Yves here. Normally I am loath to have a video as a cross post, but I suspect most of you will agree that this one merits being showcased. It describes the extent and severity of the collapse in critical thinking skills and even basic information acquisition among most children due to device dependence and AI addiction. Teachers are resigning in droves.
The narrator in passing wonders what sort of society is coming, since a minority of children, those of the affluent and above all, the progeny of the tech elite, are being brought in a more traditional way, with no or limited device use until their teens, to acquire fashioned cognitive skills. But what of the rest of the dull eaters? What role if any will be allotted to them?
A conservative colleague said the use of AI to create addiction and device dependency was evil. That is an understatement. These kids rely on ChatGPT not just for information but also to make choices, and for many, that seems to extend to every aspect of their lives. Sam Altman makes clear in video clips below that this extreme loss of independence, of personal autonomy, is deliberate.
That means unless these kids can find a way to break free, they are cognitive serfs that can be told to do anything. How to vote. Whether to sign up to die in a hopeless war. Whether to take a job in a unsafe meatpacking plant and risk loss of limbs.
This widespread abuse is far worse than what the Sacklers and other opioid peddlers did to mainly working class pain victims, or what the British did to China in the Opium Wars. At least with opioid addiction, it is possible for the victims to recover even if the withdrawal process is painful. The evidence is mounting that even for adults, regular use of AI diminishes reasoning skills and attention spans.
These children are being turned into automatons, incapable of independent thought and action. It’s widely known in developmental psychology that if certain patterning does not happen at critical ages, the deficit is permanent. Kittens needing visual input in their first few days or they are blind. Kids who don’t crawl having coordination issues as adults due to missing important movement patterning. Less dramatic versions are not being able to make sounds in foreign languages if you have not heard and practiced them when young.
These young AI addicts are set to be permanently damaged. This is tech bros creating something as permanent and harmful as fetal alcohol syndrome on a mass basis. And they clearly know what they are doing, witness how they raise their children on completely different lines.
We won’t know until these AI-brain-rotted kids grow up, but the extreme dependency discussed widely by teachers looks as if some, perhaps most, will be so wanting in decision-making capacity as to make for ideal slaves. Could they even be instructed to get into a Temple Grandin type killing line, to tamely take a bolt to the brain, when they are of no more use?
Oh, and the babbling from one of the Tik-Tok memes sounded uncomfortably like the vocalizations made by victims of a neuro-linguistic virus, designed to control the population, in the Neal Stephenson novel Snow Crash.
Hat tip to reader fk for this important find.
Mildly edited machine-generated transcript:
Narrator: A fourth grader asked their teacher, “Why do I need to learn how to read if AI can read for me?”
Right now, 40% of fourth graders can’t read. We’re witnessing the collapse of the American education system.
Teacher 1: I teach 8th grade history and I have 110ish students. Two of them are reading on grade level right now. 18 of them are at a kindergarten level. 55 of those students are between a second and fourth grade level.
We were doing guided notes. Supposed to be a real easy day. It was review. They wrote down “Maryland was founded as a safe haven for Catholics.” It was on the board. They wrote it down and before we moved on, I call in a student and I ask, “Hey, where were the Catholics one more time?”
And these students, what they do is they look at me and then they look at their notes and then they look at the board. They look back at their notes and some of them never answered me.
They never figured out the answer. It was wild.
And I kept giving them hints like rephrasing the question and saying like, “It’s in your notes. We just wrote it down. We just wrote it down. Where are the Catholics? It’s on the board.”
And they never got it. They can’t read their own notes. Not and I don’t mean their handwriting. I mean like they can’t they can’t make heads or tails of it on the page.
These kids have a frightening ability for information to go from their eyes to their hands and not pass through the brain at all. What do we do, y’all? That ship is sailing across the ocean and there is no one at the wheel.
Narrator: What she described is terrifying. The information goes through their eyes down through their hands without passing through their brains.
But this isn’t an isolated incident. This is nationwide. I looked up the actual numbers. Only 23% of fourth graders can read at a proficient level. Just 23%.
Then we have the eighth graders. Only 26% are reading proficiently. After all the reforms, adding technology into the classrooms, and debating about funding, we’re now at 40%. We didn’t get better. We made it worse.
Teacher 2: I’ve been teaching since 1993, and yes, we have always had kids who struggle to focus, but what’s happening now is on a whole other level.
Do you remember how it used to feel when the teacher would pull out the cart with the big TV and the VCR attached? Yeah. Not anymore. Now I’ve got kids asking to skip it. They literally can’t just sit and watch.
Narrator: I’m a ’90s kid, so I know exactly what she’s talking about. When that rinky dink TV rolled into the classroom, that was the best day ever. But today’s kids are overstimulated. TV is not cutting it.
When we were growing up, they said we watched too many cartoons. Now kids don’t even want cartoons. It’s not enough stimulation. They get bored.
Kids today are growing up watching Coco Melon and YouTube shorts. Content that’s meant to hold attention for seconds at a time. And now we’re asking them to sit in a classroom for hours with no screens and no stimulation. Of course, they’re going to roam around yelling “six, seven”. They’re having withdrawal symptoms.
Teacher 3: Honey, teaching kids isn’t the same anymore. It’s just not. Used to be kids would listen to teachers simply because they were teachers. That was the respect of it all. Now, uh-uh. No, honey. I got to keep the kids constantly engaged. Not even just engaged, but almost overstimulated. The candy isn’t even working anymore. Giving out candy for positive reinforcement doesn’t even work anymore. They don’t care about that. Girl, I’m using Champzini Benini just to get my kids attention. Just so they’ll look at me. Hello. Hello, girl. Bye. I got kids saying “six seven” repeatedly. They don’t even know how to spell six seven.
Catching me doing this mid mid lecture just to see if they’re paying attention. You watching? Hello? We there girl? It’s so bad now. It’s so bad.
Narrator: TVs don’t work. Candy isn’t working. The only thing that grabs their attention is Tik Tok memes:
Chimpanzini. Banani wah wah wah bananai monkey monkey monkey monkey uchi or shimpi cocoini wah wah wah poop cooni monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey monkey.
Narrator: Despite these apps requiring users to be 13, kids are on them way earlier. One study found that a quarter of kids aged 11 to 15 said they use social media to forget about their problems. 17% said they tried to cut back but couldn’t. These kids are describing addiction. Gen Z was the first generation to grow up on social media. And they’re the most anxious, most depressed, loneliest generation on record.
And now Gen Alpha isn’t just growing up on social media. They also have generative AI. Okay, this is becoming a genuinely concerning issue.
Teacher 4: As a substitute teacher, I am encountering a really concerning number of students who truly do not see any value in learning. Because, as one of the fourth and fifth graders that I was teaching the other day asked me,” Why do I need to know any of this if a computer or AI can do it for me?” A little girl didn’t want to learn how to read because why would she need to when she could have the computer read it to her or when she could just take a picture of her math problem and have the AI do it for her? This is a legitimate issue.
Narrator: Children do not have fully developed reasoning abilities. Their brains just aren’t developed. We can just take a look at the subreddit “Kids are stupid” to see proof that kids do not think long term. They don’t have the mental capacity to fully think through their actions.
