4 ms·

Are you arguing that a TI-84 has materially similar effects on development of critical thinking, writing, and reasoning skills as ChatGPT?

vouwfietsman 6d ago
No I'm arguing that many developments that simplify work while not undermining understanding exist, and we have dealt with them. In the narrow scope of understanding engineering, the fact that AI can also engineer does not prevent us from proper education or gaining understanding.
- cfiggers 5d ago
  Thanks for clarifying. I think we're talking about different things. Your response would make sense to me if I was making a case against AI for professional use based on "skill atrophy among professionals who use AI" or something like that (which is a case that I see some people making). I'm not talking about that, though. This is not me saying, "Slide rule is good, TI-84 is bad; because effortful work has good effects on practitioners and effortless work has negative effects." I'm talking about youth, adolescents, and young adults who are voluntarily foregoing the effortful mental exercise of reading, understanding, and writing as part of their primary and secondary education—the very effortful mental exercise that our education system exists to "inflict" upon them, for their own long-term good. I'm talking about people getting into the workforce who don't know how to learn because they've gotten all passing grades while having a chatbot generate the outputs that would previously have indicated that learning was occurring. Maybe it's the case that AI/LLM usage is the primary skillset needed to thrive in the job market of tomorrow. But I'm not convinced of that, yet. Just to be clear I don't think there's any way to put the cat back in the bag w/r/t LLMs and education—I think the education system as a whole needs to reinvent itself to account for the existence of LLMs. But in the mean time, until that mammoth societal initiative has time to make progress, I worry that there are many, many kids who are being systematically failed by an education system that was very rapidly outmoded by new technology (not that it was bleeding edge either right before ChatGPT launched, but that's neither here nor there). And that position, which I hold, is one supporting leg of my larger more ambitious position that, "AI is currently, so far, doing net societal harm."
  - vouwfietsman 5d ago
    These are the same thing. Youth has been able to effortlessly do math by using calculators in the past decades, yet we expect and succeed in them learning math. The main thing we need to do is ban llm use somehow for education, as we have with calculators. Then, piecemeal, bring it back when it makes sense.

vouwfietsman 6d ago

No I'm arguing that many developments that simplify work while not undermining understanding exist, and we have dealt with them. In the narrow scope of understanding engineering, the fact that AI can also engineer does not prevent us from proper education or gaining understanding.

cfiggers 5d ago
Thanks for clarifying. I think we're talking about different things. Your response would make sense to me if I was making a case against AI for professional use based on "skill atrophy among professionals who use AI" or something like that (which is a case that I see some people making). I'm not talking about that, though. This is not me saying, "Slide rule is good, TI-84 is bad; because effortful work has good effects on practitioners and effortless work has negative effects." I'm talking about youth, adolescents, and young adults who are voluntarily foregoing the effortful mental exercise of reading, understanding, and writing as part of their primary and secondary education—the very effortful mental exercise that our education system exists to "inflict" upon them, for their own long-term good. I'm talking about people getting into the workforce who don't know how to learn because they've gotten all passing grades while having a chatbot generate the outputs that would previously have indicated that learning was occurring. Maybe it's the case that AI/LLM usage is the primary skillset needed to thrive in the job market of tomorrow. But I'm not convinced of that, yet. Just to be clear I don't think there's any way to put the cat back in the bag w/r/t LLMs and education—I think the education system as a whole needs to reinvent itself to account for the existence of LLMs. But in the mean time, until that mammoth societal initiative has time to make progress, I worry that there are many, many kids who are being systematically failed by an education system that was very rapidly outmoded by new technology (not that it was bleeding edge either right before ChatGPT launched, but that's neither here nor there). And that position, which I hold, is one supporting leg of my larger more ambitious position that, "AI is currently, so far, doing net societal harm."
- vouwfietsman 5d ago
  These are the same thing. Youth has been able to effortlessly do math by using calculators in the past decades, yet we expect and succeed in them learning math. The main thing we need to do is ban llm use somehow for education, as we have with calculators. Then, piecemeal, bring it back when it makes sense.