See also https://smcleod.net/2025/03/the-democratisation-paradox-what...
Watch out horses! The motorised carriage is going to do away with your ability to gallop!
The average person didn't take freedom from manual long division to unlock whole new ways of mastering math, they stopped doing math at the grocery store and became docile enough to allow the rise of modern consumer economics, Uber, Doordash, Klarna.
And I don't know what invoking the obsolescence of horses is supposed to achieve. Yes, there are fewer horses for roles today. No, the remaining horse population hasn't been uplifted to whole new ways of thinking about labor and transportation. (I'm probably leaving myself open to a counter that today there are many horses living lives of leisure as pets.)
You're not going to find a sufficient historical analogue to general thought being the skill we no longer have to practice, you have to engage in new thought about the qualitative difference of this situation.
Yeah, the current LLM dilemma isn't really analogous. Offloading a task like multiplying two numbers is (A) safely reliable and (B) isn't delegating planning or decision-making.
> The average person [...] stopped doing math at the grocery store and became docile enough to allow the rise of modern consumer economics, Uber, Doordash, Klarna.
Disagree on this one: Wasteful spending by consumers (and vendors encouraging it) is a very old problem, much older than calculators or any withering of daily algebra skills. If anything, people have better/faster capabilities to see the "big picture" of how much a service is ripping them off than ever before.
I think a better explanation would be stuff like the psychological distance created when using digital payments (as opposed to cash or handwritten checks) and companies getting better tools for advertising/brain-hacking.
In my country we were calling this "wooden language" back when were under a communist dictatorship behind the iron curtain.
Lots of words that are designed to avoid any responsability for anything.
Now we're automating this.
Pretty sure the fascists were the same, I just have no direct experience with them.
Corporate "monthly celebrations" fall in the same category :)
> Corporate "monthly celebrations" fall in the same category :)
Also known as manager speak or corporate lingo
An AI life coach cannot guide you for if you would prefer having a large family, being part of a DINK couple, or remain single for the rest of your life. It can tell you the odds of success of living off of a band are low and to prepare backup plans,and that being a chartered accountant is a more reliable source of income but it cannot tell you what the right decision is to attempt.
The vast majority of everything you learn before university isn't that useful if all you care about is creating robots for your economy.
> What happens when AGI ...
What happens IF AGI ...
On the other hand, US schools' form (as distinct from the content they teach) - the schedules, the bells, the desks, the disciplinary expectations - has not been the subject of much debate or wide controversy, but it does encode and enculcate a particular value system. It was adapted from the Prussian model, and specifically intended to create docile industrial workers. That may have been a good idea at the time.
Now, of course, that docile industrial workers are not so economically important, that model doesn't make much sense. The public school system as a whole (I'm painting in broad strokes, and know myself of honorable exceptions) has shifted its purpose to (it's a spectrum, based on prevailing socio-economic conditions, and the individual kids in question) baby-sitting or incarceration.
I wish I weren't so cynical, but I've had too broad an experience with too large a cross-section of too many US public schools not to be.
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°I've seen the insides of a lot, though not so many, UK schools, and my limited impression is that their system is in a better place than the US, but bears the same flaws. (And that a special hell should await the members of the 2010 Conservative government who promulgated school consolidations.)
Fifteen years ago I taught ESL to a lot of German kids (from both University and non-U tracks), and was highly impressed with them, and with what they told me about their educational system. That impression is old, though, and I don't know how things might have changed in the meantime.
I have a good friend with a six-year old going to school in France. I like what she tells me about their system.
Probably only for big corps and govts.
But humans are able to exercise a ton of thinking with remarkably low energy levels a day. And the calories of energy humans consume are also used primarily for physical mechanisms like movement, breathing, etc. so the energy requirements for pure thought is even less.
Why should improved AGIs in the future consume any more energy? Besides, AGIs across the world can communicate with each other. So once one AI computes something theoretically it should never need to do it again. It can tap into the answer saved by some different AI at some point in the recent past further reducing energy needs.
I really don’t see why AI energy consumption should be too high.
* Occasionally the term effectively meaning only 'all men regardless of social class'. Perhaps related to the purpose of disincentivizing violent uprisings.
One lesson of history is that you cannot simply leave advocacy for self-interest in another's hands, as regardless of how much 'better' they may know, they do not know you and your priorities better than yourself. That was essentially already attempted in feudal past essentially. You need at very least the ability to choose your advocate. This makes education a necessity for a self-governing people. There was also another trope around the Great Depression claiming that democracy was 'obsolete' from industrialization and its top-down organization vs cottage industries. Lets not repeat history in falling for that again.
But even if we abandon such lofty principles there would still be a reason for education even if AGI does it better. Having people capable of fighting and/or maintaining the swarms of would still be essential for even cynical reasons of military power and monopoly on violence. It wouldn't just be using humans as canon fodder - most of the military manpower is logistical and the tail has only been growing longer in the tooth-to-tail ratio thanks to technological advancement. That technology is so dominant should highlight its power, considering just how effective raw numbers are in military science.
This is depressing, indeed. I think this type of empty-headedness has been growing for a while and isn't just a result of AI, I think it's a result of people generally not having a well-tuned mental barometer for what makes for strong writing.
I think if you didn't read much as a young person, the sort of grammatically-sound and calmly-smug prose that GPT produces probably passes as "good" writing because it has all of the characteristics you remember that good writing must possess. If I may..
> Summarizing paragraphs must begin with strong statements. References can be made to previous points, perhaps acknowledge weaknesses, but the main structure remains the same. Our writing is confident, familiar, and satisfied - just like writing should be.
Unfortunately, I think this is similar to someone growing used to "good" meals from Cheesecake Factory and allowing that to become their reference point for fine dining. All the pieces are there, nothing about it is distinctly "wrong", but something feels off.
I don't pretend to have a solution.
I’m still definitely providing value with no decrease in the quality of my output so I’m counting on my past knowledge + ChatGPT to get me through my career but I weep for the next generation.
Terr_•7mo ago