This article is about the Economist's summary of a journal article so we have a (AI?) summary of a summary. Not very helpful. Here are a couple of better references:
For some of the classes my kids were in, the lessons and homework time were reversed.
Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.
Flipped classroom was a popular method when I was teaching math. Some students found it very helpful. The trouble was getting the students to do the reading before class. If students came in unprepared they struggled to keep up.
I did this for the last college programming course I taught (2025) as an anti-LLM measure. Every class started with a very short closed-book auto-graded multiple-choice test on the reading. I was careful to specify which was the core reading needed to learn the material (on the quiz) and which was extra (not on the quiz - I think many professors assign this extra reading to everyone, thinking of their strongest students). I think this developed an expectation in the students that doing the reading was easier than finding a way not to.
It's especially hard when multiple subjects try to do it, because it can add enormous amounts of home-time expectations. And many families can't dedicate that much time.
I do like it though, and I like that college generally leaned that way more (and was better balanced, as it had substantially less time in classrooms, so you could study during the day).
Education sustem is not about the actual knowledge, but about training various aspects of the brain during kids development.
So even memorizing literature have benefits, even though it doesn't bring any career use.
If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.
Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
I find people’s on the spot reasoning abilities considerable worse than even cheap LLMs. This “fast” mentality is what causes stupid decisions because we need to “keep moving” (To where? Wrong meeting!) Answers, answers, decisions, decisions, quick, quick! next quarter In hindsight we need to do things differently. Answers, answer, quick quick! Time is of the essence! If you don’t start producing sound within 5 seconds we will all spontaneously combust!
People can also ask questions that it is unreasonable to expect people to know on the spot too and after a while the role of the questioner in the meeting can be questioned. :)
I can see that. Personally, I use that for people who like to go down tedious rabbit holes and want to free up the rest of the attendees to go back to work.
True, but only for things that that your colleagues don't expect you to know already. Remember the "I'll circle back" meme about Jen Psaki? This response can only be used sparingly before it's seen as a sign of underpreparedness/inability to do back-of-the-envelope thinking.
Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.
Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
And yet if nobody likes you your career is going to stall. If you’re annoying, if you smell bad, if you dress poorly, if you’re fat and ugly, just like in school you’re going to have worse career outcomes.
And I could also call most of those things assignments instead of exams and nobody would bat an eye.
Your analogy was both thoughtless and stands up to no scrutiny
This is the answer. Many (all?) European schools don’t give homework (this is partly because of the way the grad programs work). It’s on the students to study in order to pass the (difficult) exams.
There is no such thing as a European school. Each country is different. And if the country is a federation, each state might be different. And we have homework in most European countries I’m aware of.
Seems this did effectively abolish homework if AI is now doing it all for them. The result seems to be that fewer students pass the exams, not more.
As with any skill, practice is necessary to achieve competence. If homework is no longer a viable way to force students to practice, you'll need to find some replacement, you can't just abolish it and expect there to be no negative consequences.
BTW / Offtopic:
I have read some weeks ago, today if you are hosting a party for your kids birthday, parents are preparing "give away bags" for handing over when leaving the party
The often underworked (most are autograding these days and reading old powerpoints rather than do real curriculum development) and (for the quality) overpaid teachers/professors will mass riot against this because it means they might have to actually teach. We might even get yet more anti-boy treatment than already exists among them as a social class in retaliation.
Please also abolish PowerPoint and force oral exams while you are at it.
Teachers are also luddites as a social class. Math teachers cried about calculators yet everyone of them who refused to adapt did disservice to their students (especially anyone doing statistics). My state's education system is utter trash despite being well off economically because of strong teachers unions keeping them from undergoing even a tiny bit of scrutiny.
They do not deserve the social credit/grace that they get. They are ultimately gatekeepers, whose extremely biased decisions in grading/treatment of their flocks decide which kid grows up on the streets and which kid grows up to eat lobster thermador every day.
Teachers also should not be disciplinarians. Children with discipline problems bad enough to disrupt a whole class should be thrown out of the class room as basically the only thing a teacher does for "discipline". The "right to education for the shit kids means we can't do that" framing is such trash for those who want an education and will inevitably be disrupted by a small minority of terrible students.
Also it's interesting that one of the only other things Max Stirner wrote about besides philosophy was education and his myriad problems with it (given his history as a school teacher).
