6 ms·

The sad reality is that this is probably not a solvable problem. AI will improve more rapidly than the education system can adapt. Within a few years it won't m

by mgraczyk 10mo ago

The sad reality is that this is probably not a solvable problem. AI will improve more rapidly than the education system can adapt. Within a few years it won't make sense for people to learn how to write actual code, and it won't be clear until then which skills are actually useful to learn. My recommendation would be to encourage students to ask the LLM to quiz and tutor them, but ultimately I think most students will learn a lot less than say 5 years ago while the top 5% or so will learn a lot more

andrei_says_ 10mo ago
> Within a few years it won't make sense for people to learn how to write actual code Why? Because LLMs are capable of sometimes working snippets of usually completely unmaintainable code?
- mgraczyk 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - abtinf 10mo ago
    It would seem relevant to disclose you work at Anthropic.
    - meowface 10mo ago
      Perhaps. They're still 100% right.
      - Madmallard 10mo ago
        Not at all whatsoever
- ethmarks 10mo ago
  You can still argue that LLMs won't replace human programmers without downplaying their capabilities. Modern SOTA LLMs can often produce genuinely impressive code. Full stop. I don't personally believe that LLMs are good enough to replace human developers, but claiming that LLMs are only capable of writing bad code is ridiculous and easily falsifiable.
gerdesj 10mo ago
An LLM is a tool and its just as mad as slide rules, calculators and PCs (I've seen them all although slide rules were being phased out in my youth) Coding via prompt is simply a new form of coding. Remember that high level programming languages are "merely" a sop for us humans to avoid low level languages. The idea is that you will be more productive with say Python than you would with ASM or twiddling electrical switches that correspond to register inputs. A purist might note that using Python is not sufficiently close to the bare metal to be really productive. My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies - that will involve problem definition and formulation and then an iterative effort to solve the problem. It will obviously involve how to spot and deal with hallucinations. They'll need to start discovering model quality for differing tasks and all sorts of things that look like sci-fi to me 10 years ago. I think we are at, for LLMs, the "calculator on digital wrist watch" stage that we had in the mid '80s before the really decent scientific calculators rocked up. Those calculators are largely still what you get nowadays too and I suspect that LLMs will settle into a similar role. They will be great tools when used appropriately but they will not run the world or if they do, not for very long - bye!
- mgraczyk 10mo ago
  [flagged]
- ethmarks 10mo ago
  > My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies It's obviously not quite the same as programming, but my English professor assigned an essay a few weeks ago where we had to ask ChatGPT a question and then analyze its response, check its sources, and try to spot hallucinations. It was worth about 5% of our overall grade. I thought that it was a fascinating exercise in teaching responsible LLM use.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies This reminds me of folks teaching their kids Java ten years ago. You’re teaching a tool. Versus general tool use. > Those calculators are largely still what you get nowadays too and I suspect that LLMs will settle into a similar role If correct, the child will be competent in the new world. If not, they will have wasted time developing general intelligence. This doesn’t strike me as a good strategy for anything other than time-consuming babysitting.
ethmarks 10mo ago
> most students will learn a lot less than say 5 years ago while the top 5% or so will learn a lot more If we assume that AI will automate many/most programming jobs (which is highly debatable and I don't believe is true, but just for the sake of argument), isn't this a good outcome? If most parts of programming are automatable and only the really tricky parts need human programmers, wouldn't it be convenient if there are fewer human programmers but the ones that do exist are really skilled?
- mgraczyk 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > It's not good if you're a freshman currently starting a CS program CS is the new MBA. A thoughtless path to a safe, secure job. Cruelly, but necessarily, a society has to destroy those pathways. Otherwise, it becomes sclerotic.
    - DiscourseFan 10mo ago
      Its not cruel, its stupid. Why would we organize our society in such a way that people would be drawn towards such paths in the first place, where your comfort and security are your first concerns and taking risks, doing something new, is not even on your mind?
      - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
        > where your comfort and security are your first concerns and taking risks, doing something new, is not even on your mind? Because individually, lots of people seek low-risk high-return occupations. Systematically, that doesn’t exist in the long run. Societies do better when they take risks. Encouraging the population to integrate that risk taking has been a running them in successful societies from the Romans and Chinese dynasties through American commerce and jugaad.
  - 10mo ago
JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> AI will improve more rapidly than the education system can adapt We’ll see a new class division scaffolded on the existing one around screens. (Schools in rich communities have no screens. Students turn in their phones and watches at the beginning of the day. Schools in poor ones have them everywhere, including everywhere at home.)
- rdudek 10mo ago
  Every school has students work off their Chromebooks here in Colorado, regardless of how rich community is. This started with the Covid lockdowns and is pretty much standard now.
  - derwiki 10mo ago
    Even the Waldorf schools?
  - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
    > Every school has students work off their Chromebooks here in Colorado I specifically remember Telluride Mountain School’s banners in town advertising a low-tech approach.
DANmode 10mo ago
For what it’s worth: OpenAI seems to be encouraging this with their “Study” mode on some ChatGPT interfaces.
Madmallard 10mo ago
Bold claim by the Anthropic employee drinking their own Koolaid
- falcor84 10mo ago
  I'm not an Anthropic employee and think that: >AI will improve more rapidly than the education system can adapt. Is entirely obvious, and: > Within a few years it won't make sense for people to learn how to write actual code, and it won't be clear until then which skills are actually useful to learn. is not obvious, but quite clear from how things are going. I expect actual writing of code "by hand" to be the same sort of activity as doing integrals by hand - something you may do either to advance the state of the art, or recreationally, but not something you would try to do "in anger" when faced with a looming project deadline.
  - anon7725 10mo ago
    > I expect actual writing of code "by hand" to be the same sort of activity as doing integrals by hand - something you may do either to advance the state of the art, or recreationally, but not something you would try to do "in anger" when faced with a looming project deadline. This doesn’t seem like a good example. People who engineer systems that rely on integrals still know what an integral is. They might not be doing it manually, but it’s still part of the tower of knowledge that supports whatever work they are doing now. Say you are modeling some physical system in Matlab - you know what an integral is, how it connects with the higher level work that you’re doing, etc. An example from programming: you know what process isolation is, and how memory is allocated, etc. You’re not explicitly working with that when you create a new python list that ends up on the heap, but it’s part of your tower of knowledge. If there’s a need, you can shake off the cobwebs and climb back down the tower a bit to figure something out. So here’s my contention: LLMs make it optional to have the tower of knowledge that is required today. Some people seem to be very productive with agentic coding tools today - because they already have the tower. We are in a liminal state that allows for this, since we all came up in the before time, struggling to get things to compile, scratching our heads at core dumps, etc. What happens when you no longer need to have a mental model of what you’re doing? The hard problems in comp sci and software engineering are no less hard after the advent of LLMs.
quantumHazer 10mo ago
> it won’t make sense to learn how to code. Sure. So we can keep paying money to your employer, Anthropic, right?

