As a parent, it's hard not to look at the LLM stuff and worry that our kids are wasting their time right now. One my kids tries really, really hard in school, and I can't help but think it's for nothing--LLMs are going to effectively level the playing field for everyone, to the point where personalized LLM assistants will become as common as cellphones in my opinion.
In this future, what's the point in trying hard when a LLM or a person with a LLM will be just as equivalent without most of the effort? Seems like we're creating a future where humans are taught to delegate as much as possible to some LLM/service and go back to whatever entertains them.
I think extrinsic motivation—and especially social motivation—is absolutely vital to keeping humans mentally and physically healthy. We've killed a bunch of that in the arts already (who gathers around the piano to sing along with your one cousin who can play all the standards, anymore? How many amateur portrait sketch artists are genuinely valued by their friends and families, rather than humored? Mechanical reproduction destroyed both of those, among others) and we're about to expand that a ton.
I'm not on the "people must work to be happy" train, but I do think they must feel needed to be happy. I don't think most folks are fulfilled playing violin in an empty room for their entire lives except when they can convince some close friend or relative to indulge them for fifteen minutes, or reading all the classics but having no-one to talk about them with (because AI is better at chatting about the classics, too), or writing books that nobody wants to read because AI does it better.
We're about to feel needed for a hell of a lot less than we did before, which level-of-social-need was already much-reduced from its peak. I fully expect a net decrease in overall happiness & mental health, from these developments.
So be the contrarian who does those things we "don't do" anymore. Teach your kids, if you have any, to do those things. Teach them to observe the family at a restaurant, all staring at their individual phones, while yours remain safely in the car or shut off in your pocket.
> Who gathers around the piano to sing along with your one cousin who can play all the standards, anymore?
For the past 6 months or so, the lifegroup we host (mid-week discussion group associated with our church) does exactly that as part of our evenings - we typically sing through three hymns, with piano, on our path between dinner, discussion, and an open ended firepit time that often goes well into the late hours. And let me tell you, people enjoy belting out the standards (my wife generally picks one well known, one lesser known, and one "You've probably never seen this one before!"), scraping the dust off how to read multipart music, etc!
If the direction of tech is to dehumanize us and remove all that humans enjoy, then screw that! Do what humans enjoy instead!
Of course the individual can simply do those things anyway. Some like-minded groups may form, even.
Over the population, statistics is king, though. We don't, as individual actors, will our way into a better tomorrow when our environment changes to make that harder—not in large numbers. "So just ignore all those circumstances and pressures and do it!" does not work, in general. Larger forces and trends dominate.
You're right, but not being in the position of a god-king where I can change those larger trends, the best I've found is to model and demonstrate that the "consumer tech profitable defaults" aren't the only way to live life, and rather loudly so.
I work in tech (deep weeds), and most people I interact with are quite aware that I do not like what we've done with it, and that I try to keep its influence on my personal life down - with plenty of handy ways on hand to suggest people try out, or solutions to "But how can you possibly XYZ?"
Having grown up before smartphones were a thing, I do recall how we used to do things, and most of those methods still work.
Yeah, your approach is of course the only one available to the individual. What else can you do? Literally nothing. That's the only option to improve one's own experience—"just do it". I just expect the population-level effects to be... troubling. A kind of mass existential crisis. Not that there's much I can do about that, though, you're right.
We've had search and wikipedia for decades. Access to knowledge did not in fact obsolete the need to learn said knowledge in order to develop critical thinking and problem solving skills. We don't acquire knowledge for the purpose of parroting it back on demand.
LLM might be used to find relevant information quicker, but they won't think for you, so people with LLMs won't suddenly have better critical thinking skills. They'll just make the same poor decisions faster.
Which is what happened with the Internet. We thought access to knowledge was going to enlighten all the dummies. It didn't, because no matter how much knowledge you present to a person, they have to also be willing to learn it, _think_ about it and apply it. That's the hard part.
Many people could not function without cellphones any longer. So much function has become the norm that they would struggle without it.
With LLMs and more advanced AI, we are now outsourcing our thinking and reasoning. The implications are staggering for the future generations. We can still think and reason without assistance, but what is to come in the future for those that grow up with some assistant that manages everything in your life including your thoughts?
I don't think trying hard is a waste of time right now. There's a lot of hype right now and ore will come but LLMs will fall to the hype cycle soon enough as we begin to discover all the little details and things that are not possible.
I think it's great everyone will be able to have a personal tutor and I think we can rethink some aspects of education. The Waldorf model really starts to make more and more sense since kids can explore curiosities with their AI tutor which can be programmed to nudge them into the "right things". And of course analyze and report on them daily to the parents.
> Seems like we're creating a future where humans are taught to delegate as much as possible to some LLM/service and go back to whatever entertains them.
Or interests us. I think it's great if we can offload some of the mundane and repetitive things to a machine so we can focus on more interesting things.
Having massive amounts of information does not mean you can understand it or make the best decisions. There will still be a need to develop sound reasoning skills, and real-world information will be useful for examples but won't in and of itself be able to convey those reasoning skills which must grow through effort.
My classmates and I wasted a lot of time in school, but it had more to do with things like watching "Stomp!" once a year every year from grades 1-10 and reading Dr. Seuss every year from grades 1-6. A lot of public school is just warehousing. That's probably a bigger problem than obsolescence of genuinely well-planned curriculum due to technology.
In this future, what's the point in trying hard when a LLM or a person with a LLM will be just as equivalent without most of the effort? Seems like we're creating a future where humans are taught to delegate as much as possible to some LLM/service and go back to whatever entertains them.