I think we need to accept that AI causes cognitive decline, like Alzheimer's. For an Adult this may be manageable, but in a young brain, this is detrimental.
Guess what this is probably fine. AI helps people do their work on a daily basis and probably makes them memorize less things. That’s how the world is moving. You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic. And we shouldn’t organize our society around memorizing things for exams.
What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).
If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.
OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.
I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.
Let me explain.
All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche.
I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-rays wrong, as she did them non-weight bearing, which is useless if there are no fractures.
The specialist was excited to see me, and up to date on all the lisfranc research. I've had a really bad sprain and he said conservative treatment should be sufficient. It took months but I healed up.
I've had quite a few injuries from playing sports and often found doctors to be "wrong" simply because their knowledge was out of date.
I am confused as to how this is an argument for a single source of truth. It seems like you've presented an argument for the opposite. If there were a single source of truth, there would be no point in seeking a second opinion - it would be the same as the first. If the first opinion was correct, excellent. But if the first opinion was incorrect (and no AI model is correct 100% of the time), then you're straight out of luck.
The problem is that the first source is incorrect because she doesn't deal with lisfranc injuries frequently enough and her knowledge is not good enough. I've had to go do my own research to find a guy who specializes in lisfranc. Most patients would not.
However, if you went to an AI agent which has access to medical research, you would get the most up to date research.
Why would I seek a 2nd opinion if the initial doctor knew what to do?
> I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.
We should establish a single practice of care, MedicineGPT. It may be a rough start but over time the gene pool will adapt and the human race will live harmoniously with the machines (sorry, with the GPUs). Plus our insurance premiums should finally go down.
It would be better than most physicians now. It can quickly crunch many pages of medical history and medical research, this something a physician cannot do. They have intuition but sometimes are not equipped to deal with complex problems.
> What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).
Ironically I had a friend who went to med school and in his own words roughly 90% or more of the students there are heavily relying on GPT. They even had a few instances where people were using it to cheat during exams. And supposedly during the clinical years of uni if they don't know something they literally just go to a separate room and start asking GPT for answers. Make of that what you will.
This is too simplistic. There are disciplines, like Anatomy, where you're basically just memorizing bones, glands, and other parts of the human body. For organic chemistry, students need to memorize most of the krebs cycle diagram for their exams (because doing so and drawing it lets them reference it later).
Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.
Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.
Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.
How do you differentiate between mastery of a topic and mastery of using an AI in an exam setting?
Open book tests and allowed cheat sheets already solve the memorization-is-not-required gap. It seems like allowing use of AI pushes that closer to thinking-is-not-required. And if no thinking is required, then how can you prove personal mastery?
A lot of expertise is actually knowing things about the domain. You can't make a good judgement call on a topic without getting relevant knowledge in your head to make that decision. You can't even lookup the relevant knowledge without knowing what knowledge is important to make the decision, so reference material is not enough.
A good analogy to caching and memory lookups. You store in your head only the most valuable immediately necessary information, the rest can be outsourced.
> You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic.
Yes, you do need to memorize and know things about the subject in order to be a master of it. What is the definition of "mastery" that you are using? What are the Things being memorized?
Memorizing stuff is good for understanding. Of course memorizing without understanding doesn't really help, which is what a lot of student last-minute "cramming" boils down to. But without concrete and memorized knowledge, any abstract reasoning skills become quickly impossible.
Wrong. Memorizing without understanding is pointless. And I'd argue that rote memorization does nothing to guide ones understanding. Because if you actually understand a subject deeply enough you can literally derive almost anything that would need to be memorized on the fly, and if you can't (say constants, or spec information, or anything else) you can simply surgically look it up online (or via an LLM).
> Wrong. Memorizing without understanding is pointless.
GP said exactly the same thing.
I agree with GP’s broader point, which is that you cannot have understanding without a specific set of baseline facts. The student studying only those facts and never achieving the understanding they are meant to support is a tragedy of our education system.
There are people who need to understand microbiology at a specific level and they cannot derive it all on the fly. They can achieve better memorization through understanding but I personally have found rote memorization can be an essential first step in some disciplines.
This is not, in fact, fine. The point of education is to learn things, and these results show that kids are not learning things as effectively when they use LLMs.
It's critical to understand the fundamentals on your own and that is different from AI being used in public. Sure school doesn't have as much value as it used to but it was always more about social credit or a certification that you took the time and effort to understand the world under pressure (obviously not true for all disciplines) or goals attached preferably in group settings.
