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I have taught/lectured the odd thing in my past and I can do it; I come from a family of teachers and it is in the blood. I do not have the psychological const

by dofm 24d ago

I have taught/lectured the odd thing in my past and I can do it; I come from a family of teachers and it is in the blood. I do not have the psychological constitution to teach kids so I am not going to do that. But teaching/training adults is an industry that AI will destroy because the baseline income — the stuff nobody else wanted to do but you could earn from — will be eliminated, increasingly by policy directives from above. I have some ideas in that regard but it is difficult to see how I won't end up competing with LLMs when even open weights models are pretty good at coming up with tech tutorials etc. Broadly I think there is undue optimism about what will be left to move to when the programming jobs dry up. (Thank you for the discussion, though! I may sound quite negative but actually I am doing better than I have been for years, and it is always useful to provoke one's own thoughts)

somenameforme 23d ago
Well there's a world of difference between teaching a 7 year old and teaching a 17 year old. I would say in both regards a more engaging style may be necessary than what you're possibly alluding to, so there is that. Depending on your background, teaching in a university is also completely viable. There's also the private lessons possibility. There's many options and I definitely wouldn't just write it off. I don't think AI will touch education. A good case study there is Khanmigo which was to be Khan Academy's revolutionary AI tutor. There's been a million articles written about the topic. It completely failed, in spite of receiving massive sponsorship and imposition in various educational settings. And I'm kind of surprised that Khan himself didn't understand or predict this. As you probably know, great intrinsically motivated students don't really need teachers. You could give them a book or a sort of LLM tutor, and they'd excel completely independently. But then there are the other 95% of students you have to consider. And those other 95% tend to fall into camps of either being a bit less gifted in the cognitive domain, or lacking motivation. Depending on exactly where they stand on the balance of two, a good teacher can have a huge impact, whereas 'go learn with the LLM for a few hours' would have them tune out instantly. It's because teaching isn't just about literally teaching, but about forming a rapport and trying to gradually push those 95% into more of the habits and patterns of the 5%, but without them realizing they're being pushed in that direction. An LLM there is almost entirely nonsensical.

by dofm 24d ago

somenameforme 23d ago

Well there's a world of difference between teaching a 7 year old and teaching a 17 year old. I would say in both regards a more engaging style may be necessary than what you're possibly alluding to, so there is that. Depending on your background, teaching in a university is also completely viable. There's also the private lessons possibility. There's many options and I definitely wouldn't just write it off. I don't think AI will touch education. A good case study there is Khanmigo which was to be Khan Academy's revolutionary AI tutor. There's been a million articles written about the topic. It completely failed, in spite of receiving massive sponsorship and imposition in various educational settings. And I'm kind of surprised that Khan himself didn't understand or predict this. As you probably know, great intrinsically motivated students don't really need teachers. You could give them a book or a sort of LLM tutor, and they'd excel completely independently. But then there are the other 95% of students you have to consider. And those other 95% tend to fall into camps of either being a bit less gifted in the cognitive domain, or lacking motivation. Depending on exactly where they stand on the balance of two, a good teacher can have a huge impact, whereas 'go learn with the LLM for a few hours' would have them tune out instantly. It's because teaching isn't just about literally teaching, but about forming a rapport and trying to gradually push those 95% into more of the habits and patterns of the 5%, but without them realizing they're being pushed in that direction. An LLM there is almost entirely nonsensical.