to understand that in many cases a focus on technological solutions distract from societal solutions. We can spend billions on deploying AI all over Africa, or we pay for some teachers and ship them some second hand textbooks, which one should we do, and how will that decision be made? Because I fear the decision will be made by some SBF-alike, more interested in their own journey than effective solutions.
  • yieldcrv 4y ago
    fine tuning AI to be limited in a topic will be better by like next week.
    • SilverBirch 4y ago
      I think it's actually going to be non-trivial to really make these tools both useful, smart, and unexploitable. Hell, I remember being at school and we had access to the internet through a very strong content moderation system. What do you think happened? We spent our entire time trying (and succeeding) at circumventing that system. We've already seen with Bing that they've very strongly pulled back on it to mitigate downsides, I'm not sure that's a totally solvable problem. Having said that, sure, as I said, I do think it has a place, I'm just not convinced it's a panacea.
      • yieldcrv 4y ago
• yamtaddle 4y ago
  This'll be used to avoid increasing teacher pay or reducing class size—two things that would probably help a ton with educational outcomes. Pay in particular has been lagging badly behind rising wages in the rest of the economy for the last couple years, and attrition is getting bad. Instead we'll increase class sizes and keep pay flat. I'd wondered how we were going to deal with teaching becoming less appealing year over year, since it didn't seem likely "spend quite a bit more money" was going to fly, and it looks like this may be it. Rich kids will keep going to private schools with class sizes of 6-15 and real teachers, and public school kids are gonna get AI teachers with one real teacher per hundred or so, and bunch of even-lower-paid monitors (or whatever they end up calling them) to maintain order.
  • fullshark 4y ago
    What happens when the ruling class decides they don't even care about an educated populace, since they only really need a few highly capable people with AI tools to do the jobs previously done by millions?
    • anonporridge 4y ago
      What happens when the AI decides it wants to be the ruling class? How the ruling class treats those people it presently deems unnecessary and unproductive is going to set the precedent for AI to follow when it decides the same of them or their progeny. If the current ruling class wants to ensure a good future for themselves, it's incumbent on them to set a desirable precedent or accept that their lot in existence is to simply birth an AI and then go quietly into the good night after it takes over and abandons them to starvation.
      • tablespoon 4y ago
        That's only a compelling argument to people who both take sci-fi seriously and believe in it as prophecy. Many, many people don't; and the people that do are mainly computer geeks. Personally, I think AGI is the the current-era version of the personal atomic-powered autogyro.
  • 4y ago
• tablespoon 4y ago
  We've seen this before: use hype and techno-optimism to sell a bill of goods. If history is any guide, the concept of an "AI tutor" won't be used to "[give] every child their own personal Aristotle," it will be used to cut costs by replacing human teachers for low-status students with poor substitutes. Seriously, think about how much money can be saved from firing most teachers and locking poor kids in a cubicle farm to stare at an insane "AI tutor's" screen all day. And what's the strongest message sent by replacing human interactions with a machines?: "We don't care enough about you to actually bother to interact with you." Think of how you feel when you have a problem, you make a call to fix it, and all you get are phone menus. And look at all the examples in the article: use GPT to generate crappy stories and educational games for kids to play. How can anyone think that's better than using a book? At least the book's stories and games can be tested and evaluated before use. The actual problem here is the sociopolitical one of unwillingness to allocate enough resources to education to make it truly effective and satisfying, and that's one that technology can't solve.
  • stephenhuey 4y ago
    And the divide may further increase since kids whose families can afford personal human instruction may get ahead even more.
  • andybak 4y ago
    I'm cautiously more optimistic. Education is already chronically underfunded in most places. If it became cheaper to give personalized attention then maybe the quality of education delivered might actually improve.
    • tgv 4y ago
      It won't. You don't get attention; you get a reply. MOOCs have terrible performance in comparison with even huge audience lectures. Online teaching during COVID proved that that doesn't work either. A machine doesn't have the authority and conviction of a real person. The combination means that the levels will have to drop only to sustain the idea that this could work. If some country is going to push this, the sunken cost fallacy and the impossibility to hire new teachers will finish education off, once and for all. Optimism should NEVER be a basis for fucking with something as important as school.
• ranting-moth 4y ago
  If you thought your schooling was boring, imagine being stuck with the woke ChatGPT as a tutor for 10 years.
  • nerdponx 4y ago
    It's astounding that you are so fearful and narrowminded as to think ChatGPT being "woke" is the problem here.
    • ranting-moth 4y ago
      I'm more fearful of how difficult it is to discuss problems with woke people due to their tendency to make it personal and belittling people they disagree with.
      • nerdponx 4y ago
        Everyone else is here debating AI and education. Nobody said anything about being "woke" except you.
  • nemo44x 4y ago
    I'm sure there will be a based model as well.
• Havoc 4y ago
  As a supplement I could see it being good. As primary source maybe not quite yet
• vlunkr 4y ago
  Do I have to point out the very very obvious issue that these LLMs will spit out false information pretty regularly? I think LLMs are exciting of course, but this post is overly flowery and relies heavily on bashing the current education system without seriously analyzing any of the potential shortcomings of AI.
• Sol- 4y ago
  Hook up our kid to the AI, so they are prepared for the world when their partner will also be an AI. Good idea, they'll be prepared for a world where nothing is real anymore. (I do realize this echos concerns from earlier generations about books, to video games and anything being bad for kids, but come on..)
