Comment by oblio
1 day ago
> If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
You do know that educational results based on the best evaluation we've created so far, PISA, have been dropping since 2015, roughly when smartphones and social media became widespread?
What makes you believe that LLMs from more or less the same companies will be any different?
The average score peaked in 2009 though.
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/pisa-education-and-s...
Ie it's been dropping since 2009.
For mathematics and reading the large drop off is between 2018 and 2022.
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Peptide style drugs already have clear positive effects on executive function, it's not particularly hard to envision that we'll find other classes of drugs that have similar effects in other cognitive domains. Twenty years is a long time, and we're set up to make absurd gains in our understanding of biology over that time frame. If we additionally are able to mitigate or cure various intellectual disabilities, that's a massive baseline performance boost to the population as well.
If you want some examples in how AI could improve education:
* Alpha School (https://alpha.school/the-program/) reports 2.6× faster learning growth with just 2 hours of AI-driven instruction daily, with students scoring in the 99th percentile nationally.
* Mindspark (https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/scaling-personal...), deployed in Indian schools, demonstrated gains of +0.22 SD in math and +0.20 SD in language in a randomized trial involving 6,500 students.
* A Harvard study (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12179260/) found more than 2× the median learning gains using AI tutors.
The broader implications are clear: individualized, adaptive tutoring at scale is becoming accessible in ways that historically required expensive one-on-one instruction. This is also going to be possible in places that historically never had access to this quality of instruction, which again, is a massive boost to the human baseline.
I don't think the future looks like Wall-E. I think it looks like insanely healthy people able to pursue their passions with a level of rigour and capability that has never existed before.
Edit: fucked up link 2, fixed
are you seriously suggesting that the cure to the education crisis is peptides?
for children?
Yeah man, that's a good faith interpretation of what I said! You've owned me and scored points, good job!
3 replies →
We seriously looked into Alpha School, my impression was strongly "overpriced con". Frankly, I don't believe their marketing material, which is what you're quoting. I am not anti-AI in learning (LLMs have a great learning boost for me personally), but learning especially for children is a complex problem and truly making it more efficient will take more innovation than an ipad with a magic program. I would caution more skepticism with these results, especially self-reported ones.
I mean, that's entirely possible. It's definitely less powerful evidence than the other two. The Mindspark RCT in particular seems pretty sound (6500 participants, statistically significant improved outcomes).