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If religion and human technology are any guide, there will be a lot of this but it will never be the entire sum of human activity. Some of us are just too damn curious. We go straight for the curtain. I refuse to believe that very human pattern won’t continue.
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If think you're overestimating how much the average person knows about how technology operates today, or 30 years ago, or 1000. In some sense, we have been living with magic and tech priests since the Romans built the aqueducts. I wouldn't be surprised if widespread, cheap AI makes it easier for the average person to learn how things around them work, if they are so inclined.
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I meet kids today who haven’t heard of Microsoft, who regularly play GTA and hand in assignments made in Powerpoint. 20 years ago I discovered that a friend didn’t know Xbox and Word were both from Microsoft. It’s really hard to understand what is common knowledge in different parts of society.
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Indeed. You'd be shocked how few people on Hacker News even know the difference between cross stitch and blackwork.
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Honestly, don't think so. That's certainly the path one might extrapolate if the next generation grows up exactly the same way as the current generation, but that's not how it works.

They will be exposed to this technology throughout childhood as their brains develop and they will develop unique ways to work with it we don't entirely understand just like GenY with cell phones and GenX with home computers. I think you deeply underestimate how adaptable we are as a species, but if you consider that we've been running the same OS and Bios as a species for the past ~40K years, perhaps you might be more optimistic?

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I've been writing code since my teens, I've studied assembly... yet the fact that _things_ start happening when I press the power button on my computer are pure magic to me and I like it this way.

I started digging a few times, but, I prefer the "magic".

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I prefer at least a superficial understanding.

Hopefully, there will never be a time when at least some folks are not reading books such as:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44882.Code

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turtles all the way down
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I'm not convinced that's where we are heading. LLMs are really good at explaining things ("explain to me like I'm a 5 year old").
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A post that lives rent-free in my head points out that a kid who is addicted to chatgpt is going to be more literate - and therefore likely better educated - than a kid who is addicted to tiktok
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and both saw the world through an inherited training/feed bias and censorship, hurray!
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Just like they always have. There’s a reason religion is mostly inherited.
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Has there ever been a modern time when this wasn't the case?

I mean: I can only go back so far, but I remember the 1980s well-enough. At that time, most of the new information that came into my brain from outside was sourced from public schools, newspapers, and the evening news on TV.

None of these sources were particularly unfiltered, uncensored, or unbiased. It was always an abbreviated approximation of someone else's idea of the truth.

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It's enough to make "explanation" a separate "educational" license to make it less broad used. Or disable it in some countries (this is happening already).
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There's a big difference between having something explained to you and developing expertise in it.

I don't see an AI-as-explainer future where expertise isn't sacrificed en masse.

Capitalism rarely supports a currently economically unproductive alternative for future good reasons.

The recent AI tech layoffs are a warning sign that corporate leaders will happily shoot their company's (and the future's) expertise to pad next quarter's financials and trust in 90% correct, but much cheaper, AI.

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Imagine someone in a position of power mandating that LLMs should not be good teachers.
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Some manager at LLM provider: "hey, we can sell 'education' ability as a separate product!".
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You jest, but I’m actually convinced education-tuned LLMs are (today) the only way education outcomes can actually improve in the AI era. As is, students are leveraging them for doing homework which makes homework useless, you want and economically need a model which can work as a 1:1 tutor with minimal supervision (and some hardware so lessons aren’t keyboard-driven).
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> and some hardware so lessons aren’t keyboard-driven).

What's wrong with (screen-, probably) keyboard?

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Writing with a pen or pencil has better learning outcomes than with a keyboard for neurological reasons.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11943480/

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I think it will be just like Dr. Know in Spielberg's "AI" movie from 2001 — I found it amazing how the oracle, though giving mystic-sounding obfuscated answers, was actually intelligent enough to figure out (a) what the kid was asking for and (2) give the correct answer.
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Give it six more months and you'll have a second "oh shit" moment when you peek behind the curtain of LLMs shitting the bed.

I guess tech unsavvy people who are easily amused by LLM tricks will always exist, but they'll be an increasingly smaller minority as time goes on.

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