6 ms·
The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning. To struggle to learn to write, code, and all that is how you become a professional. A lot of peo
by noobermin 3y ago
The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning. To struggle to learn to write, code, and all that is how you become a professional. A lot of people will never develop these skills, and the chasm between the talented and untalented will only grow.
- donkeyd 3y agoI'm not sure. With every generation some tech pops up that'll make every next generation worse off and in the end there's just something else people spend time on. My generation built their own PC's, struggled to install Windows by popping tons of floppies in a drive and hoping none of the steps failed, our internet connection made sounds and we learned DHCP the hard way. The generation after me is hardly able to reset their iPhone if it freezes without going to a help desk for help. Meanwhile, that same generation is using the cameras in their phones, readily available video editing software and processing power to create content like no generation has ever before. They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. My grandfather built his own house. My generation gets their house delivered in prefab parts that are then welded together. Nobody really cares that we've lost (the majority of) the ability to build houses or blacksmith katanas.
- loup-vaillant 3y ago> They are able to entertain millions of people around the globe while doing it and some build incredible wealth at the same time. I think you meant hoard incredible wealth? There's a limit to how much wealth you can actually create with immaterial entertainment alone. Even a best seller book: it takes time to read, so while it provides value to millions of readers, it also removes value in the form of opportunity cost. No way around choosing what to do with your own time. Other alternatives have more potential. Educational content could lift some people out of incompetence and help them build actual wealth (say a very good programming or sawing tutorial). Writing useful software could also create wealth, even more so if it's Free (and free). And of course, building stuff (while taking care not to deplete our resources or burning up our planet…). We say that people "make" money, but that's a dangerously misleading idiom. They don't actually make money, they extract money. Hopefully this money is actually earned in proportion to the value they actually injected into society (make a chair, get paid for the chair, all fair and square). But never forget that the people who "make" the most money generally do so by taking it from other people. Employers, landlords, stakeholders… who get most of their "earnings" not from what they do, but from what they own.
- admax88qqq 3y agoWhat makes a chair more valuable to society than entertainment?
- joelfried 3y agoMany of us have the ability to entertain ourselves entirely within our own minds on the regular. None of us can snap our fingers and summon a chair from nothingness. Do you know anybody who owns zero chairs?
- hnfong 3y agoThere are cultures that don't use chairs. The Japanese generally didn't use them (I think?) before they came into contact with European civilization. I don't think any civilization could survive without entertainment though.
- admax88qqq 3y agoMany of us can sit on the ground or in a deep squat. None of us can snap our fingers and summon a book from nothingness.
- roguas 3y agosure, you can, many did, they are called authors
- loup-vaillant 3y agoI did not say it was.
- squirtlebonflow 3y agoYou can't rest your legs on an entertainment
- lxgr 3y agoYet the entertainment I'm getting out of my chairs is limited. But I think this is a false dichotomy: A comfortable armchair and a good book go well together.
- noobermin 3y agoJust a thought, why is it ok these skills were lost? You never really said whether it was good or bad, just that it happened.
- Karrot_Kream 3y agoOkay in the sense that nobody really mourns their loss aside from a few and it has no material impact on our understandings of underlying phenomena. My partner's grandfather was a wizard on the abacus, my grandfather loved his slide rule, but a calculator and now smartphone can do all of that much better. Has computation been retarded due to the lost knowledge of operating the abacus? There's probably been thousands of skills that have been lost that doesn't really affect our everyday lives.
- loup-vaillant 3y agoI recall a study whose result said that beginners improve faster when they're told the solutions right away, and experts improve faster when they're given time to figure things on their own. Struggling as a learning tool is important, but there's a good chance the fastest path to expertise is to start with examples of how to do it, and delay that struggle a bit. What you don't want is to keep the crutch forever and never struggle. That would be a sure path to stagnation.
- nerpderp82 3y agoIt would be trivial to configure multiple LLMs to track a student's progress in real time and ensure the optimal difficulty gradient for maximum learning. It could even detect when you should go outside and play. The rejection of LLMs for education by otherwise intelligent people is disheartening.
- nuancebydefault 3y agoIndeed I believe the LLMs are an excellent tool to education. Especially because you can ask it questions until you understand. Also, some things are not need to be known anymore, like phone numbers or the inner working of a car. There are plenty of things to learn even if automation made some of knowledge beneign.
- saurik 3y agoI remember a study that I presume is that one as it is so similar to what you are saying not saying that that you are better off being given the answer "right away" but that you are better off being given an answer after a bit of struggle, but not like, just letting you off in the desert and hoping for the best... I'd be shocked if it helped to simply give people the answer right away and I just don't remember the study--at least the one I remember--saying that.
- nazka 3y agoI agree but also I will also argue that the beginners that got all the right answers at the beginning may learn faster in the first steps but will struggle a lot faster later on at the expert level because: - they wouldn’t have yielded all the knowledge of the little kirks, know how, edge cases, etc… they now have to know (and the Pareto rule 20% vs 80%), - created an intuition from all the hours spent just struggling to understand what is wrong or find a solution and little by little honing their intuition from that hard work they would have done by themselves for themselves (compared to having ChatGPT, a teacher, or an expert telling them most of time what to do), - and getting a will to find a solution by themselves even after hours looking at a shell prompt (or logs or whatever else) that is taunting them and will tell them nothing.
