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Comment by dv_dt

12 hours ago

In history, some of the best educated aristocrats had live tutors for education. Was their cognitive ability impaired by having expert instructors? When textbooks were generated did they impede the ability to think about problems or advance it? Does one have to expend every hour of previous effort to collect knowledge in order to understand and advance further? Does AI have the effect of tutors or textbooks, or something else?

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dv_dt

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Matl  12 hours ago

> Does AI have the effect of tutors or textbooks, or something else?

With tutors or textbooks the explicit goal is to transfer their knowledge to you. With AI agents the goal is presumably to get things done and if you are happy with the results without wanting to understand how the thing you instructed the agent to do works, there's no knowledge transfer there.

  • dv_dt  10 hours ago

    I think the goal comes from the user. Some users want to solve a problem, some users may want to learn something. I'm not sure that having AI widely available really changes the ratio of the two, but I think I see AI availability as a factor that could accelerate the learning curve of the ones that have a goal of learning.

    • tatjam  6 hours ago

      To contribute my n=1, I consider that when using LLMs I do have a huge pull towards "just let the AI cook", and often it really approaches problems better than I ever could. I try to keep the Rust's LLM policy in mind, let it review, search and suggest but not create, and hopefully that way I can keep my brain function. That was (until now?) one of the few things that couldn't be taken away from you easily.

    • Matl  10 hours ago

      I think that's fair. On the other hand whereas previously when you wanted to i.e. write software you HAD to learn something, now you don't. It could be that those who want to know will still want to know but it may also be that the knowledge becomes less desirable since it's not as valued any more.

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theptip  12 hours ago

Right, this would be “using it in a way that increases not decreases human knowledge”

I’m fairly confident that many won’t (immediately) adopt such techniques.

I hold out hope that there will be new ways to make educational content “addictive enough” via personalization that AI is on net a positive to education. I don’t think this is necessarily the easiest or first product configuration.