This is something that AI cannot replace. Viewing things as memorizing is the wrong take.
Yeah, obviously. We also don't know how to use flint and steel to start fires any more. You wouldn't outlift a crane, why would you want to outhomework an AI? And you can't even argue that this toil is going to help in the workplace, because the workplace is now AI-native, and you can offload everything to AI.
These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.
Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.
Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.
The important thing is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.
If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).
Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.
(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)
> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.
Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?
1) We're building a tool that can make toil of all kinds obsolete. We're not there yet, but I'm watching it happen in real time.
2) The fact that it works so well economically means that it's inevitably going to take over. Humans simply won't be profitably employable, and this will happen sooner than you think.
3) The takeover could lead to a utopia, where nothing is needed of anyone, and you could do what you want when you want it.
4) Humans are likely fuck that up, and it's worth doing what you can to end up in the group that benefits. Sipping wine on the beach isn't mutually exclusive with a great deal going to the winners.
I do not believe that human brains are magical, and I think that they can be surpassed with manufactured brains.
Concerns over equitable the distribution is doesn't affect the value of the skills.
I get it, there's a strong anti-AI vibe here because of point 4. I'm somewhat worried, but I'm also really excited about the possiblilities, and I don't think we can avoid going to a fully AI future no matter how anti-AI you are; we can only figure out where to set the dial between 3 and 4.
88 comments:
This article is about the Economist's summary of a journal article so we have a (AI?) summary of a summary. Not very helpful. Here are a couple of better references:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6868618
https://archive.is/w1eng
Also note the findings are more nuanced than may appear on the surface.
Appreciate your summary of this summary of the economist’s summary of the paper.
I'm confused, could you summarize that for me?
Summarized happened.
https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/summary
All this plus a malware popup too, at least when I looked.
For some of the classes my kids were in, the lessons and homework time were reversed.
Learning the material (using the text book and videos) was what they had to do at night and class time was spent working through problems or applying the material in some way.
Flipped classroom was a popular method when I was teaching math. Some students found it very helpful. The trouble was getting the students to do the reading before class. If students came in unprepared they struggled to keep up.
I did this for the last college programming course I taught (2025) as an anti-LLM measure. Every class started with a very short closed-book auto-graded multiple-choice test on the reading. I was careful to specify which was the core reading needed to learn the material (on the quiz) and which was extra (not on the quiz - I think many professors assign this extra reading to everyone, thinking of their strongest students). I think this developed an expectation in the students that doing the reading was easier than finding a way not to.
I taught a flipped classroom online. Students had to successful pass a quiz on the before class materials to get the join link to the session.
It's especially hard when multiple subjects try to do it, because it can add enormous amounts of home-time expectations. And many families can't dedicate that much time.
I do like it though, and I like that college generally leaned that way more (and was better balanced, as it had substantially less time in classrooms, so you could study during the day).
They’re using flipped learning even in universities now.
Flipped classroom method?
Yes! I didn't know it had a name but a quick googling confirms what you said.
Interesting. Ages?
This was probably middle school.
Education sustem is not about the actual knowledge, but about training various aspects of the brain during kids development. So even memorizing literature have benefits, even though it doesn't bring any career use.
If you skip this, well your brain won't develop as much at period of life it's able to do so.
In my professional career, my employers give me a lot more assignments than exams.
Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.
You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")
“I don’t know but after this meeting I will find out and get back to you”
Is an acceptable answer.
It's only an acceptable answer when used sparingly. The more often it's used, the more questions arise about your role in that meeting.
I find people’s on the spot reasoning abilities considerable worse than even cheap LLMs. This “fast” mentality is what causes stupid decisions because we need to “keep moving” (To where? Wrong meeting!) Answers, answers, decisions, decisions, quick, quick! next quarter In hindsight we need to do things differently. Answers, answer, quick quick! Time is of the essence! If you don’t start producing sound within 5 seconds we will all spontaneously combust!
People can also ask questions that it is unreasonable to expect people to know on the spot too and after a while the role of the questioner in the meeting can be questioned. :)
Exactly, maybe there was no need to waste his time with the meeting, he could have been doing productive work instead
I can see that. Personally, I use that for people who like to go down tedious rabbit holes and want to free up the rest of the attendees to go back to work.