- didericis 3y agoIt will rob people going through the motions and cheating from actually learning. The people who most benefit from education have never been the people just going through the motions and have at least some intrinsic motivation to actually learn.
- JustSomeNobody 3y agoI would agree. At least for some people. The act of trying to code something and failing and then failing again before I finally get it right is what I enjoy about coding. Sitting down to write code and it just works each and every time is boring. It's like writing boiler plate UI code. But... other people want to succeed quickly so they can show people they succeeded quickly. For them, ChatGPT is like a super power. Edit: I've had conversations with people who write. We have come to an agreement that there are writers who love the process of writing. They want to BE writers. Then there are people who want to HAVE BEEN a writer. ChatGPT was meant for these people.
- albrewer 3y ago> The thing is this will rob a whole generation of that learning I disagree with this take. My personal anecdote is that I am far, far better at mental math than I was in high school because I ended up in a job where doing a lot of ad-hoc calculations was just a day-to-day thing. I started out using a calculator, but eventually got to where I didn't need it most of the time just through sheer repetition. I think AI tools (the kind people are worried about right now, anyway) will be used in a similar fashion to calculators. After learning the basics, it will be a tool taught as an assist for streaming ideas into and getting out a well-formatted and coherent output. People who write a lot will eventually find the hassle of using the tool to be more trouble than it's worth. People who don't will still know how to use it to and know how to recognize when the output doesn't make any sense.
- dboreham 3y agoI think we went through this with calculators in the 1970s.
- nerpderp82 3y agoYou are wrong. LLMs are the single biggest advance in mass learning since the printed book. They are infinitely patient and can be reprogrammed, or repurposed with three sentences. Debate partner, editor, quiz master, literally anything. Every new tool can be abused, of course we can't structure education the same, but we should always be re-evaluating our methods and techniques in the face of new technology and knowledge. I am dreaming when physics students can have an electronics TA that can projection map over a breadboard to help kids understand and debug their circuits. For 70% of physics undergrads, hands on electronics classes are the hardest classes they took.
- noduerme 3y agoWhich is worse, having no debate partner, editor, or quiz master? Or a debate partner who insists they're right when they're wrong, an editor who injects false references and made-up citations, and a quiz master whose accuracy is essentially random?
- nerpderp82 3y agoAll those things are already true. Debate isn't about being right, it is about winning a debate. It is literally rhetorical combat. A quiz master that is wrong, how delightful! A chatbot is the multiple choice test you can argue with! If those things are a problem, we have already failed. Because if your current education system is built upon taking things at face value, the harm is not in the shoveled knowledge but in building a student who accepts what is presented as unquestionable fact. My child is an phenomenal bullshit discriminator. So much so that they have been correctly correcting all of their teachers in every grade they have been in. The real education is learning how to use the tools we have available to learn anything you want. And in that way, the LLM is most powerful thing we have since the printed book.
- noduerme 3y agoYes but "bullshit detection" is a skill honed over time by not only reading many sources, but by learning to read skeptically, analyzing and comparing sources for bias and factual credibility, and adjusting your certainty level on a subject as you go along. No teacher is accurate 100% of the time; lots of teachers spew bullshit when they don't know the answer to something; practically everyone laces their facts with opinions. But you can turn to other primary sources for facts, secondary sources for opinions, and the shape of some general consensus will emerge. The problem is if there's just one teacher tutoring, one quiz master who points to sources it controls or simply invents as its "proof". My concern is that AI will be trusted more than a single book or a single teacher, precisely because it claims to neutrally encompass a consensus already obtained through all those sources. [It's a tertiary source masquerading as one offering primary and secondary sources, without the ability to differentiate or trust one source more than another]. This is exactly why the frequent comparison to calculators is so misguided: Because calculators are always right. To whatever degree LLM proponents believe LLMs are simply useful tools like calculators, that will be the same degree to which they fail to check for bullshit.
- melagonster 3y agounfortunately, this just happens. I trust let baby watch YouTube from the fist of their is not a good idea, too. but we are here.
- cainxinth 3y agoBefore books, everyone had to memorize information they wanted to preserve. Books robbed a hundred generations of that learning. So it goes.
- hnfong 3y agoNot really. Many cultural traditions emphasize reciting every single word from classical texts as part of the learning process. (I hated it, but it's still there 2000+ years after books were invented.)
- cainxinth 3y agoPeople still ride horses sometimes too, but I would argue that the advent of the car meant most will never become proficient at horseback riding. There are many examples like this. People aren’t great at writing cursive with fountain pens anymore because we type. Our mental math skills aren’t as strong because we have calculators. Even our sense of direction and ability to navigate is probably weakening due to decades of reliance on GPS. Are there still people who can memorize whole books, ride horses, write cursive, calculate big numbers in their head, and navigate by the stars? Of course, but they are outliers. Most of us just use our smartphones.
- BurningFrog 3y agoThe history of progress is full of machines robbing people of learning to master difficult tasks. On balance, it's been hugely positive.