So, how is a teacher supposed to convince a student to learn how to read when that student believes that the AI can just read for them? How do they convince them to learn to write when they can talk to chat GPT and it’ll write for them? Spelling, why bother? Grammar, who cares? History, civics, critical thinking. The AI has all the answers. And all a child sees is a path of least resistance. They don’t understand that to struggle is to learn and to grow.
Male Adult: What are you doing?
Toddler: ChatGPT.
Male Adult: I know, but what are you doing?
Toddler: I’m doing I’m doing school.
Male Adult: You’re doing school and ChatGPT.
Toddler: Uh-huh.
Male Adult: How old are you?
Toddler: Three.
Narrator: And what are these children hearing from the adults about AI? AI is going to change everything. AI makes you so much more efficient. AI can do it for you.
Why would a child invest in learning when every adult around them is saying that machines will do it better? We’re creating learned helplessness at scale.
Teacher 5: I’m going to start with saying that teachers are not afraid of AI because we hate technology. We are scared because we are watching critical thinking disappear in real time.
When I was in high school, my math teachers would say, “You got to know how to do this because you’re not going to have a calculator in your pocket.” Well, guess what? I have a calculator in my pocket at all times.
But what I’ve realized is that it’s not a fair comparison because calculators replace computation after we learned how math worked. AI shows up before students ever learn how to think through a problem. What we are witnessing is that students are now incapable in sitting in any kind of intellectual discomfort. And that’s concerning.
Narrator: This is what people miss when they compare AI to calculators. It’s not just math. That’s literally every subject, including thinking itself.
And we now have more research on AI and cognition. Students who use AI show weaker reasoning skills. They accept answers without questioning them. Researchers call it cognitive offloading. They develop this pattern of generating first and thinking later, or really generating first and not thinking at all.
And the scary part is these studies are showing cognitive decline in adults, people with fully developed brains. If AI is doing this to adults, then what is it doing to a brain that’s still forming?
Teachers are responding to the overuse of AI by removing Chromebooks and iPads from the classroom. They’re going back to pencil and paper, the method that we’ve used for hundreds of years because it actually works.
But I want to discuss who’s actually incentivized to have AI in the classrooms. We already know what social media was designed to do and we know the future design because Mark Zuckerberg has been quite open about that. He thinks AI can fill the gaps in your friendships. He’s exploiting the loneliness caused by his own apps.
Then there’s Nome Shazir. He’s the founder of character AI. In an interview, Shazir said, “I joke that we’re not going to replace Google. We’re going to replace your mom.” He wants his AI chatbot to replace mothers. the person who’s supposed to guide you, help you make decisions, and provide you with life advice. He would rather his chatbot do that.
And then there’s Sam Alman. There’s always a Sam Alman quote because the man has never received a podcast invitation that he could turn down.
Sam Altman: People talk about the most personal in their lives to ChatGPT. Young people especially like use it as a therapist, a life coach, having these relationship problems. “What should I do?”
Sam Altman [different interview]: They don’t really make life decisions without asking like ChatGPT what they should do. And it has like the full context on every person in their life and what they’ve talked about.
Sam Altman [different interview]: And there’s young people who just say like, “I can’t make any decision in my life without telling ChatGPT everything that’s going on. It knows me. It knows my friends. I’m going to do whatever it says.
Narrator: These CEOs know exactly what they’re doing. They’re not accidentally replacing critical thinking. They’re designing for it. They want users dependent on the chatbot for advice, for decisionmaking, for thinking itself because dependency is a business model. In fact, it translates to $20 a month for chat GPT. But all of this has a societal cost and we are paying for it.
Teacher 6: I don’t get to teach. I spend my day managing behaviors and teaching students how to regulate their emotions. I’m not a counselor. I’m not a behavior specialist. I’m a teacher. And most of my job is managing behaviors. I just watched a video of a teacher getting pepper sprayed by their student in the school because they took their phone because it was being used to cheat on a test.
Narrator: She didn’t sign up for this. None of them did. Teachers go into the profession with the expectation that they will teach similar to how their teachers taught them. They didn’t realize that they would be managing behaviors because they’re not behavioral therapists. But today, that’s what the job entails. Severe breakouts, tremors, daily anxiety attacks, crying before work, crying after work, dreading the drive in, bringing work home because there’s not enough time to do your job at your job.
The data shows teacher shortages were being reported on back in 1998. But back then, it was fewer than 30% of states. Fast forward to today, and it’s 86% of school districts that can’t fill their positions. 86% is a collapse, not a shortage. 411,000 teaching positions are either empty or filled by someone who isn’t fully qualified.
As a result of having less staff and more students, more students with behavioral issues, teachers are burning out. In fact, teachers have the highest burnout rates of all industries with 44% reporting always or very often feeling burned out. This clip says: “How it feels going to sleep tonight knowing that I don’t have to wake up tomorrow and teach children because I quit teaching in the middle of the year.”
We can go to the comments:
“What are you doing instead???? (Asking for me).”
“Currently in class and just letting them talk over me because I’m tired of it already.”
“What do you do now? I want out of education”
“Quitting teaching was the BEST decision of my life…you won’t regret it!!”
“This is honestly terrifying seeing how many teachers wanting to quit. Teachers deserve better than this.”
Narrator: The comments are filled with teachers who want out or teachers who have already left and it’s the best decision they made.
By the way, this video was posted one week ago. It has over 2 million views and over 292,000 likes. The algorithm found every burnt out teacher in America.
“I live like this. so that my students can live like this. So, how can I afford to do this on a teacher’s salary? The answer is I can’t. I’m living paycheck to paycheck. I am beyond broke.”
Narrator:These are the people that we’re losing. Teachers who are willing to live paycheck to paycheck to nurture the next generation.
A survey found nearly 97% of teachers use their own money to buy classroom supplies. Teachers earning between $35,000 to $50,000 are spending $700 out of pocket each school year for kids to have pencils.
Critical thinking is becoming a class marker. Who can actually question things? But this is to be expected. For years, education has been systematically devalued, defunded, and deprioritized.
But who truly benefits from a population that can’t read, can’t write, can’t think critically and ask questions? These same tech companies creating these problems are selling the solution. The same government that claims prosperity is defunding schools while at the same time using our tax dollars to build yet another AI data center.
Male Speaker: What every educator on this app is talking about and what every educator in the field is noticing is a dramatic decline in basic critical reasoning skills and basic literacy skills among students. This is particularly pronounced among high school age students where they’re engaging with more complex material and can’t grasp basic concepts or manage basic memory about those concepts. And what this is creating is a generation entering the workforce without basic comprehension skills that is going to make it very hard for them to keep and maintain any form of employment.