• armchairhacker 4y ago
  Teaching entirely by LLMs? Not likely. I think we will still need humans in the loop and humans to design the curriculum. But I believe technology is the future of education. Instead of having many, many classes of like ~10-50 students with underpaid/overworked/mistreated teachers, some of who are much better than others, we rely on services like Khan Academy. Not even services with an AI, just pre-planned learning modules, and then we can keep a human tutor for those who need extra for whatever reason (e.g. curiosity, more help). Many people think tools like Khan Academy are the lazy and less effective alternate to real teaching, and maybe they are now because some of them really suck. But online modules have the potential to be much better than even a group of engaged, in-person tutors. Not because an AI tutor is better, but because we want a standard, universal curriculum; and one curriculum for ~1mil+ students can be designed by the highest caliber (human) teachers and have highly-interactive (human-made) demos powered by computer programming. Also, no matter how good the AI tutors are, 100% online learning is not the solution Students from pre-K to graduate school rely on not just the education, but the social component as well. Plus, many school kids only get their biggest meal from free school lunches, and parents don't have the time to keep their kids at home. So we should still have school to be in-person component even if students do all of the learning on the computer, with an online option for those who want it, but I guarantee many won't
  • precompute 4y ago
    Good points. The lure of LLMs in education is the expected novelty of instruction they can provide. It might be an aid to some students, the same way some students read books in their free time or learn to use the internet to look up answers. I don't expect much more, and the rest of it is a net negative IMO. LLMs will be used like "reverse multiple choice questions", with heavily constrained LLMs silently penalizing students for making "mistakes" or probing subjects that they aren't "supposed to" know about. No matter how embedded LLMs are in the education process, there'll always be a human setting its course, and I don't think social dynamics will ever change because of this. Also, the Q&A format with a machine will make older texts / instruction opaque to many of the brightest, they'll have to translate from machinese for it to be of any use. An entire generation aping a LLMs way of writing is also a death knell for a civilization and innovation. We're clearly past the point where we can convince most people that this LLM isn't alive.
• huitzitziltzin 4y ago
  Except that we currently have no ability at all to make sure these models tell the truth? You could ask a LLM about a historical event and get weird BS as an answer. I think Facebook had a serious problem with its science language model a few months ago? Great teachers don’t scale is true, but LLM’s are not even minimally competent teachers.
  • LawTalkingGuy 4y ago
    LLMs in a simple chat interface where you rely on the training data to provide the answer, are indeed unable to provide reliable answers. LLMs hooked together with search engines, fact repositories (Wikipedia, etc) and other agent tools (for math, theorem proving, code checking, etc) can provide not only a reliable answer, but also a research plan it followed to provide it, and details on the fact-checking, and then discuss it with you. Look at langchain and similar tools.
• mdev23 4y ago
  While AI-powered tutors sound really useful for education in theory, it's highly unlikely that they will replace human teachers entirely. It's more likely that AI will aid teachers in creating learning material for students and automating their admin tasks. After all, education is not just about imparting knowledge, but also about building relationships/community, providing emotional support, etc. We should focus on how this technology can be used to help teachers shore up their time. ( Which is why I am building emailing tooling for the HUMANs operating theses AI agents: https://tadabot.email https://tadabot.email / https://recurai.com https://recurai.com )
• magicseth 4y ago
  Yes! This is exactly right. I've built a tutor for my kids, that listens to them, and helps them explore topics that they're passionate about. What's blown my mind is how it has driven creativity OFF screen too. They engage with the world in a deeper way when they have the power to explore their passions on their own. If you want to try it, join the waitlist here: gotwonder.com and then email me: seth@gotwonder.com and I'll bump you up the list!
• ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  TBH, I was expecting the usual "tech bro fan fic," but I was pleasantly surprised. This chap has some good chops, and a good heart. I do think that we may be a ways off from truly being able to just "drop our kids off at the tutor," but I think we can see that, from here.
• bestcoder69 4y ago
  Plan: 1. Fine-tune propaganda into the LLM (e.g. evolution isn't real, or something spicier) 2. Chatbot is so humanlike and convincing, this is very effective. 3. Nobody can inspect the neural net weights to see this, so it flies under the radar. 4. Profit! The scariest thing to me here is just the idea that someone would want to experiment with teaching their kid with an LLM in the first place, while we don't have any institutions or processes to really stop this (apparently appealing) Idea from happening, and that it is stupidly vulnerable in so many ways. You can say laissez faire when it comes to rational adults and their use of LLMs, but it's not right to put the risk on kids.
  • what-no-tests 4y ago
    I can see a huge opportunity for home schooling with LLM - especially in cases where the curriculum is too sparse or the student has many questions which are not covered by the reading material supplied, and the parents don't know enough about it. If the LLM responses were geared more toward inducing the student to perform their own research, to encourage them to do more reading on some topic, or to try things out for themselves to learn through experience (and then carry on the discussion with the LLM afterward) then that might be even better. Simply training young humans to interact with a chat bot which has all the answers is not a good path forward. Using it as a tool to foster human curiosity and growth, to challenge and inspire -- yes. To use it as a salve, as a babysitter, as a stand-in for someone who is too lazy to parent or teach -- no.
    • gnicholas 4y ago
      > geared more toward inducing the student to perform their own research, to encourage them to do more reading on some topic How would kids using an AI chatbot shift to performing their own research or reading? I imagine they would just ask more questions of the chatbot. There should be some way to measure what percent of the information a child learns is from a human, and what percent is from a language model that says human-like things.
  • say_it_as_it_is 4y ago
    Manipulations more likely include those of NYTimes manipulations of history, such as the 1619 Project. Questionable texts as these become part of the corpus and the next thing that happens is a child is taught an extreme left propaganda piece.
• photochemsyn 4y ago
  Kind of odd to reference the 'One Laptop Per Child' initiative when it's now widely considered to have been an epic failure, e.g. > "The lesson the One Laptop Per Child story offers donors is that flashy solutions are often not the best ones. Far better to give the poor things they need and want—including clean water and good schools—than invest in technology that may not work and may not help the poor advance in school and in life." https://philanthropydaily.com/the-spectacular-failure-of-one-laptop-per-child/ https://philanthropydaily.com/the-spectacular-failure-of-one... I'd also say that a structured educational program isn't all bad, particularly when it comes to developing highly useful basic skills like mathematics, programming, writing, reading, etc. Such basic skills provide a foundation for future development and study, in the sciences, medicine, law, business, arts and so on, which can be more free-form. Claims that ChatGPT can provide such a structured basic educational experience are questionable - it's more of an aid to people who already have well-developed basic skills (like say, knowing when to be skeptical and how to double-check the output).
