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:
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.
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.
Homework is boring. I had a tough enough time focusing on it in the 90s when computers and video games were still a drag to get going... Imagine explaining to a child today that they need to sit down and do an hour of math homework every other night?
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")
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
> 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?
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.)
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.
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.
These people have fallen into OpenAI and Anthropic's trap and are illiterate without the assistance of coin-operated slop generators.
Thank god for china!
Homework is boring. I had a tough enough time focusing on it in the 90s when computers and video games were still a drag to get going... Imagine explaining to a child today that they need to sit down and do an hour of math homework every other night?
I just can't see it happening.
It's too boring.
I don't have a solution to this problem.
The point is to train the brain via repitition and iteration.
If your goal is entertainment, I'm not sure what you are looking for.
Don't make any commentary on my intelligence or I'll get you banned.
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")
Is an acceptable answer.
Career exams tend to be a mix but a lot less ideology.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 the exposure to feeling under pressure, creativity of the mind etc - the less you expose a human to ‘suffering’ the more useless they become.
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.
(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.)