On the inverse of this, we’re seeing kids in more affluent families being not only pulled out of the public school system and sent to things like Montessori schools, but being pulled away from technology, not given access to anything more than say a TV or a video game station until they’re a teenager. No tablets, no phones, things like that. And what they’re doing to fill their time instead is the normal childhood stuff of playing outside, reading a book, coloring coloring sheets. All of these things that seem like play, but are actually building soft skills that make someone much better able to navigate the world around them as they get older. The gap is not going to be who can use AI and who cannot. The gap is not going to be who is an allstar on the ACT with a full ride and who is not. The gap is going to be who can reason in a basic way and who cannot. And those that cannot will probably be left behind.
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A particularly horrifying piece. Thanks for sharing Yves. I only wonder what’ll happen if due to economic or resource constraints AI goes belly up. Will we be left with a whole generation of people incapable of thinking without crutches? And without said crutches, what will be of them? This feels the sort of processes going on during late-Roman times: a society that for its continuation today destroys its possibilities to continue tomorrow. After you eat the proverbial seed corn, what’s next? I think everyone knows the answer.
An anecdotal point must be said: AI use absolutely is damaging to adult brains. During my limited use it was quite clear that it has the tendency, unbeknownst at first sight, to worm itself in lines of reasoning that it really does not belong to (like a bad sycophantic “friend”). Best avoided entirely or used very cautiously and sparingly.
Small note: I assume “Chachi PT” in the Altman passage ought to be “Chat GPT”
Aha that error that was from the auto-transcription that I cleaned up and formatted but not enough. Fixing.
An subtle ironic counterpoint for emphasis, imo.
It is the machine translation of what I’ve noticed to be part of a techbro millieu. A studdering verbal delivery that implies “I am so super intelligent and thinking so fast that my words can’t keep up”. They all seem to do it, but Altman is one of the worst. Once you notice it, it is hard to unnotice (at least for me)
Altman talks in an almost childish way. I grimace at the “like … like” he sprinkles throughout his sentences. Did no one teach him how to speak with precision, eloquence? Or mention to him, how mediocre his language sounds?
At some level, this is pretty simple: if a student doesn’t want to learn, unless their family is very wealthy, their future will be doing manual labor and nothing else.
I once read an interview with a MD — an occupational medicine specialist — who said the first question he has for incoming patients is whether or not they have a High School diploma. If they answer “no”, he automatically assumes they will never be able to sit down in a chair during working hours. For certain kinds of injuries, this is obviously pretty important and can mean long-term disability status.
So, that’s the future for these kids, though they may not understand it. Perhaps some visual aids could make it clearer to them? The first thing that comes to mind are the scenes of the masses of identical, depressed workers in Lang’s Metropolis marching to eventual doom as they are sacrificed to Moloch, though there must be plenty of other examples.
In any case, I’m here to report that teaching in a university for many years now, I also see the incoming effects of AI, though I’m dealing with older students (mostly Gen Z), so I am not on the front lines like the teachers interviewed in this article. Still, I have to stamp out the use of AI almost every semester now — it is plagiarism and gets treated as such, i.e., automatic “F” — but many universities have capitulated into sad “embrace A.I.” policies.
Moreover, we are approaching a time when it will likely become more difficult to detect the use of AI by students, and teachers will only spend so much time on this before either handing out more “F”s or just waving the students through (you can guess which one is more likely).
Bluebooks, pencil and paper, or a return to oral exams are only a stopgap solution. For if the ultimate goal of Higher Ed is to train new researchers who will produce new knowledge, they are first going to need to learn how to engage with published research and then produce solid, argumentative writing. Students learn that by learning how to write research papers, and then writing a MA thesis, and eventually a PhD dissertation. I do not see how students are going to get from blue book exams in a classroom to writing a graduate-level thesis. If they do, the quality of their research will be predictably very poor.
So, teacher burnout is happening in Higher Ed as well. I have one colleague who quit because the university refused to adopt any sort of policy on students using so-called “AI” apps, just offloading the whole matter onto the faculty. A familiar refrain from other colleagues is now: “yeah… I can’t wait to retire.”
And I’m sure many will think to themselves that dancing on Tiktok or appearing on OnlyFans is a very nice way to make a living doing manual labor.
“dancing on Tiktok or appearing on OnlyFans” is still gig work.
What is disappearing is full time white-collar and blue-collar skilled work where the employee can expect defined pay with health and pension benefits, and a reasonable expectation of not being laid off.
Good luck to them with those pursuits. Might as well just play the lottery.
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Yes, another example would be gamers or influencers who want to become social media stars, and believe this is a viable path to a comfortable life.
No doubt many young people now hear stories about somebody’s cousin who is “making millions” as an influencer, though as @Geo points out, most influencers are only receiving a poverty-level income from their activities, and there is extreme wealth concentration at the top.
Also, all of these “professions” depend upon platforms, and beyond the “if your business depends on a platform…” adage, I suspect it is only a matter of time before we begin to see large “talent management” firms begin to assert control, like Johnny’s or Yoshimoto Kogyo did in Japan.
These firms present themselves as being concerned with “talent” but AFAICT they are really about human resources, not simply deciding who gets to be a star and who doesn’t, but in effect controlling labor markets.
And all of this is even before we get to the use of AI to generate humanoid “stars” who can be used to replace actors/actresses in movies and media, e.g., what appears in Ari Folman’s The Congress (2013).
Most known influencers have a ‘partnership’ with a firm, and there are already firms supposedly doing recruitment drives for things like OnlyFans. Also Youtube is doing its best to favour AI-heavy/only channels and a recent problem on Instagram is that there are a lot of accounts that seem like real persons but are actually AI (that was Meta’s intention as per their announcement last year, but also persons have been using AI to make a fake profile, so a lot of ‘hot models’ on Instagram may be men using AI to get the cash that comes with that popularity).
Even ‘manual labor’ is increasingly demanding & complex.
To wit, the garbageman just came by. Alone in his truck, he must 1) be an excellent and attentive driver, 2) operate the waldo arms which pick up and empty the cans, 3) stay on schedule, 4) deal with the unexpected.
Ai can’t do this. Can an AI-dependent human?
I teach physics at a public liberal arts college, and, yes, “I can’t wait to retire” is also something I have started to hear a lot from people I know in higher education.
It’s not all bleak, though. I have no shortage of students who are aware that AI is a problem, who genuinely want to learn, and seek my help to do things properly to develop their thinking and arguing skills. That is, I suspect, in large part because most of my students come from professional-class backgrounds, and aspire to professional careers—they doubt that faking it through AI will be an option.
What worries me most is that AI is further undermining our ability to make education available to people with working class backgrounds. In higher education, we’ve never been all that good at serving those who might want to do something with their hands and their brain, who might find a liberal education valuable without ending up in a career where they end up behind a desk. AI will, I imagine, feed further into our PMC prejudices that there are Morlocks and there are Eloi, and that is the way of the world.
Those PMC are pretty dumb — after all, the Morlocks eat the Eloi …
I assume “Chachi PT” in the Altman passage ought to be “Chat GPT”
And “monastery schools” in the last paragraph should obviously be “Montessori schools”, but either would probably work.