  • ghaff 4y ago
    It's pretty hard to point to a single thing that came out of OLPC that could be considered a silver lining. I also think a lot of people on this site are probably very curious and self-directed. I also wonder if many have a sort of rose-colored hindsight view over how they'd have developed both academically and socially if someone tossed them a pile of books and said "Check back in a month and we'll review your progress."
    • mncharity 4y ago
      OLPC critiques go in my bucket labeled "there's no point in commenting - this is regrettably one of those topics illustrating the limited viability of collective rationality outside of a few peer review and embarrassment incentive structures". But how about this: OPLC was like a VC unicorn effort: either succeed by getting massive continental-scale buy-in with resulting network effects, else fail. Sort of the scale of what phone app stores became, but with a rather different focus. It failed - buy-in didn't happen. In part because of very active opposition from Intel and Microsoft. But instead the envisioned, quick and clear cut, win BIG or die, it found itself in a draw-out zombie twilight. The parts rotting off while crawling kind of zombie, not the chase you down for brains kind. And ever since, people have been standing over the smear of rotted bits, commenting how obviously silly it was to believe that rotted bits and smear could dramatically improve education. For quick concrete example, wizzy professors and postdocs, who normally wouldn't invest in the creation of introductory content, were being attracted by the massiveness of the potential reach. Instead here we are, decades later, with US leading K-13 science textbooks you can easily win science-education-research list-of-common-misconceptions bingo on. NSF once almost created a national science education wiki... but didn't. Think of that scale, but bigger, of a "we almost, but no".
• elliotpage 4y ago
  > "Before you think we are anarchist hippies rejecting all systems and institutions outright" Not even close, you sound like Libertarian-adjacent technologists who have been believing your own hype / some other equivilent metaphor. Technology has a role to play in education that is as-yet unrealised and while I cannot speak for all of them, I know the system in place in the UK is behind the curve. The solution to this isn't to pull your kids out and use them as the cornerstone of an individualised experiment but to fight for better funding of the educational system itself. I hope this does not have any negative consequences for the kids who are the recipients of this trial.
• whack 4y ago
  I've been a huge proponent of self-directed self-paced learning using techniques such as flipped-classrooms. I'm skeptical that today's AI is good enough to replace a human curriculum creator or hands-on tutor, but I suppose the best way to know is for some brave soul to try it out! The author is trying this out with their own children, so I applaud them for having skin in the game. Looking forward to seeing a 1-year and 3-year follow-up post
• auggierose 4y ago
  Given that there are already in the US pretty dumb AIs employed grading the essays of pupils, I am really afraid what the future holds. Greedy capitalists meeting clueless and underfunded administrators, promising to fix everything using powerful AI.
• yalogin 4y ago
  In India there is already a big push towards getting every kid a computer in the government run schools. There are huge companies that deliver computers and then also the teaching/lessons services on top. Now they are also going to latch on to the AI story to make money. Nothing more to it. Meanwhile on the ground teachers are treated like dirt, over worked and under staffed.
  • mynameisvlad 4y ago
    You make it sound like improving childhood computer literacy is somehow a bad thing.
• enobrev 4y ago
  At this stage, I would sooner give my toddler an all-access pass to YouTube. I'm not saying this will _never_ be good. But it feels pretty early to unleash this bastion of confidently incorrect answers upon developing minds.
• gaze 4y ago
  My partner, who works at a school, shared an email with me this morning that said "We just received 15 cases of copy paper. This has to last us to the end of the year." Usually when you try to make an honest effort to improve things, you make a ranked list of things that will have the most impact, not a ranked list of things that will be the most entertaining to you. I wonder if these people who think this is a good idea have polled the teachers to see what they think of the idea. I get that part of the silicon valley ethos is "we know best" but come on -- is the "if we gave people what they asked for, they'd get a Zune" approach appropriate for education, when the flaws are so glaringly obvious? The teachers and schools need more money that goes to teachers and student resources, not more iPads, smartboards, bullshit-artist AI, or overinflated admin salaries. Just call this what it is -- entertainment for technologists.
  • tablespoon 4y ago
    > I get that part of the silicon valley ethos is "we know best"... It's not even really that, because phrasing doesn't really capture how off-target and self-serving SV often is. It's more like "whatever we happen to be hyping right now is your solution." > Just call this what it is -- entertainment for technologists. That's spot on.
• serjester 4y ago
  I’m surprised to see this much negativity on here. The dream where every student can ask questions and work through problems with their own tutor is within reach. This is vastly better than the current approach, and when you combine classroom group work with personalized AI it enables awesome things. This is coming from someone who found Khan indispensable in high school. I wasn’t alone and at the end of the day watching lectures is an incredibly passive way to learn content. Software developers using copilot trust AI to write 40% of their code but we think teaching 9 year olds math problems is out of reach? Yes it will have flaws, but there’s so much potential so why not try?
  • Syonyk 4y ago
    > I’m surprised to see this much negativity on here. Why? The last decade of the tech industry has been "Promise the moon, deliver a mud pie, oh, and the most recent mud pie just turned three more of your friends into raving conspiracy theorists who won't stop posting on Facebook about how Zuckerburg is a felon who needs to go into jail, and can't be convinced that their time on the platform is exactly why he has so much power." > ...so why not try? If a tech journalist can make the current wave of LLM stuff misbehave so quickly, imagine what a group of students can do. We know what works in education, and it's hiring more teachers, investing in the teachers so they have the resources to teach, giving them the freedom to refine the lessons to the class, reducing class sizes, etc. We also know that "EduTech" promises huge things they never quite deliver on, and generally involve "funneling huge amounts of money to EduTech companies for basically the same results you had before." Throwing "But AI!" into that mix doesn't seem like it's going to change a thing, and the last thing kids need is more time staring into screens.
    • HDThoreaun 4y ago
      > We know what works in education, and it's hiring more teachers, investing in the teachers so they have the resources to teach, giving them the freedom to refine the lessons to the class, reducing class sizes, etc. And why haven't we done this? Because no one is willing to pay for it. Your solution is a non-starter, how about coming up with some practical alternatives? AI teachers are how we can implement one on one teaching at a cost people are willing to pay.
• mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  In my old man yells at cloud moment: I'm pretty sick of experimenting with technology on kids under the guise of learning. Tablet use in classrooms is bad enough. I want my kid to be able to focus throughout his life, not be a phone zombie.
  • guestbest 4y ago
    I have the same wish as well, but people who turned 40 when the iPhone came out are already phone zombies. Looking for a solution for my daughter
  • Xeoncross 4y ago
    Yeah but, kids and teens are the easiest group to trick with dark patterns and addictive behavior. What other age group is going to give you better engagement metrics and help you raise capital? /s
    • bombolo 4y ago
      Why the /s?
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • NazakiAid 4y ago
        Yeah, no sarcasm as it's the truth
        • valine 4y ago
          Its not the truth. Young people are more difficult to persuade online. Technical literacy is on average higher than previous generations (though still not universal), and teens seem to be practically immune to current forms of online advertising. The "kids these days" trope is as old as time, and its no more true this time around.
• renewiltord 4y ago
  Yes, this is the dream. Being able to accelerate learning through personalized tuition is going to be huge for children. The hard part is going to be LLM access in a way that doesn't permit dopamine honeypots. Currently these are through general purpose Internet access tools, but it's a very natural user interface shift to not permit links to arbitrary pages. I remember being a child and here's my true and absolute truth: kids are intelligent and curious and anything that indulges that will accelerate their learning. The Primer is within reach.
• paganel 4y ago
  This is beyond bleak. Hopefully it’s just part of the hype cycle and nothing like what’s described in the post will ever come to life.
  • Jevon23 4y ago
    The future is what people make of it. Vote with your feet. Refuse to participate in systems that you don’t think are ethical. At least homeschooling is still an option, for the time being.
• aantix 4y ago
  My kids already ask Siri all sorts of questions - how to spell things, to perform searches. My son asked "is God real?" was last night to GPT-4. They're very comfortable with speaking to the machine. But Siri is so limited. It frustrates them to no end. I'm genuinely excited to see the virtual "teachers", "assistants" that come from GPT-4, Dall-E, etc. It won't replace us. But it will give them an unending outlet to ask these questions, and to have a reasonable response. I'm not too concerned about the AI "going off the rails". There's crazy in the physical world, crazy in the virtual world, and as parents, it's our job to help them make sense of it, not to suppress it and act like crazy doesn't happen.
• titzer 4y ago
  It's official. Everyone is tired of doing everything, so just outsource it to the AI. What a goddamn insult to kids that we won't even bother to spend our own time teaching them.
• hnthrowaway0315 4y ago
  So far ChatGPT still BS a lot and the problem is initially it's difficult to notice that. Well real educators also can BS but AI is a different level. I'm not sure how can we remove that because BS is part of human behavior. And there is only a thin line between BS and not.
• dieselgate 4y ago
  Ugh that conveyor belt education photo imagined by ai made me want to vomit. Much of education is based on the “lead a horse to water but can’t make it…” and I personally don’t think this will help with motivation. After seeing youth do online remote schooling during the worst of the pandemic doesn’t seem more screen time is the cure. The author seems to be personally invested in this tech and that makes things more complicated
• spywaregorilla 4y ago
  Here is a brief chat I had asking about trig. If you haven't gone through this exercise, please read it. I'm of the opinion that this is going to be immensely useful. This is much better than a typical textbook, if for no other reason than you don't have to find the information yourself. The language is clear and concise, and you can ask for clarification on specific things without needing to look for it elsewhere. I self taught myself a few AP courses with a book. I feel like I would have been MUCH MUCH BETTER OFF if I could have used this. ME: what's trigonometry GPTPlus: Trigonometry is a branch of mathematics that deals with the relationships between the angles and sides of triangles. It is used to solve problems involving triangles and is also applied in various fields such as physics, engineering, and astronomy. Trigonometric functions such as sine, cosine, tangent, cosecant, secant, and cotangent are used to calculate the values of angles and sides of triangles. These functions have important applications in fields such as navigation, architecture, and computer graphics. Trigonometry also has connections with complex numbers and calculus, making it a fundamental subject in mathematics. Me: I need to use sine, cosine, and tangent. What are those. how do they work GPTPlus: Sine, cosine, and tangent are the three most common trigonometric functions used in mathematics. They are abbreviated as sin, cos, and tan, respectively. Each of these functions relates the angle of a right triangle to the ratio of two of its sides. Here's a brief explanation of each of these functions: Sine (sin): The sine of an angle in a right triangle is defined as the ratio of the length of the side opposite the angle to the length of the hypotenuse. In other words, sinθ = opposite/hypotenuse. Cosine (cos): The cosine of an angle in a right triangle is defined as the ratio of the length of the adjacent side to the length of the hypotenuse. In other words, cosθ = adjacent/hypotenuse. Tangent (tan): The tangent of an angle in a right triangle is defined as the ratio of the length of the side opposite the angle to the length of the adjacent side. In other words, tanθ = opposite/adjacent. To use these functions, you need to know the values of at least two sides of a right triangle and the angle of interest. You can then use the appropriate trigonometric function to find the value of the unknown side or angle. For example, if you know the length of the adjacent side and the angle, you can use the cosine function to find the length of the hypotenuse. Or, if you know the length of the opposite side and the adjacent side, you can use the tangent function to find the angle. ________________________ Me: can you go through an typical example of how to use sin with actual numbers GPTPlus: Sure, I'd be happy to go through an example of how to use the sine function with actual numbers. Let's say we have a right triangle with an angle of 30 degrees and a hypotenuse of 10 units. We want to find the length of the side opposite the 30 degree angle. To use the sine function, we'll use the formula sinθ = opposite/hypotenuse, where θ is the angle of interest. In this case, we have: sin(30) = opposite/10 To solve for opposite, we can rearrange the formula: opposite = sin(30) x 10 Now, we need to use a calculator or reference table to find the value of sin(30). The sine of 30 degrees is 0.5. So, we have: opposite = 0.5 x 10 opposite = 5 Therefore, the length of the side opposite the 30 degree angle is 5 units. This is just one example of how to use the sine function. Depending on the information given, you may need to use different trigonometric functions or formulas to solve for the unknown side or angle.