True, but only for things that that your colleagues don't expect you to know already. Remember the "I'll circle back" meme about Jen Psaki? This response can only be used sparingly before it's seen as a sign of underpreparedness/inability to do back-of-the-envelope thinking.
Why would they ask you when they can ask Claude then?
Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.
The exams aren't the thing that matter, they're an experiment to measure the thing that matters. Which, presumably, still matters at work!
In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.
Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
If cohorts are graduating into the workforce with decreasing stand-alone skills, that implies the economic value-add of labour is shifting to AI, which implies broadly falling standards of living, falling political power, and an ongoing transfer of power and wealth to capital.
If students are taking shortcuts with AI when their brains have the highest capacity for learning they may be permanently weakening their prospects. It doesn't seem likely that whatever "AI management skills" they incidentally learn will make up for, over their lifetime, the economic value loss they suffer due to reduced cognitive skills.
On an individual basis, in the next few years, this might not matter. Across decades, economies and polities, it will.
> Stand-alone bottom-up observations (even if valid) obscure the fundamental problem that AI (or "AI" if you like) is inducing systemic change across human civilization.
Students have been cheating and taking shortcuts on their work long before the current generation of AI tools existed (and probably for as long as graded exams have existed).
Somehow, civilization has managed to survive.
Your employer gave you your job based on your exam results.
Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.
Fortune cookie ass statement.
Your career is more akin to the totality of school than it is to any specific facet of it imo.
The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
> Fortune cookie ass statement.
> The social aspects are more important than the exam sitting most of the time.
To spell it out more clearly: every single aspect of your career is an exam. The interview is an exam, quite literally. The day-to-day responsibilities (meetings, planning, problem-solving, collaborating) are parts of the exam. If you're failing at those or automating them away, then what is your role? The assignments (solve X bug or add Y feature) are parts of the exam too. Failing to do these things will mean that, yes, you are failing the exam.
And yet if nobody likes you your career is going to stall. If you’re annoying, if you smell bad, if you dress poorly, if you’re fat and ugly, just like in school you’re going to have worse career outcomes.
And I could also call most of those things assignments instead of exams and nobody would bat an eye.
Your analogy was both thoughtless and stands up to no scrutiny
Disagree. School exams test for academia-readiness too. And sometimes the schools and lecturers are filled with ideology irrelevant to real work.
Career exams tend to be a mix but a lot less ideology.
One of the main reasons safety standards are written in blood.
We cannot be boosting AI slop like this
abolish homework
This is the answer. Many (all?) European schools don’t give homework (this is partly because of the way the grad programs work). It’s on the students to study in order to pass the (difficult) exams.
There is no such thing as a European school. Each country is different. And if the country is a federation, each state might be different. And we have homework in most European countries I’m aware of.
What are you basing that claim on?
Seems this did effectively abolish homework if AI is now doing it all for them. The result seems to be that fewer students pass the exams, not more.
As with any skill, practice is necessary to achieve competence. If homework is no longer a viable way to force students to practice, you'll need to find some replacement, you can't just abolish it and expect there to be no negative consequences.
The replacement is students maturing into functional adults who learn they must study to pass exams, not to treat them like babies.
> The replacement is students maturing into functional adults
By what means? Have you got a magic wand that will turn 3rd graders into mature functional adults who will study on their own without homework?
I’m talking about university students. I don’t think I third graders are turning into functional adults any time soon.
Okay, but this article isn't about that:
> The study followed 27,000 pupils aged 12 to 18
The same applies to high school students. Just make it exam based and give suggested reasons.
(Third grade is 9-10 years old I believe.)
Around here kids get homework in kindergarten. It's absurd.
Errr, what does it contain then? :-D
This sounds really strange, never heard of.
BTW / Offtopic: I have read some weeks ago, today if you are hosting a party for your kids birthday, parents are preparing "give away bags" for handing over when leaving the party
The often underworked (most are autograding these days and reading old powerpoints rather than do real curriculum development) and (for the quality) overpaid teachers/professors will mass riot against this because it means they might have to actually teach. We might even get yet more anti-boy treatment than already exists among them as a social class in retaliation.
Please also abolish PowerPoint and force oral exams while you are at it.
Teachers are also luddites as a social class. Math teachers cried about calculators yet everyone of them who refused to adapt did disservice to their students (especially anyone doing statistics). My state's education system is utter trash despite being well off economically because of strong teachers unions keeping them from undergoing even a tiny bit of scrutiny.