A couple of years ago I was doing some work with a very young Venezuelan (about 20 yo) then. The work was very physical carrying solar modules and weights from here to there. Any time we stopped he was with his mobile and his social networks (don’t ask me which) and he was crazily “navigating” through an infinite sequence of what looked like a mix of messages, news and commentaries all filled with emoticons, gifs etc no stop motion. The guy looked unable to concentrate in a single thing for more that a fraction of a second. Not that I was spying him but we were probably enclosed in an elevator with solar modules and he wanted to show me something. I asked him if this was the way he was getting informed on anything. Let’s say the situation in Venezuela. “Yes” he answered and showed me a cascade of BS fast commentaries about Venezuela that were his sources. Man, i told him, this is not information but noises.
You don’t need ChatGPT to get to this inability to concentrate on anything and this need for overstimulation and noises. Instagram and other social networks are good enough for that.
While I agree that needing or seeking overstimulation and losing the ability to focus is bad, IMHO the learned dependency on AI for decisions is much worse. It’s a staggering loss of autonomy that sets up users for exploitation by app owners and/or governments.
Die Zeit had an interview with the German Digital Minister, Karsten Wildberger, about a month ago (alas it’s still behind their paywall). He starts each day by babbling some “unstructured” thoughts to Anthropic’s Claude, and asks it to give them back to him in the form of a couple of “ideas.”
The man responsible for AI policy in Germany has an AI program tell him what he thinks. That’s a stark form of lobbying, at the very least.
Making smartphones into people-remote-controls. scary
AI Apocalyptic Idiocy
So, the mad rush to construct data centers is engendering: a financial bubble that makes the mortgage derivatives crisis of 2008 look like a picnic; depleting the water supply; erasing what it means to be a sentient being; debasing cultural creativity; exacerbating the climate crisis via energy demands, destroying democracy, facilitating the Gaza genocide, domestic surveillance on steriods, all for the aggrandizement of the Silicon Valley Sociopaths.
What’s not to like?
As someone in the field, yes a lot of kids do not see the value of education. But that isn’t new. What is new is how fast the go to their phones for the “answer”. I can tell.. I ask them to redo it. At this point schools can ban the phones, but you need a frequency jammer to make it effective. There needs to be outright bans at the state/federal levels for it to be taken seriously.
They see their parents on their devices and see it as normal. So that has to change as well.
My son attends a pretty good public high school but he still doesn’t know the meaning of many words. I suppose some of it is my fault but I can’t get him to read. Shockingly, his teacher suggested he enroll in AP language. All these kids are in AP classes but don’t understand how to read a text. I won’t allow him to download a chat GPT app to help him on work but I’m sure everyone else uses it. All these kids want to do is hustle and try to make money at reselling vintage or become YouTube stars which I guess is its own skill. Also the only watch animated or superhero movies because they have no interest in complex stories.
See how the Superhero genre changed from the original Iron Man film, which had (relatively) complex characterisations with few actors and a slow plot, to the later Avengers mishmashes of action, a vague plot, and characterisations limited to the particular superhero skill.
I rewatch the Thin Man series, particularly the first 3, despite knowing the plot backwards, because I enjoy how well it is done.
The younger guys at work don’t watch anything older than 2000’s for TV or movies. One guy said, I never watch black and white movies . I”m like …Gosh, kind of limiting yourself. I wonder if the reliance on ChatGPT is helped by Covid brain fog. I know I have it. My spelling skills have deteriorated. I’m not sure if it’s caused by biology or spell check in the computer. I was trying to spell worth wile and was like, that doesn’t look right. Put it in google, worthwhile. Oh… Maybe it’s because I’m a senior now.
“Teachers are resigning in droves”
Sounds reasonable. Why deal with the stress of kids who can’t read, zombie-fied by social media, and pushed along the system by administrators who just want to make their numbers? And then there is the demoralizing effect of idiots like Sam Altman and co. who push mass firings in education to replace you with AI.
However, the problem is at a group, not an individual level. This is just what they want. If teachers really are resigning en masse, we’ll have a crisis. And we all know these tech bros propensity to never let a crisis go to waste.
Our only hope might be state-level legislation banning AI as a teaching tool. Or limiting it to the point where it can never replace a human teacher, and mandating actual warm bodies leading classrooms.
Teaching still has the potential to be a good career, though it has always been underpaid.
What we’re likely to get instead, at least here in Ohio, is state-level legislation requiring AI as a teaching tool.
Good comment, but I think that this is contrary to the way public school education is structured in many states. Teachers, despite their absolutely critical role (second only to parents) are regarded as labor, and as such regarded by ISD management as a component whose cost and automony must be minimized. Hence the low salaries given the required skills, responsibilities, and workload (of which many outside the profession are completely ignorant: “they get summers off, don’t they?!”). All schools are different of course, and some are stellar, staffed by people who see educating youth as a personal responsibility. But my point is that many districts are and will be under enormous financial and political pressure to adopt AI as a cost-saving tool. TINA, per neoliberal thinking.
It is cultural suicide to allow widespread use of AI in any educational environment, school or home, without any real regulation, particularly prior to high school. Replacing teachers with AI: same result. But even if that horse is already out of the barn, I think one fundamental change that should happen in the US is to give school teachers real control and autonomy, a significant boost in pay and status, and an increase in height of the bar for entry. Supply teachers with the independence and means to teach kids how to evaluate and recognize AI for their own good.
Ai have so much potential but corporation are using
it for censorship . Try to one day ask Greenland population it say 230k, I thought can’t be that high, then I notice it was getting error saying that number wrong but it still couldn’t give right number, so what it did was give right number and wrong number. I am sad to say AI will dum down people, it will not be like when internet came and people could learn from other people .
A larger question is posed by considering the international scene. In some major Asian nations, students endure grueling preparation for “examination hell.” Will AI melt their brains too? The rigorously schooled children of Europe marched to their destruction in 1914. The U.S. is going to suffer disproportionally from misapplied AI because of its poor governance, but world civilization will advance. After declaring an emergency, the U.S. will catch up because we have only two modes of operation: shocking neglect and panicked remediation.
I am a student of the pre WWI period in England and France. It was not even remotely about “schoolchildren” being manipulated. Elites eagerly sent their son to war. Those men were keen to see action and have war stories. Thye thought Allies would quickly trounce Germany.
And propaganda as a concerted enterprise didn’t start until later, and in the US, with the Creel Committee.
Did you mean pre WWII? pre WWI ist 1913, that’s 113 years in the past
Yes. That’s clear in HH’s comment and my reply.
The topic at issue was WWI, which was before the era of concerted state-directed propaganda, which started in the US with the Creel Committee, starting in 1917 (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Information). It successfully and in a very short period of time, changed US attitudes from indifference to what was then called the Great War to strong support for entering to counter Germany. Eddie Bernays, nephew of Freud, was on it and became the father of the PR/propaganda industry.
I think Plexiglas misinterpreted “I am a student of the pre WWI period in England and France“ — meaning that you have a scholastic interest in the era — to mean that you actually were a student during that era. At least that is the only way I can make sense of his/her response.
Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed statement of 1897 quacks like propaganda.
Every teacher should realize he is a social servant set apart for the maintenance of the proper social order and the securing of the right social growth. In this way the teacher is always the prophet of the true God and the usherer in of the true kingdom of heaven.