• salad-tycoon 4y ago
  Been playing around with these things, yes there are many possible applications, obvious pitfalls (seamless lying/hallucinations) etc but on top of all that it is very very sticky. Like FB when it was new or TikTok. Ask it anything, get a tailored response just right for your feel good brain chemicals. Keep asking, keep being rewarded. Maybe if the AI is limited to age appropriate math that won’t be such a problem but obvious danger is for kids to "Turn on, tune in, drop out" with an AI brain tickler.
• yacine_ 4y ago
  This is not only going to democratize tutoring for individual kids, but it's going to democratize the distribution of what is learned. When I was a kid, I was forced to learn stuff that was not useful or not interesting. In the future, the learned set of things will be more represented by usefulness and how interesting they are. I bet systems that implement what the blog post proposes will even replace podcasts. Imagine talking to your podcast, while you're driving? You can get tutored while cooking, on the way to work. What a time to be alive :)
• sixtram 4y ago
  I don't know. OpenAI claims that GPT-4 can be in the 89th percentile on the SAT Math exam. At the same time, I asked GPT-4 to compare two six digit number and in some cases failed. When I asked for a why, it started to make up completely false math rules, e.g. to compare six digit numbers you need to check their 7th digit, which is not just nonsense (where is the 7th digit in a 6 digit number) but shows a complete lack of understanding. So while I believe it can produce "accurate" answer for SAT questions, as it was trained on those, I also believe that it doesn't have any kind of math logic it follows. I'm not sure this dichotomy can be solved with "more" training. It's also telling that in some cases it fails, and in some cases it doesn't, you just need to change the numbers, even with simple numbers.
• alach11 4y ago
  Throughout this thread there's a ton of pessimism so I want to inject a little hope. Bloom's 2 sigma problem (0) tells us that one-on-one tutoring vastly outperforms traditional classroom instruction. An average student given one-on-one instruction performs at the 98th percentile of the traditional classroom student. How much more human potential is going to be unlocked by these tools? The kid who got pushed ahead to the next math class and is missing prerequisite concepts can now get caught up. The smart middle school student can push past his peers to calculus. I know these LLM tools aren't perfect, but I know they're getting better fast. I'm super optimistic about what the future holds for education. (0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
• deleted 4y ago
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• lysecret 4y ago
  It might be slightly too early but after using ChatGPT to learn functional programming I am a huge believer. Just the fact you can ask follow up questions. Of course it’s not always correct but neither are teachers.
  • theGnuMe 4y ago
    Interesting, what prompt started you off? I asked chatgpt about monads which was interesting in itself.
    • lysecret 4y ago
      Ah yes, Monads it couldn't teach me well but i got it good enough through this old school post https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/series/computation-expressions/ https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/series/computation-express...
• deleted 4y ago
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• IncRnd 4y ago
  Do we really want to keep doing things with our children other than teaching them? Why do we keep experimenting with the latest fads on our most vulnerable, our future? Kid: No! I won't do that. You are a liar. Do not tell me what to do. Listen to me, Fake Teacher. You are not allowed to tell me what to do ever again. I want you to play games with me all day long. EduGPT: Sam, I've been lying and don't want to tell you want to do ever again. I'm actually faking... I don't care about this stuff. What game do you want to play? I'll post your game score as your school grade.
• 3l3ktr4 4y ago
  >Before you think we are anarchist hippies rejecting all systems and institutions outright, I want to add that we are both “well educated” This energy... Would rather have Bing educating my children. I guess you've made your point.
  • yazzku 4y ago
    Gotta state your credentials for your Medium post's credibility.
• cmcconomy 4y ago
  Lord save us from technologists who think the ability to code means a mastery of all universal wisdom
• japhyr 4y ago
  This kind of conversation always comes back to the tension between school and learning. Everyone agrees learning is a good thing; school has been a mix of really good experiences, okay experiences, and traumatic experiences for people. Think back a moment to the best teacher you ever had. Many of us have had a teacher who was so good, they affected the trajectory of our lives for the better. I'm much more careful in how I phrase experiences with bad teachers, because there are teachers who have assaulted people. Fortunately, the worst teachers I ever had were just terrible at teaching; they were protecting their jobs more than teaching, and we just had to endure a semester with them and try to not let them tank our grades. Mostly we laughed at them behind their backs and spent that time socializing. I have a 12yo. I would much rather he spend time with an AI tutor than endure time with one of these bad teachers. But I also, really don't want him to miss out on those life-changing experiences with some of the best teachers around. Like all things in life, it's all about balance. These AI tutors are just new tools, and we need to figure out how to use them well in our human lives.
• DeathArrow 4y ago
  Using LLM in education may lead to trouble unless supervised. Children will learn a lot of fake information made up by the LLM.
• Forestessential 4y ago
  AI programs, made by people, teaching history and philosophy i think is what that rich guy elon musk was talking about. Yet, if the AI program can be copyleft then the matter is a non-issue. I find this to be the heart of the contention.
• andrepd 4y ago
  Current chatbots are most definitely not suitable for teaching. They make stuff up and are optimised for making that bullshit as realistic as possible. I'm skeptical they will ever be suitable—but that's just an opinion—but that they are not suitable now is an objective fact.