andrei_says_ 10mo ago

> Within a few years it won't make sense for people to learn how to write actual code Why? Because LLMs are capable of sometimes working snippets of usually completely unmaintainable code?

mgraczyk 10mo ago
[flagged]
- abtinf 10mo ago
  It would seem relevant to disclose you work at Anthropic.
  - meowface 10mo ago
    Perhaps. They're still 100% right.
    - Madmallard 10mo ago
      Not at all whatsoever
ethmarks 10mo ago
You can still argue that LLMs won't replace human programmers without downplaying their capabilities. Modern SOTA LLMs can often produce genuinely impressive code. Full stop. I don't personally believe that LLMs are good enough to replace human developers, but claiming that LLMs are only capable of writing bad code is ridiculous and easily falsifiable.

gerdesj 10mo ago

An LLM is a tool and its just as mad as slide rules, calculators and PCs (I've seen them all although slide rules were being phased out in my youth) Coding via prompt is simply a new form of coding. Remember that high level programming languages are "merely" a sop for us humans to avoid low level languages. The idea is that you will be more productive with say Python than you would with ASM or twiddling electrical switches that correspond to register inputs. A purist might note that using Python is not sufficiently close to the bare metal to be really productive. My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies - that will involve problem definition and formulation and then an iterative effort to solve the problem. It will obviously involve how to spot and deal with hallucinations. They'll need to start discovering model quality for differing tasks and all sorts of things that look like sci-fi to me 10 years ago. I think we are at, for LLMs, the "calculator on digital wrist watch" stage that we had in the mid '80s before the really decent scientific calculators rocked up. Those calculators are largely still what you get nowadays too and I suspect that LLMs will settle into a similar role. They will be great tools when used appropriately but they will not run the world or if they do, not for very long - bye!