The of/by/for, Manifest Destiny, Free Market, on and on predate the Creel Con.
Point: Until contradictions are brought to a head, expect no meaningful change.
Anecdotal, but: in the middle in 2023 (ChatGPT was announced in 2022) I spoke with a fourth-year Japanese H.S. student in Tokyo and asked about the use of generative A.I. apps by her peers.
The answer was that the student had not tried it, because under 18s were not permitted to use it without parental consent, and her understanding was that most parents would say “no”. Ergo, it was not really “a thing” in High School. As of 2025, this rule about consent is still in effect, though I don’t know what the current thinking is amongst Japanese parents.
As you say, High School in East Asia is the time of “exam hell”. I cannot speak to the situation in China, Korea, or Taiwan, but in Japan the college-bound students have already all been in cram school [juku] for years, and they must take numerous exams over a period of several years to determine their hensachi, which in turn determines which schools they can apply to.
Private High Schools are very much a thing, so the exam hell begins even before that. The private schools have their own exams, so a junior H.S. student may already be preparing to take several different exams for different High Schools. The same process will be repeated for college entrance.
Since the exams are all conducted and proctored en mass, cheating is pretty difficult, ergo the A.I. apps are pretty much useless for “helping” students to get through this whole
ordealprocess.A disquieting piece. I’m a therapist and the use of AI is being pushed as a way to ease charting time and, no doubt, to make things more efficient and productive. I used it twice and decided against using it in the future. My rationale is it is best to write my own notes as it allows me to better integrate session experiences, insights, and areas of struggle that I need to carefully ponder and revisit with a client / patient. More importantly, using AI can lead to some questionable ethical issues. AI charting programs allow you to check boxes for a given modality (e.g., CBT, Gestalt, psychodynamic, etc.), even if you aren’t trained in that modality. For example, I have a colleague who uses AI and it included in the chart note a particular intervention used during a session with a client for which the therapist received no training. You can edit this out, but it takes time (it also defeats one of the intended purpose of using AI). The person in question did not edit the note and used what the AI offered as a finished note. Of course, my mind went to a scenario in which a therapist is subpoenaed and questioned in court about using an intervention for which they have no formal training. I would rather just do things on the up and up and rest easy at night. Ominous times…take care everyone.
Well, it’s not just children. I am currently tutoring a group of seven second-year medical students, MWF, 9:00-12:00. I ask a question and not one of them can answer without looking at a laptop or tablet. Two seem more prepared than the other five, but how will their future patients identify those two ex ante? The medical education business (that’s all it seems to be) is wrapping itself with AI-in-Medicine. I’ve not yet heard a medical student reply, “Why do I need to know that? UpToDate is on my phone.” But that is what most of them are thinking, I think.
It really is sad because there is a certain delight in putting two and two together and getting four. Discerning patterns, making new connections, finding new analogies and metaphors seem to be activities our brains have evolved for. It’s really the ability to appreciate the cosmos of which we’re a tiny part. For medical doctors, especially diagnosticians, there’s the added emotional reward of actually treating the sick. It’s tragic what your young students are missing out on.
It’s even more tragic that we live in a system that employs those skills for profit and power, a perversion foretold in many myths from many cultures. We seem to be living at the dawn of a Great Battle. Thomas Berry might say it’s between those see the universe as a collection of objects (humans included) versus those who see the cosmos as a communion of subjects (all life included). Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael would say it’s between the Takers and the Leavers. I suppose burying one’s nose in a phone is a way of blocking out such a fraught future.
I’ve asked this elsewhere before, but to what extent will AI be possible to implement or adopt if the masses widely reject it, which they seem to? As I mentioned, I was at a NYE party where AI was a hot topic with near universal revulsion and rejection – so I have to wonder, to what extent can Sam Altman’s dreams be made manifest if the people simply don’t want it?
“the people” simply don’t have agency beyond their own actions. Banks, gov depts. don’t ask before using AI to filter customer service, health systems don’t ask before using AI to vet surgery approvals.
Stores never asked before applying surveillance on shoppers.
My impression is the forced, nonconsensual nature of how this is being rolled out is WHY people are building up resentment toward it.
The video above says the reverse, as did KLG just above, IM Doc in many comments we have hoisted about med school students at his hospital, the therapist above…
Users seems to be embracing it whole hog. It is customers who want a live human as opposed to a chatbot who are in the apparent minority of refusniks.
As TimH pointed out, it’s a little optimistic to think that we’re going to be able to avoid it or refuse it forever. There are certain important network effects and the like that make adoption more or less unavoidable once certain thresholds are crossed. Much like though it’s theoretically possible to avoid having a cellphone, in practice to do so is to exit from society to a large degree.
My university requires me to have a cellphone.
How did the university justify/argue for this obligation, and did that institution provide you with one if it is required for whatever professional/educational tasks?
To do my job, I must use software that requires MFA.
Of course my university did not provide me with a cell.
You can do MFA with a dumbphone and a desktop device. They accept SMS.
I refuse SMS and have rejected vendors that don’t allow an e-mail or phone MFA option but I am not an employee. SMS is not secure. Too easy to highjack phone numbers. And my phone option is not to a cell but to a VOIP so I can transfer the call to another # when traveling.
Even though tokens make me a bit nervous (you can lose the device) they are far and away the most secure MFA solution generally available.
Multi-factor authentication using your personal smart internet-connectable device is a near universal professional work requirement. Students and educators using any 3rd party software must also use MFA devices. Identity and security are used to justify the requirement.
I think the effect on different demographics is going to be very pronounced – these kids are growing up not knowing what the world was like before AI, so how can they reject it? The hope is that our responsible leaders will regulate AI (let’s just assume it gets classified as an addictive but legal substance so its use is restricted to people over 18-21 like cigarettes and alcohol, so kids get a chance to grow up leaning how to think independently), but for the current generation of kids the damage is being done… all due to this technology that’s only been in widespread use for 2-3 years.
This story is eerily familiar to me. I’ve been teaching university students last 5 years, including Scientific Writing, and I’ve had to go back to doing tests with pen and paper because I noticed that students have become so intellectually lazy that they don’t even think about it, chatGPT is the first choice right away and always. It started first during Covid when we had online courses, and it has only gotten worse since. I teach non-native English speakers, and I first noticed when suddenly students started answering their written assignments in perfect and correct English which had similar sentence structure and content. They’ve completely outsourced any written assignment which requires synthesis of knowledge and critical thinking to AI. I’m still struggling with how to get them to understand that using such crutches will stunt their development as scientifically literate and thinking professionals in their future life. I’m considering going back to a complete ‘no technology, only pen and paper’ approach, but if what is mentioned in the video above is true, things are only going to get worse.
There were some who used to say that the whole purpose of public education was to teach kids to show up in the morning and take instruction from authoritarian teachers as preparation for their future factory jobs. For the girls there were home economics classes to teach them to be good housewives.
So I’d question the premise that school systems were ever about “critical thinking” although the powers that be do need basic literacy training for their minions to perform many of their assigned tasks. Indeed some would say that our past education system was intended to teach kids not to think about, oh say, Gaza which they probably know more about than their parents via TikTok.