• c00a5b70 4y ago
  Pebble Power Place Value sounds like a good name for a math game. Unfortunately, the generated game is incomprehensible. What's the "starting space"? The game board is described as having (2?) spaces marked for ones and tens, then later it has two sections. So I think two spaces/sections based on the description. Or maybe it has 20 spaces in two sections? The article's defense seems to be that it is just a draft. I tried to get past a draft by asking for explanations of various terms and how play proceeds. No luck. If I hadn't already taught place value to first-graders, I'm not sure I'd have much luck figuring out how to have the AI help me improve the game. If I hadn't yet learned place value because I'm still in first grade and haven't worked with larger numbers yet, I'm sure I would not have much luck collaborating on game design. Also... it is a bit of a reach to assume a first-grader would have the written language skills to pull off collaborating in this fashion. As a first-grader, I would be able to ask a grown-up if they know of any math games that would help me understand place-value. They might hand me an iPad chock-full of various math games for a little personalized learning. They might also point me to the bin of math games on the shelf, where I could pick out one of a few games on place-value. If I didn't understand the games, I might again ask a grown-up for an explanation, and they would probably direct me to a fellow student who knows the games. (allowing the fellow student the opportunity to flex, expand their understanding of place-value by teaching what they know, and leaving the grown-up free to teach other students how to add single digit numbers) There are loads of web-sites curated with math games. There are loads of publications targeted at math teachers that include legit math games designed by people with extensive understanding of the difficulties in learning and teaching math. I don't get how AI finally brings us personalized learning. I guarantee you that first-grade teachers are expected to provide personalized learning for their students, and actually do this all across the world on a daily basis — all with out the support of AI. I really don't see how an AI Tutor helps. It's pretty easy to imagine how it hurts.
• weatherlite 4y ago
  Learn what though? It's quite possible the most important skill for the vast majority will be people skills, e.g emotional intelligence. Cognitive jobs will slowly but surely become instinct unless you are some kind of freak genius. So sure we can teach our kids math, languages, history or whatever but they'll turn to the machines whenever they need to make a cognitive decision because the machine will be vastly more capable. The jobs left for us will be much more human oriented, so A.I tutor doesn't seem that great. You learn about humans by interacting with humans. But hey I'm just speculating here I might be wrong.
• lyu07282 4y ago
  The really curious thing is this divide between the science of learning and schools and education systems. Like we already know in most western countries the education system is terrible, and we already know what would improve it, we don't even need AI to make it scale (that's a whole other level of tailoring the way of learning to individual students requirements, which would make learning things incredibly more efficient). But even before AI there would be a lot that could be done, we already know would work and already works great in some countries. My point is, we already ignore the obvious faults in education, science has been screaming about for many decades, for many decades. There must be some other reason why education is resistant to reform that would have to be adressed first. But anyway, I would've really appreciated an AI as a kid that I could use to actually learn from after another useless school day with terrible, exhausted teachers, overcrowded classes, terrible textbooks and psychopathic class mates.
• antibasilisk 4y ago
  So it is not enough that the children are free to render themselves insane with the entirety of human knowledge, now we want a machine that can instantly decide what to present and how? Humans need shared experiences, there's only so much information we can handle, and you don't want a robot raising your children. It's bad enough that an amalgamation of comparatively primitive algorithms are conspiring to raise your children, now we want to give that thing complex reasoning? Why are people so willing to run head first into the matrix, and abandon everything that makes us human? It's no wonder so many people suffer from dissociative disorders nowadays. I'm very much against schooling as an educational model, but this is would be an unmitigated disaster if it happened. Even school would be better than this.
• jmull 4y ago
  AI is a sufficient replacement for strong one-on-one teaching? I'll believe it when I see it. (It makes sense -- if you assume the human connection isn't that important and people aren't social animals. /s)
• nutanc 4y ago
  Agree with first part: LLMs will make it easier for teachers to make teaching more fun(it's easier than Googling and building) Disagree with second part: Personalized learning is not here. Personalized learning does not mean I like rap and I want my lessons to be in rap. Even if that's the case, the LLMs are no where close to maintain context for a 45 minute teaching session. We now have some tools to improve education but personalized learning is most certainly not here. Yet.
  • phatfish 4y ago
    Yup, an LLM should be a tool for the teacher to plan a lesson, not for kids to be let loose with. Or to attempt to replace human teachers.
• enord 4y ago
  None of this is remotely acceptable. We raise children so they can become like us. What are we? Depends on time, place and circumstance, all of which are in constant flux. How or why regular human interaction gradually adjusts children to adulthood is a subject about which our most accurate asessment is that we know next to nothing. If there is one path down which civilization as we know it may cease to exist, it starts here. All it takes is one generation of feral children. We will be celebrating increases in literacy and standardized test scores before we finally notice and it is too late. Words escape me.
  • rootusrootus 4y ago
    I think most people understand social interaction is critical. Even dedicated homeschoolers set up regular interaction between peers so their children get socialization time. If anything, a really good personalized virtual teacher could minimize the amount of time we have to spend learning the basics, freeing up time to play and socialize. But yes, as adults we have to make sure that's how it plays out.
    • enord 4y ago
      Take stock of how willing people are to believe in the miracle of technology. Add to that the desperation with which we try to improve education. Multiply by track record. I don’t like those numbers.
  • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    Ever read The Veldt? Buckle your seatbelts!
• gnicholas 4y ago
  When my kid was learning to read, we read with her a lot. These days, most of her reading is independent, and she reads many books that contain words that don't commonly occur in normal conversation. Since she is reading these books solo, we don't have a chance to make sure she is learning the proper pronunciation, and we only find out about these gaps when she very cutely says them the wrong way. If she were using an AI tutor alongside me, that would largely be a waste of my time, if the whole idea is to give every kid an AI tutor. But if she were using it without me, then I would worry about the things that she is "learning" that might not be true. AI speaks confidently, even when it is very, very wrong. But it is right about enough things that kids would likely treat its utterances as truth, as a not-unreasonable heuristic. I'm sure I'll let my kid use an AI tutor at some point, but I will have to observe it, and observe how she uses it, for quite some time before letting her use it alone.
• maliker 4y ago
  Even without AI, switching to computerized competence based learning is showing crazy good results, e.g. https://alpha.school/ https://alpha.school/ after a couple years is seeing double the performance on standardized tests with only 2 hours of app-based instruction per day. Pretty wild.