mgraczyk 10mo ago
[flagged]
ethmarks 10mo ago
> My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies It's obviously not quite the same as programming, but my English professor assigned an essay a few weeks ago where we had to ask ChatGPT a question and then analyze its response, check its sources, and try to spot hallucinations. It was worth about 5% of our overall grade. I thought that it was a fascinating exercise in teaching responsible LLM use.
JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
> My recommendation would be to encourage the tutor to ask the student how they use the LLM and to school them in effective use strategies This reminds me of folks teaching their kids Java ten years ago. You’re teaching a tool. Versus general tool use. > Those calculators are largely still what you get nowadays too and I suspect that LLMs will settle into a similar role If correct, the child will be competent in the new world. If not, they will have wasted time developing general intelligence. This doesn’t strike me as a good strategy for anything other than time-consuming babysitting.

ethmarks 10mo ago

> most students will learn a lot less than say 5 years ago while the top 5% or so will learn a lot more If we assume that AI will automate many/most programming jobs (which is highly debatable and I don't believe is true, but just for the sake of argument), isn't this a good outcome? If most parts of programming are automatable and only the really tricky parts need human programmers, wouldn't it be convenient if there are fewer human programmers but the ones that do exist are really skilled?

mgraczyk 10mo ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > It's not good if you're a freshman currently starting a CS program CS is the new MBA. A thoughtless path to a safe, secure job. Cruelly, but necessarily, a society has to destroy those pathways. Otherwise, it becomes sclerotic.
  - DiscourseFan 10mo ago
    Its not cruel, its stupid. Why would we organize our society in such a way that people would be drawn towards such paths in the first place, where your comfort and security are your first concerns and taking risks, doing something new, is not even on your mind?
    - JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
      > where your comfort and security are your first concerns and taking risks, doing something new, is not even on your mind? Because individually, lots of people seek low-risk high-return occupations. Systematically, that doesn’t exist in the long run. Societies do better when they take risks. Encouraging the population to integrate that risk taking has been a running them in successful societies from the Romans and Chinese dynasties through American commerce and jugaad.
- 10mo ago

JumpCrisscross 10mo ago

> AI will improve more rapidly than the education system can adapt We’ll see a new class division scaffolded on the existing one around screens. (Schools in rich communities have no screens. Students turn in their phones and watches at the beginning of the day. Schools in poor ones have them everywhere, including everywhere at home.)

rdudek 10mo ago
Every school has students work off their Chromebooks here in Colorado, regardless of how rich community is. This started with the Covid lockdowns and is pretty much standard now.
- derwiki 10mo ago
  Even the Waldorf schools?
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago
  > Every school has students work off their Chromebooks here in Colorado I specifically remember Telluride Mountain School’s banners in town advertising a low-tech approach.

DANmode 10mo ago

For what it’s worth: OpenAI seems to be encouraging this with their “Study” mode on some ChatGPT interfaces.

Madmallard 10mo ago

Bold claim by the Anthropic employee drinking their own Koolaid

falcor84 10mo ago
I'm not an Anthropic employee and think that: >AI will improve more rapidly than the education system can adapt. Is entirely obvious, and: > Within a few years it won't make sense for people to learn how to write actual code, and it won't be clear until then which skills are actually useful to learn. is not obvious, but quite clear from how things are going. I expect actual writing of code "by hand" to be the same sort of activity as doing integrals by hand - something you may do either to advance the state of the art, or recreationally, but not something you would try to do "in anger" when faced with a looming project deadline.
- anon7725 10mo ago
  > I expect actual writing of code "by hand" to be the same sort of activity as doing integrals by hand - something you may do either to advance the state of the art, or recreationally, but not something you would try to do "in anger" when faced with a looming project deadline. This doesn’t seem like a good example. People who engineer systems that rely on integrals still know what an integral is. They might not be doing it manually, but it’s still part of the tower of knowledge that supports whatever work they are doing now. Say you are modeling some physical system in Matlab - you know what an integral is, how it connects with the higher level work that you’re doing, etc. An example from programming: you know what process isolation is, and how memory is allocated, etc. You’re not explicitly working with that when you create a new python list that ends up on the heap, but it’s part of your tower of knowledge. If there’s a need, you can shake off the cobwebs and climb back down the tower a bit to figure something out. So here’s my contention: LLMs make it optional to have the tower of knowledge that is required today. Some people seem to be very productive with agentic coding tools today - because they already have the tower. We are in a liminal state that allows for this, since we all came up in the before time, struggling to get things to compile, scratching our heads at core dumps, etc. What happens when you no longer need to have a mental model of what you’re doing? The hard problems in comp sci and software engineering are no less hard after the advent of LLMs.

quantumHazer 10mo ago

> it won’t make sense to learn how to code. Sure. So we can keep paying money to your employer, Anthropic, right?