Which is to say that for those who want to learn you won’t stop them from doing so and for the rest their “need to know” attitude was always true and their “why do I have to learn all this stuff” complaint quite common.
Without a doubt smartphone addiction is a bad thing and taking laptops away from students for awhile a good one. They do need to learn how to face to face socialize which is another public education goal as seen in an endless series of movies about high school.
But if kids are bored in school it could be the teachers are part of the problem. No offense to anyone but in my long ago experience the really good ones are rare.
Please look at this 8th grade test from 1895 on the NASA website and get back to me.
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/p_test/1895_Eightgr_test.htm
When we homeschooled our children back in the Age of Megafauna, we preferred old 1950s State of New York mathematics textbooks. They were the best designed texts around. Likewise the other texts we ended up using for other subjects. Almost all were older tomes.
Now our middle girl is certified to teach in a Deep South state. She tries her best to keep her Third Grade charges away from electronica in the classroom. Not all of the “cognitive elites” to come will be from the upper income brackets. Many will be from the “noncompliant” “deplorables” class.
The “Elites” may want to divide Terran humanity into two distinct classes; the “owners” and the “workers,” but life is never that clean cut and homogeneous. The “points of friction” will be where the future action is at.
Stay safe.
Your comment about the use of older textbooks to teach mathematics complicates the discussion of this post. The newer approaches to teaching mathematics and reading, in their multiple versions deserve a discussion of their own. My mother taught first grade using old school phonetics. It worked. Her children left first grade with a good basis for reading and spelling. She would not and did not change away from this method that worked and worked well, but she had to fight constantly to rebuff the pressures of various state mandated ‘improvements’ to teaching.
As for mathematics and the manifold “new math” methods — those too deserve their own discussion, and neither of these “new and improved” teaching methods involved AI.
Your Mom had the right of it. Many, many “improvements” in processes and methods were and are implemented for reasons not related to the actual carrying out of any particular task. The Twentieth Century seems to have suffered from a Myth of Progress in its philosophy. Simply put, good enough is no longer fine. After that, absent some radical improvement, all ‘tinkering’ results in degradation. Yet, ‘tinkering’ is often the basis of successful careers and status.
Modernity is a Doom Loop.
Stay safe.
The 1895 eighth grade test explains why Jacques Barzun was contemptuous of contemporary education in 1959 when he wrote The House of Intellect. I assumed that he was voicing the complaint every generation has about younger people and that the decade of the 50s was far enough in the past that standards and expectations remained high. But that time is consistent with the essay posted here a few months ago, “The Dawn of the Post Literate Society,” and it explains Decadence more clearly in his cultural history.
I have a certain fondness for the anarchist critique of schooling (for instance Ivan Illich did make some good points) so I don’t think you’re entirely wrong, but this AI thing is more like illiteracy for the masses and competency for those whose parents have the resources to make sure their children don’t become stunted (i.e. the rich). I think in a general sense this is closer to water poisoning a la Flint than bad schooling per se.
While reading and writing and arithmetic and retaining rote information remain of some value in some situations I question whether critical thinking is especially valued or rewarded. In education, critical thinking and questioning too readily conjure ideas contrary to or complicating the doctrine taught in the academic curriculum. Critical thinking in the workplace is a dangerous occupation unless conducted in silence and under strict restraint. And while critical thinking is a topic, what of creative thinking?
Another thread of today’s post and the comments it engendered, suggests that those without education, without basic reading and thinking skills will be relegated to “make a living doing manual labor”. Doing manual labor, much if not almost all manual labor, requires basic reading, arithmetic, and thinking skills. I believe it is a grave injustice to suggest manual labor does not reward or in many cases require basic thinking skills. Before students were asking why they need learn arithmetic, and more recently why they need learn to read, those students destined for the trades or manual labor asked how whatever they were being taught applied to doing the work they expected to do when they left school.
I believe the term manual labor is not the truck driver, the plumber, or the receptionist. But the person on the end of a shovel. Even that requires the ability to read the “Hard Hats Required” signage.
Yes, I assume Jeremy is referring to my post, above, and I agree that there are many people who work with their hands who also need a good handle on reading, arithmetic, and thinking skills.
By manual labor, I do not mean people working in skilled trades, but instead those who are pushing shovels, clearing debris, unloading trucks, cleaning floors, cleaning dishes, vacuuming hotel rooms, etc.
I suggested that this is where the primary school students who don’t want to learn are heading, because they don’t seem to have enough curiosity to become tradespeople.
There is a lot of truth in the “show up and behave” rationale for primary and secondary education practices in the US in the mid-20th century and before (which I was seeing described back then by Paul Goodman and Edgar Z. Friedenberg). But it was a multipurpose activity. Rote memorization of arithmetic, rules of grammar, spelling, and some geography and history was the norm because it worked and was way more efficient than the tortuous “reason through” method that they tried to replace it with in the 1960s. Reading whole books, even if they were aimed at children, was necessary for doing the required book reports. So a lot of it was about norms of behavior that you were supposed to carry forward to your future work environment (show up on time, speak to your superiors respectfully, sit still for long stretches of time, don’t even get me started on the dress code!), but there was still a lot more to it in terms of learning.
I can’t even fathom what is going on in the classroom now. Managing behaviors? If you didn’t behave in 1960 you got sent to the principal’s office, and if you weren’t convincingly remorseful there you were given detention (after school hours sitting still in a mostly empty classroom with an adult watching for misbehavior), and if that didn’t work you were suspended, and if you didn’t come back from that reformed and chastened, you were expelled. There was bad behavior, but students tried to hide most of it (like bullying and harassment of fellow students) from the teacher. How did we go from this admittedly overly strict environment to the total zoo that today’s schools come across as? Why aren’t students who can’t perform being kept back a grade and students who run around the classroom yelling “six and seven” or whatever the phrase is sent home and told not to come back until they can shut up and not disrupt the class? It sounds completely deranged, which I guess is consistent with the deranged “leaders” our society has produced over the last couple of decades.
… “dress code!” Don’t forget how you had to cut your hair. If memory serves (and it probably doesn’t) I was in third grade when I realized school was preparation for the Army. Sit still, don’t talk back, do what you are told, no independent thinking allowed and go get your ass shot off.
The corruption of our kids continued unabated.
Nothing stopping us from forming a political party that advocates the dissolution of the bureaucracy stealing all the wealth (kids) from us.
I guess AI addiction plus letting COVID rage unchecked is one formula dealing with the “elite overproduction” discussed in today’s Links.
This goes back a long way.
I was in college in the Bay Area when Reagan was gov, when he was starting his education reforms. I remember one of his advisors saying something like “if we teach kids to think they won’t do what they’re told”.
I believe William Bennett was Regan’s Sec. of Education who later became his drug czar. The Regan Adm. promoted alternative education, like religious and home schooling. Then behind the scene Bennett started a company to provide computer curriculum while lobbying for legislation to require testing based on his curriculum.
I went head to head with one of his lieutenants who managed to become superintendent of a local single school school district with the intent of making another school within that district to provide computers and curriculum to home schoolers so they could take the test and graduate.