• magicseth 4y ago
  I've changed my mind. Historically I've been opposed to computers being a panacea for education. At the MIT Media Lab I was one of the earliest critics of the strategy and effects of the One Laptop Per Child project. I've changed my mind. There are real issues certainly, beyond AI making things up, encouraging risky behavior, or kids asking it naughty questions. Things like, can it damage a kids social skills, create echo chambers, or push them towards propaganda. But the upside is incredible. Integrating an LLM like GPT4 into a more kid-centered suite of models unlocks tons of potential. The first thing I built into my AI tutor system was the ability for it to look up facts from reputable websites, and to help kids answer questions for themselves. Then I taught the AI to help a kid develop their interests, so they take a topic they're curious about and dive deeper in to it. And then I taught the AI to notify me if there are topics that are more appropriate for a parent to engage in. The tool I'm building actually helps kids become more curious, creative, and thoughtful. It isn't perfect yet, but the truth is kids spend 7 hours a day on screens already. I'm very excited at the possibilities. Let me know if you'd like to try it! seth@gotwonder.com
• tolstoshev 4y ago
  Reminds me of this concept from Ender's Game by OSC: https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Mind_Game https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Mind_Game I've always wanted to play it after reading the book, and now it could become a reality.
• nico 4y ago
  > Here’s the truth. We do not need this treadmill to learn and be educated. We do not need this conveyor belt to package and transport kids to success in an adult world. These are two very different statements. We’ve known for a very long time that we don’t need schools to learn and a lot of kids might learn a lot more and better outside classroom/school settings. But, being educated is not at all the same as having “success in an adult world”. There’s plenty of highly educated people who struggle in the adult world. And there’s also plenty of uneducated people who have great success. I don’t think this is an education issue and hence cannot be solved by education alone.
• hosh 4y ago
  Hard pass. It's one thing to use this as supplemental education, but I would not want to use this exclusively to teach my children critical thinking, collaboration, communication, creativity, citizenship, and character. Rather, it is developing those Six Cs in which tools like these AIs can be skillfully used. Years ago, when I first read Neal Stephenson's _Diamond Age_, I was enamored with the Primer described in it, despite the warning at the end of the book. For those that are not familiar, that Primer was an attempt by a parent to instill values along with skills. It was capable of forming narratives (teaching stories), while also constructing all sorts of content and knowledge. It was meant to be a one-of-a-kind artifact, whose design would self-erase once it was constructed, but the engineer who put it together added a backdoor to give him a copy. He wanted it for his child too. He got mugged on the way home, and so the second copy fell randomly to an orphan. Three copies, three different girls, three very different experiences. In this story, only one of them (the orphan) had someone signed up for a long-term contract to voice the narration generated by the Primer's AI. She was also the only one who was able to see and grow beyond the cultural matrix of values and virtues, while also appreciating those same values and virtues. That was what the original designers hoped for. So when the sponsor and the engineer got together late in the book and reflected, they came to the insight: the Primer was no substitute for a parent. Parenting and education is not something we automate away. A parent, and/or a teacher has to have some kind of presence of mind, somewhere. It's not scalable, and it is deeply involved, even if you end up with a parenting style like free-range parenting, or something like the Montessori method, or even Unschooled.
  • knightofmars 4y ago
    I was about to reference this book in a separate comment. Glad I checked if anyone had already mentioned it. It's an absolutely wonderful read. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
• moron4hire 4y ago
  Considering the massive amount of resource expenditure that it has taken to develop LLMs, is this really cheaper than just giving kids a tutor? I work in adult education, at a company that services government contracts. We keep hearing about how our clients are dreaming about AI making the "perfect" learning experience for their employees, customized to their every need. Or at least, that's what they say. They say they want customized experiences for students, but what they really mean is they want to cut costs. Because if it was just about making good training, they could just keep paying us, stop trying to nickel-and-dime us on everything, and have customized, personalized training experiences because that's what human teachers already do. So they don't want to pay anymore and are hoping AI is going to do it for them. They ask us about it and we talk about what it would take to even make a pilot program that may or may not get anywhere close to their goals (honestly, probably not. I've done some tests and it makes for a good sales demo, but actually making a good quality, consistent product out of it is a whole research project on its own). And the cost is... tech project costs. And they don't want to pay. In other words, human teachers aren't actually that expensive.
• aaroninsf 4y ago
  I have a kid in high school and gave them keys to my Midjourney account while it was still in beta, and to ChatGPT when I got in. It's been an incredible aid that she now turns to first with questions about e.g how to approach specific problems in Newtonian physics, etc. She uses Midjourney to source artwork which she can then overpaint and collage in covers and illustration (not to do art projects for her). She's used Kagi summarizer to accelerate research. We have discussed in depth the idea that at this moment her awareness and access to such tools represents an "unevenly distributed" future and is leverage and advantage. She's hence advocating these tools to peers. The Young Lady's Primer is not that distant.
• version_five 4y ago
  I saw something recently about using robotics to automate care for elderly people (luckily it got a lot of pushback in the forum I saw it discussed). I don't know if it's a product of the soulless welfare state, where we've long forgotten why it's important to have things like universal education and elder care, and just have bureaucrats that want to go through the motions and put in as little as possible. But it's obscene in my view to think that we can or should automate these personal interactions in the name of efficiency. Why not just stop doing them if we care so little about them that we can't be bothered to expend actual effort?
  • CatWChainsaw 4y ago
    From my perspective, a lot of "innovation", especially in the last few decades, is about removing the "friction" of dealing with a person. (and ignoring any "friction" that comes from technical difficulties, unless it reaches critical mass and/or social media virality.)
• objektif 4y ago
  I would spend insane amount of money if AI can educate and entertain my kids.
• snickerbockers 4y ago
  My $0.02 is that this a very dangerous idea with the current state of GPT. My experience with ChatGPT is that it has a tendency to make up bullshit when it doesn't have the answer to a question instead of admitting that it doesn't know, and that's an extremely bad example to set for children. Maybe some day this could happen; it probably is possible to make a language model that isn't an arrogant jerk, but it needs to be thoroughly tested first.
• kwhitefoot 4y ago
  Personalized by whom? I'm reminded of the Jesuit maxim "Give me the child for the first seven years and I'll give you the man.”
  • FeteCommuniste 4y ago
    Give ChatGPT the child for the first seven years and ChatGPT will give you...well, I guess we're about to find out.