They do not deserve the social credit/grace that they get. They are ultimately gatekeepers, whose extremely biased decisions in grading/treatment of their flocks decide which kid grows up on the streets and which kid grows up to eat lobster thermador every day.
Teachers also should not be disciplinarians. Children with discipline problems bad enough to disrupt a whole class should be thrown out of the class room as basically the only thing a teacher does for "discipline". The "right to education for the shit kids means we can't do that" framing is such trash for those who want an education and will inevitably be disrupted by a small minority of terrible students.
Also it's interesting that one of the only other things Max Stirner wrote about besides philosophy was education and his myriad problems with it (given his history as a school teacher).
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-fals...
I think we need to accept that AI causes cognitive decline, like Alzheimer's. For an Adult this may be manageable, but in a young brain, this is detrimental.
Guess what this is probably fine. AI helps people do their work on a daily basis and probably makes them memorize less things. That’s how the world is moving. You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic. And we shouldn’t organize our society around memorizing things for exams.
What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).
If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.
OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.
I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible. Let me explain.
All podiatrists are not the same. All physicians in their specialties are often specializing in their own niche and are up-to-date on that niche.
I've had lisfranc ligament injury. My podiatrist wanted to perform a surgery quickly, which in 90% of cases is advised. I decided to seek a 2nd opinion because I realized she did the X-rays wrong, as she did them non-weight bearing, which is useless if there are no fractures.
The specialist was excited to see me, and up to date on all the lisfranc research. I've had a really bad sprain and he said conservative treatment should be sufficient. It took months but I healed up.
I've had quite a few injuries from playing sports and often found doctors to be "wrong" simply because their knowledge was out of date.
I am confused as to how this is an argument for a single source of truth. It seems like you've presented an argument for the opposite. If there were a single source of truth, there would be no point in seeking a second opinion - it would be the same as the first. If the first opinion was correct, excellent. But if the first opinion was incorrect (and no AI model is correct 100% of the time), then you're straight out of luck.
The problem is that the first source is incorrect because she doesn't deal with lisfranc injuries frequently enough and her knowledge is not good enough. I've had to go do my own research to find a guy who specializes in lisfranc. Most patients would not.
However, if you went to an AI agent which has access to medical research, you would get the most up to date research.
Why would I seek a 2nd opinion if the initial doctor knew what to do?
> I actually think having a single source of truth would not be terrible.
We should establish a single practice of care, MedicineGPT. It may be a rough start but over time the gene pool will adapt and the human race will live harmoniously with the machines (sorry, with the GPUs). Plus our insurance premiums should finally go down.
It would be better than most physicians now. It can quickly crunch many pages of medical history and medical research, this something a physician cannot do. They have intuition but sometimes are not equipped to deal with complex problems.
While I am not 100% opposed to this idea, it should come with liability to the provider AND its error rate be better than best human doctors.
> What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).
Ironically I had a friend who went to med school and in his own words roughly 90% or more of the students there are heavily relying on GPT. They even had a few instances where people were using it to cheat during exams. And supposedly during the clinical years of uni if they don't know something they literally just go to a separate room and start asking GPT for answers. Make of that what you will.
This is too simplistic. There are disciplines, like Anatomy, where you're basically just memorizing bones, glands, and other parts of the human body. For organic chemistry, students need to memorize most of the krebs cycle diagram for their exams (because doing so and drawing it lets them reference it later).
Thinking is infinitely more complex than "critical thinking" vs. rote functions. You want students to get to critical, eventually, but the lower orders on bloom's taxonomy serve important roles, too.
Course design built around multiple choice questions, essays, and a lot of the historical assessments that we're used to are largely not great for learning in the first place—–they're used because they can be auto-graded or score assigned quickly. AI, conversely, is kind of revealing the limitations of these outmoded learning design practices.
Think of the meme going around right now from Milennials to Gen Z: "I wrote a 5 page essay on a book I never read!" <- They're saying this to AI generated essays as if there's any difference in the critical thinking that comes out of an exercise like that (read: absolutely none).
AI is a new tech—so of course people are still figuring out the limits of it. In 10 years a lot of the paradigm will be set. Until then, students are unfortunately kind of in the thick of it.
How do you differentiate between mastery of a topic and mastery of using an AI in an exam setting?