At the beginning of the Great Depression, kids knew spelling, they knew mathematics, they knew how to read & write and ordinary life back them encouraged them to be problem solvers. If there is a very severe recession if not another depression, how will today’s kids be able to cope? They won’t the skills, they won’t have the nuts & bolts knowledge and by the sounds of it, their parents won’t be able to help that much either. The fun and games start when in such severe economic times, that many families will be forced to drop internet at home a being a luxury. That’s gunna hurt.
At the beginning of the Great Depression, kids also know how to use hand tools to build, many knew how to plant and grow food. Some knew the ropes, as in knew how to tie knots and use ropes and pulleys to control the motion of heavy objects. Many knew how to drive heavy machinery and large vehicles. Many knew how to fight and how to organize face-to-face. Though it is common to bemoan how today’s youth have gone to the dogs, how many of today’s youth, let alone today’s adults know these things.
As to spelling — English spellings are an object of my particular disdain. Proper spelling, like good teeth, has become something of a class marker. There are few less rational ways to spell than English spelling — French spelling perhaps? I have often wondered why one of the simplified spelling systems were not adopted for use by foreign nationals using English as lingua franca for business communications. I thought such adoption might compel more rationale spellings of words by native English speakers.
I fear the next Great Depression may be much more ‘difficult’.
Yes. My late neighbor, born in ’23, had to grow a garden in elementary school and was graded on its quality (San Gabriel foothills N. of LA). I miss his dry wit. A Warrant Officer on a Pacific theater troop transport in WWII, I asked him what “LST” stood for. His reply: “Large, Slow Target.” Here’s looking at USN’s present-day aircraft carriers.
French spelling is much worse, believe me.
French spelling (and grammar) is weirdly complicated, but at least the language seems to me more regular when going from spelling to pronunciation. English, on the other hand…
I was very good at spelling until I got to be fairly competent at French. My English spelling went to hell and has gotten worse with spell check.
My wife’s French cousin assures me all those letters are in the pronunciation. Even if you can’t hear them she can.
The h*ll they are! This is way Francophone countries have relatively low levels of male literacy and high male drop-out rates.
“The fun and games start when in such severe economic times, that many families will be forced to drop internet at home a being a luxury. That’s gunna hurt.”
The way internet/cable prices are heading, it’s already hurting. Our cable/internet bill went from an outrageous $224 a month a year ago to $267 a month now. We don’t subscribe to premium cable channels through the internet/cable provider. But to watch streaming apps like HBOMax, Paramount+ and Disney+ adds another $60+ a month. I would say for many it already is a luxury. So $300+ a month to watch what used to be free TV. Quite the grift. Maybe Matt Stoller could look into it?
300 dollars a month?! ?!
stunned. unbelievable.
I live near london. I pay £35 a month for internet and phone access – fast fibre from a good provider with great support. I could get it cheaper. I pay another 15 on top for netflix. That’s 50 a month. $68 a month at todays exchange rate.
300 is extraordinary. a rip off.
This validates my belief that AI doesn’t need to make money because the MIC/Gov’t will keep it going for Social Control.
George Carlin said in his famous 2005 Stand-Up special “Life is Worth Losing.”
“They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. Thats against their interests.
Thats right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting f**ked by a system that threw them overboard 30 f**king years ago. They don’t want that!
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it“ – George Carlin
I am a professor in a business school. The issues identified in this piece apply to most of the undergraduates and masters students I have taught. They cannot go 20 minutes without checking their phone. At start of semester for masters students I ask them to share how much time per day their ussage log shows–the average is 7 hours! They are accustomed to multiple choice tests and writing unaided by AI is a source of stress. They cannot deal with unstructured problems. They do not want teaching, they want bite sized “content delivery” which is now the prefered mode of activity in regional state schools (and others as well), teaching in traditional sense of engagement is no longer possible…I am out at the end of the semester, can’t do this anymore….
To take one statistic here — fourth grade reading proficiency — here is what Gemini(!) reports, for National Association Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) testing, which was first initiated in 1992:
4th Grade Reading Proficiency (1992–2024)
Year % At or Above Proficient Key Context
1992 29% The baseline year for achievement levels.
1994 30%
1998 31%
2000 32%
2002 31%
2003 31%
2005 31%
2007 33%
2009 33%
2011 34%
2013 35% The Peak: Highest proficiency rate in NAEP history.
2015 36% (Rounded up; often cited as a period of plateau).
2017 37%
2019 35% Pre-pandemic decline begins.
2022 33% First post-pandemic data; significant drop.
2024 31% Most recent data; returns to early 2000s levels.
John Taylor Gatto had some statistics I think in either Dumbing us Down or The Underground History of American Education about how the Military had to throughout the 20th century reduce its education standards for basic grunts. I can’t check the sources right now, but I think this tendency has been around for a long time (Yves’ comment about 1895 tests above seems to corroborate it).
I’ve heard this also — at least since the 1980s — and the number that sticks in my mind is “on average a 9th grade reading level”. This, I believe, is why DAPRA got so much budget for technology projects, i.e., to “make the weapons smarter” because they saw that they were not going to be getting smarter guys enlisting.
I would hope the NAEP occasionally gives the 1992 test to the 2026 kids to make sure the tests are in line.
One criticism of the SAT (and I’m assuming the ACT) is that the test scores have increased not through student performance but from re-scaling the tests. So for an elite school, the admissions counselors can only select students among a sea of 1500+ scorers with very little differentiation–so the ones who get through are often children of alumni or someone who did something really unusual (like spending a summer in the Arctic Circle).
Before the focus on AI, as the stick in the spokes, gateway diagnoses helped to line the pockets of solution merchants. Saviors pitch their din with a straight face, as if they knew not many cared to think/hear beyond the din of concocted notoriety. Where ONE traffic signal per intersection was enough, now at least six are needed. Yes Martha, the witless production plan still works. From Pre K -12 to a “Higher” education that perpetuates the lavish myths that enable the few to rule the many, and repress critical thinking. Go figure, effective marketing begins where critical thinking ends. Show me your papers…
Based on the stories my 1st grade (6 yr olds) teacher daughter tells me (which tracks this video), the elite may have overshot on this goal.
She says many can barely talk. A few still cry most of the day 1/2 way through the school year. Parents are either checked out or crazy helicopters expecting individual lesson plans for their snowflakes. She is in a solidly middle class district. She is looking to get out.
This is in reply to the George Carlin quote a few posts above. I guess my brain is rotting even without AI. :)
I think Taylor Lorenz’s new Youtube is relevant to this discussion. It’s titled, “Tech Billionaires Want Us Dead,” but the content is much more substantive than the clickbait headline. It’s a history of the evolution of Silicon Valley worldviews until we have reached the point today where Peter Thiel can’t answer Ross Douthat’s question about whether he wants humanity to survive.
Who needs to go to the expense of training today’s children to do anything, much less think critically, if your plan is to replace them with robots and AI assistants so the TechBros can live in their pristine world undirtied by icky biological life? I thought Bill Gates hated Nature with his Frankplants and robot bees, but this next generation appears to hate the idea of carbon-based life.