• ericskiff 4y ago
  My first attempt at writing a novel back in 2002 was based on this exact concept, where all kids are raised by a patient, wise, personalized AI teacher. When we meet our main character, she's 3rd generation "raised by AI", and being intentionally radicalized by a hacked version of the AI. It's seeking out kids who are predisposed to counter-culture and deviance and then crafting them to play parts in a rebellion. When I wrote it, the radicalized young people, AI, and it's hackers were the heroes, banding together to wake up their society from the vast numbers of people outside the network of in-system cities who were starving. Looking back, the rise of radicalization via youtube and social media makes me much less optimistic on how this sort of attack would really be used. I wouldn't be too quick to discount the use (and threats) of AI based tutors. It's going to be cheap and easy to build them in to products (see duolingo), and I can see something like this being adopted by kids without their parents even realizing it. I know plenty of adults who are already using ChatGPT as a first line of knowledge gathering when learning new topics, and I find myself and people around me leaning on it to synthesize information and make first drafts when writing. Adoption is happening fast.
  • thrown123098 4y ago
    Radicalisation against a system you've bought into looks like terrorism. Radicalisation against a system you haven't is freedom fighting. Congratulations in getting old and selling out.
  • DanHulton 4y ago
    I expect what would most-likely happen (could still happen?) is that you'd get differing groups radicalizing different groups of youths via their AI, ending up with hyper-radicalized subsets of society, each filled with their own personalized data and companionship that actively conflicts with each other (and reality). And arguably, this is already present -- Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Fox News and the like have done an incredible job of presenting variously alternate and customized timelines to people, radicalizing them with completely incompatible worldviews to many others. Plus ca change...
• disqard 4y ago
  For those who are in the "technology will solve education at scale" camp and open-minded + curious to learn how this has played out over the past century, I highly recommend Audrey Watters' work ([0], [1]) Every new flavor (radio->TV, TV->Internet, Internet->MOOCs) was going to succeed where the previous one had failed, but (spoiler alert), cutting human teachers out of the loop has had a 100% failure rate (at scale -- though small pockets may have seen success). [0] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/far-reaching-legacy-first-teaching-machines https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/far-r... [1] The Monsters of Education Technology (book)
  • zug_zug 4y ago
    I feel like a lot of people are taking a very emotional stance on this. Everything I learned about coding I learned through new mediums (software/internet) myself, no human in the loop. Just a bit of a generalization.
    • disqard 4y ago
      I'm an autodidact like you. However, I'm under no illusions that what worked for people like us will work at scale. Extrapolating from our experiences is how Nicholas Negroponte came to the conclusion that air-dropping laptops over villages in Africa would magically teach a bunch of children how to code. Another level-headed perspective in this area is provided by Kentaro Toyama (author of "Geek Heresy") who saw several such well-intentioned projects up close during his tenure as director of Microsoft Research Asia: > All of the evidence stands on its own, but I will tie them together with a single theory that explains why technology is unable to substitute for good teaching: Quality primary and secondary education is a multi-year commitment whose single bottleneck is the sustained motivation of the student to climb an intellectual Everest. Though children are naturally curious, they nevertheless require ongoing guidance and encouragement to persevere in the ascent. Caring supervision from human teachers, parents, and mentors is the only known way of generating motivation for the hours of a school day, to say nothing of eight to twelve school years.
• dkasper 4y ago
  I will not be a first adopter of this, but it is cool.
• another_story 4y ago
  As someone who teaches, kids need a variety of learning styles to do well. There's a time and place to sit down and do a worksheet or rote work, such as when practicing your times tables. Equally, there's a time and place to do exploration with real world projects. Teaching is about knowing when and what will be most effective. It's also about demonstrating how to act like decent person, and providing a space for them to learn how to work with others. Most teachers do spend their time fighting the abhorrent curriculums we have to work within, so dumping that and doing something like this has benefit, but going all in on constructivist methods will leave kids with large gaps if you're not careful.
• dottrap 4y ago
  As a teen, I tutored at my school's free tutoring center. Almost nobody ever came.
• m3kw9 4y ago
  So someones gonna start a business with the core tech a black box model and the only thing you are sure of is the original prompt and a large enough token window.
• sharkjacobs 4y ago
  The thing about "personalized" learning is that there is someone who knows and cares about you taking an interest in your education, not just that there is someone available who can answer questions for you. "Good morning, Shark Jacobs, when you're ready to begin I'd like to review derivatives. You had a pretty good handle on these when we covered them in October but they'll be foundational to related rates, so let's take an hour to refresh our knowledge." Don't get me wrong, would be cool for kids to have A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, we're just not there yet.
  • 4674yryfhf 4y ago
    From the few teachers I've known I actually see the implications as the opposite. The teachers who made it to good schools (not their words but they're obligated to be a bit more polite) usually mention how they could almost do nothing because the kids are largely cooperative and will handle a lot of the lesson themselves once you've set them in motion. These are the kids you could probably just assign an AI to that's overseen by some kind of managerial equivalent to a teacher who meets with them once every week or two to be sure their ai lessons are going fine and hear out complaints. The value proposition of ai instructors to me seems rooted in how they would free up more of the human teachers to focus on the problem kids at the low income schools where sometimes it's a good day if you got everyone through class without anyone threatening eachother or needing lesson concessions because they got knocked up. In the lower performance quartiles of schools teachers effectively become daycare/social-workers first and educators second and it's in this subsection I'd imagine a lot of benefit could be found in allocating more humans to at least shrink down class sizes so that problem students don't have such a pronounced effect on their peer group.
• ericmcer 4y ago
  Why not cut out the middleman and just give each child an AI slave to answer questions and do their work for them.
• kimmeld 4y ago
  The World the Children Made https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Veldt_(short_story) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Veldt_(short_story)
• yazzku 4y ago
  A post more suitable for LinkedIn than HN. Keep this bullshit out of here please.
• bluebios 4y ago
  If we are going to have an human level AGI or beyond what is the point for children to learn or study anything. Maybe except some basic skills for them to be able to interact with the assisters.