Open book tests and allowed cheat sheets already solve the memorization-is-not-required gap. It seems like allowing use of AI pushes that closer to thinking-is-not-required. And if no thinking is required, then how can you prove personal mastery?
Completely agree.
Absolute waste of time getting babies to walk now that we have cars and electric scooters!
A lot of expertise is actually knowing things about the domain. You can't make a good judgement call on a topic without getting relevant knowledge in your head to make that decision. You can't even lookup the relevant knowledge without knowing what knowledge is important to make the decision, so reference material is not enough.
"You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic."
Yes you do???
Good exams don't just test memorization
Yup, when you find such exam please let us know.
A good analogy to caching and memory lookups. You store in your head only the most valuable immediately necessary information, the rest can be outsourced.
so how _do_ you show mastery of a topic?
> You don’t need to be able to memorize something for an exam to show mastery of a topic.
Yes, you do need to memorize and know things about the subject in order to be a master of it. What is the definition of "mastery" that you are using? What are the Things being memorized?
Memorizing stuff is good for understanding. Of course memorizing without understanding doesn't really help, which is what a lot of student last-minute "cramming" boils down to. But without concrete and memorized knowledge, any abstract reasoning skills become quickly impossible.
Wrong. Memorizing without understanding is pointless. And I'd argue that rote memorization does nothing to guide ones understanding. Because if you actually understand a subject deeply enough you can literally derive almost anything that would need to be memorized on the fly, and if you can't (say constants, or spec information, or anything else) you can simply surgically look it up online (or via an LLM).
> Wrong. Memorizing without understanding is pointless.
GP said exactly the same thing.
I agree with GP’s broader point, which is that you cannot have understanding without a specific set of baseline facts. The student studying only those facts and never achieving the understanding they are meant to support is a tragedy of our education system.
There are people who need to understand microbiology at a specific level and they cannot derive it all on the fly. They can achieve better memorization through understanding but I personally have found rote memorization can be an essential first step in some disciplines.
This is not, in fact, fine. The point of education is to learn things, and these results show that kids are not learning things as effectively when they use LLMs.
It's critical to understand the fundamentals on your own and that is different from AI being used in public. Sure school doesn't have as much value as it used to but it was always more about social credit or a certification that you took the time and effort to understand the world under pressure (obviously not true for all disciplines) or goals attached preferably in group settings.
This is something that AI cannot replace. Viewing things as memorizing is the wrong take.
Definitely not fine. People are graduating from Computer Science programs literally unable to write a line of code without AI assistance.
These people have fallen into OpenAI and Anthropic's trap and are illiterate without the assistance of coin-operated slop generators.
Yup this is the devious plan.
Thank god for china!
One more step towards eliminating the value of labor entirely. What "work" will people be doing on a daily basis, and what makes it valuable?
Yeah, obviously. We also don't know how to use flint and steel to start fires any more. You wouldn't outlift a crane, why would you want to outhomework an AI? And you can't even argue that this toil is going to help in the workplace, because the workplace is now AI-native, and you can offload everything to AI.
These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.
Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.
Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.
The important thing is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.
If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).
It’s not ‘even the learned how to learn’.
It’s the exposure to feeling under pressure, creativity of the mind etc - the less you expose a human to ‘suffering’ the more useless they become.
Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.
(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)
you know we let social media companies cause massive harm over 2 decades; but clearly, this will be deifferent!
Why one would care? Look at your comment from two days ago.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363319
> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.
Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.
Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366313
You gotta pick a lane with your rah-rah-ism.
I believe 4 things:
1) We're building a tool that can make toil of all kinds obsolete. We're not there yet, but I'm watching it happen in real time.
2) The fact that it works so well economically means that it's inevitably going to take over. Humans simply won't be profitably employable, and this will happen sooner than you think.
3) The takeover could lead to a utopia, where nothing is needed of anyone, and you could do what you want when you want it.
4) Humans are likely fuck that up, and it's worth doing what you can to end up in the group that benefits. Sipping wine on the beach isn't mutually exclusive with a great deal going to the winners.
I do not believe that human brains are magical, and I think that they can be surpassed with manufactured brains.
Concerns over equitable the distribution is doesn't affect the value of the skills.
I get it, there's a strong anti-AI vibe here because of point 4. I'm somewhat worried, but I'm also really excited about the possiblilities, and I don't think we can avoid going to a fully AI future no matter how anti-AI you are; we can only figure out where to set the dial between 3 and 4.