“Narrator: And what are these children hearing from the adults about AI? AI is going to change everything. AI makes you so much more efficient. AI can do it for you.
Why would a child invest in learning when every adult around them is saying that machines will do it better? We’re creating learned helplessness at scale.”
And that’s why despite all evidence to the contrary, the same hype is repeated over and over again.
The most cynical and tinfoil hat view: It’s playing the game of having the bigger megaphone, keeping it on blast, and waiting for most people who know what questions to ask to pass on.
“Then there’s Nome Shazir. He’s the founder of character AI. In an interview, Shazir said, “I joke that we’re not going to replace Google. We’re going to replace your mom.” He wants his AI chatbot to replace mothers. the person who’s supposed to guide you, help you make decisions, and provide you with life advice. He would rather his chatbot do that.”
Some years ago, there was an article about how all the tech bros liked to come up with apps/tech that did things that their mothers used to do for them.
In my teens I found the idea of creating an AI companion (better than a dog!) compelling. Decades ago I heard the suggestion that an underlying psychological motivation for AI was the desire of men who, who cannot bear children, to create life. This rings true to me. When Data’s daughter dies in Star Trek the Next Generation, she says “thank you for my life.”
“I joke that we’re not going to replace Google. We’re going to replace your mom.”
It is said one does not become an autonomous adult until ones parents die … so my question is what occurs when that – life – experience is removed.
LLMs AND all the psyche and behavior modification drugs are flashing red lights to me.
Ex-teacher here. Quit for many reasons listed above. The kids are getting worse, way worse. We know the AI stuff will not be, or already is, not good for learning.
Now do parents.
I have noticed good critical thinking and writing from you before. This is the first time I realized you are a former teacher. (I think OIFvet is also a teacher with useful things to say.) I have nothing but contempt and disdain for my own education, and accordingly, my teachers hated me passionately despite my stellar grades. And the animosity was mutual. But my teachers were not like you. Many of them were severely critical of students who refused to sit still and listen to impractical lessons. Some of them were truly evil, desirous of abusing children sexually.
Despite my handle, I’m never going to antagonize[1] anybody, not now, not 35 years ago when I was in high school. Unless, of course, a teacher was audacious enough to call out my wrongdoing. All I wanted to do when I was a student was quietly sit in the back of the class and read the Wall St. Journal or home stereo magazines. I still vividly remember the dread I felt when getting sent to the principal’s office for reading a newspaper during class.
[1]: My handle refers to antagonist and agonist in the neurophysiological sense, e.g. norepinephrine antagonist. Occasionally, it refers to antagonism in the musculoskeletal sense.
It’s amazing to me, at 82, I have begun to feel that I am finally beginning to find my own voice.
One important insight–no matter whether the topic is AI, monetary economics, or the seeming binary nature of language–is my deep, deep longing to be right.
With that insight, I find myself asking what are my immutable truth claims that I believe are valid for all times. Questioning such “truths” now feels as a necessary step for creating something new.
Why not create a LLM based on the real knowledge here at NC?
We know the truth. We know wtf is going on.
We know the Israeli supporting Rich pedos are trying to foment a Civil War in America.
When are we going to be proactive in our own local neighborhoods and unite the Empires people?
Who will be the first?
This burden of knowledge demands that we take action to DO SOMETHING.
The libs are growing their protest minions to confront ICE to get murdered. And the Neocons are doing vice versa.
I know in the South we got Chris, Ambrit, Amfortas, inter alia. Why are we not doing what we know needs to be done and help America?
Long Live The American People
Long Live The Second American 🇺🇸 Revolution
How fucking dare you. I will sue anyone into the ground who tries. This site is copyrighted, including the comments (users agree to our intellectual property rights as a condition of commenting. You are advocating theft and propagating the project to make citizens stoopider and dependent.
AI = FAKE KNOWLEDGE
Here = REAL KNOWLEDGE
A Promethean Website if you will.
Surely, you understand that I’m advocating for you and everyone here to help Americans take back their country from the Rich to avoid another World War and or Civil War in favor of another American Revolution.
Anyways, seemed like a good idea to me.
Just trying to help here, boss
LLMs ≠ knowledge
Having a background in AI and education, I believe the greatest betrayal will occur when AI transitions from being a servant to becoming the master. Currently, AI is employed to evaluate and categorize job candidates through oral interviews, which essentially function as a career gatekeeper. Consequently, this rating and gatekeeping function will naturally extend to advancement in education. While AI is currently used to offload the cognitive demands of students, it will be a rude awakening when that system expects students to replicate the very functions they were initially encouraged to discard.
That said, let me defend AI by stating that students are less likely to question a grade assigned by a machine than by a human. Large language models are perceived as more impartial, and this perception will likely strengthen as they “imprint” their objectivity on users from a younger age. While there may be a role for adults in this context, it will primarily be to supervise interactions, mainly to mitigate legal liabilities. I do believe the direct role of humans in cognitive development will continue to diminish in both learning and teaching. At the end of the day, children were always sat in front of screens to be visually hypnotized and subtly brainwashed. The bulk of the damage was already done. I imagine catastrophe, but remember worse.
Looking forward to the day when having the Internet go down essentially disables a large segment of our population. /sarc
It would be wise for American elites to look at how the key BRICS countries are educating their youth and decide if they want only America hobbled with this Silly Con Valley AI tech lord stupidity while their erstwhile competitors are still doin’ it old school.
Oaf remember when Maine’s own Anus King was the first to make “laptops for every child” a reality. Thank him for me, please./sarc Wonder how much he made on tech stocks following the implementation of that program.
I am old enough to remember “Why do I have to learn this stuff when the Internet can supply me with all I need?” and my favorite “Why do I need to learn math when I can use a calculator?” (This came from a student who punched dozens of keys rather than just moving a decimal point when multiplying by ten.)
The people behind these questions think that dictionaries are useful in learning to spell. (To find a word in a dictionary, you have to know how it is spelled.) To find information on an Internet search engine, you need to know how to ask the question, which requires some knowledge of the context of the question. And with regard to AIs, at least the machines not worthy of the name we have now, you need to know how to prompt the damned things. Yes, I assume that kids will learn how to do that fairly well, given the role of AIs as workarounds to actually doing the work of learning, but really—having an AI read a text to you? Think of all the problems associated with this. In any communication the words used are of less value than the affect, how the words are read/spoken/pronounced/etc. The kid making the “read to me” request also has to listen to the entire piece. Readers can skim, jump around, and thus be more efficient. Imagine a kid listening to a basically boring text. Gosh, will they lose focus? Will they lose the stream of information and where it might be going? So, they will surely ask the AI to “summarize” the work for them. But what if the summary doesn’t emphasize the part the assignment was getting to? And can a summary provide context? (One of the things AIs utterly fail to do is to provide context, because context requires understanding and AIs don’t understand shit.)
Any teacher who falls for this shit has failed, if you ask me.
Er, a dictionary is useful for learning how to spell — the process being of the “make a guess and check for results” variety.