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Asleep_Barracuda4781 t1_j9rge28 wrote

Almost the same question was asked a few days ago.

Same answer: Just because we have google, siri, or some future AI has no bearing on education. You still need education to know if any given information is true or reliable regardless of source. You also need to know and practice for times when you don't have access to the all knowing entity or for emergencies when there is only time for action.

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SomedayWeDie t1_j9rtyvy wrote

You also need education to literally understand the answers that the AI gives you

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Asleep_Barracuda4781 t1_j9rvphd wrote

Great point! You would also need to know what and how to ask the AI to get what you need.

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Workerhard62 OP t1_j9rvzih wrote

Wouldn't the AI advance to a level where it could teach a student from start to finish?

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ShowNudesForLove t1_j9sgst9 wrote

To learn from an AI like this, you have to have an intrinsic desire to learn something new. You want to know something, so you ask the ai. You care about what it has to say because you actively want to know the answer.

In general, the majority of students k-12 in the US so not possess this intrinsic desire to learn for all or even most of their courses. Good teachers find ways to build relationships with the students and build connections from the content to the students' lives in order to help foster that intrinsic desire.

That's a piece that will be extremely difficult to recreate because of how individualized it is.

Take for example a student who wants to know more about physics. They ask an AI to explain some concept. If the explanation is too high level, they'll then need to ask the ai to explain the pieces of it to them and break it down until they can build up their understanding. This requires a kind of meta cognition that most students don't develop easily. And at each step where they don't understand and need it broken down further, it's another block causing them to reconsider how much they actually care about learning the information in the first place.

For upper level students or very motivated individuals, I think ai could potentially get there. But for the majority of schooling at primary and secondary levels, I think we are going to need teachers for a very long time.

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Workerhard62 OP t1_j9tj3wm wrote

Very well said. Meta-cognition seems to be a popular term lately.

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Zer0pede t1_j9us962 wrote

Have you tried to teach before? Every student learns so differently, and the best teachers are learning while they teach (think of professors who both research in their field and teach, but it applies to other teachers). Students ask fascinating questions. Feynman talks in many places about how much teaching helped his research. Also, office hours are for befriending students because elements of their home life affect how they learn, and you really need to get an idea of how they think.

There’s lots of ways AIs could assist learning and self-education: I’d love to have something that could pre-read books and papers with an eye to subjects I’m interested in and bring those to me. It would also be great if students had something at home that could direct them to parts of a textbook that were relevant to a homework problem they didn’t understand and suggest supplementary materials like videos, but you’re always going to need a human teacher in the mix. Maybe you could save that teacher a lot of stress by having an AI build rough lesson plans and materials that they only had to tweak (teachers can spend all vacation writing a lesson plan), and then the teacher could focus their time on helping students one on one.

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Asleep_Barracuda4781 t1_j9rw8yb wrote

So the AI would be educating and training people?

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Workerhard62 OP t1_j9ry341 wrote

Think it's possible?

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Asleep_Barracuda4781 t1_j9rz3rl wrote

Its going to be a while until AIs are anything more than very fancy pattern recognition algorithms and data aggregators. Even then I think an "AI teacher" would just be an online course guided by an AI to better tailor it to the individual student.

You'll still need a football coach, ballerina teacher, first aid teacher, etc.. Think of anything you learn today that would suffer from a disembodied voice and maybe a youtube video series being your instructor.
Unless AI gets to the point of triggering muscle groups and programming synapsys for us...then frankly we have much larger questions to worry about than "what does education look like?"

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Workerhard62 OP t1_j9rzbni wrote

The field of robotics may play into this somehow as well.

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jeffreynya t1_j9urmc4 wrote

I think Curriculum could be designed more as an outline of a subject and you then are asking questions about that topic. Different questions may be answered in different ways depending. This would allow students to better learn things in ways that are best for them. Some may need more details and others less. It would be much more personalized.

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Zer0pede t1_j9syg93 wrote

The “I do my own research!” people will just come to the same bad conclusions faster, instantly sending you hundreds of links to all the papers they misunderstood.

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AnswerTheDoorPlease t1_j9uu5kj wrote

Reminds me of the time I tried to watch a biochem lecture on YouTube before I had taken any college level science classes. Like yeah I understand the literal words but I had NO idea wtf was going on. Obv this is anecdotal

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vundercal t1_j9sbcbo wrote

These people thinking AI can replace school will bring about the world of idiocracy

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planet_oregon t1_j9slk9m wrote

My kid goes to public school in an overcrowded room and is mostly learning to read from an app on a tablet. And we have one of the better public school systems.

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Asleep_Barracuda4781 t1_j9sc7lx wrote

That satirical future is looking less fanciful with every passing day. It blows my mind how I hear people want to shove more and more of their responsibilities off on to an AI, tech companies, or gov't while also hearing people complain about how they are products of the system and the system is holding them down. I wonder how much overlap there is between the two groups.

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Freds_Premium t1_j9sh54i wrote

Will it be possible to download knowledge into your brain via a brain-chip interface?

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Zer0pede t1_j9szh15 wrote

I think it depends: What do you consider knowledge? Critical thinking skills for instance are different from facts—those take practice, not information. Arguably all knowledge is more than just information—the process of learning figures into it.

Even with a language: you could download grammar rules maybe, but everybody develops a feel for language that’s intimate, unique, and distinct, and that sense develops because you learn it slowly over time. Could you download the fact that many people find the word “moist” uncomfortable, but only in English? I memorized the case system in German and Russian long before I could use them in conversation correctly and instinctively. Knowing the facts was only part of learning the language.

Scientific insight is often described as coming in a flash after years of familiarization with a subject. That’s more than just the information—that’s years of turning a subject around and around in your head until you feel things about it instinctively, connected with other things in your life. There’s reason to believe dreams forge unique connections between subjects and experiences in your brain, almost like metaphors, and those would be entirely unique to how you learned a subject as opposed to what you learned. That kind of complex learning and interconnecting of subjects as you go is very different from a “download,” but that’s what we mean when we say “knowledge.”

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Asleep_Barracuda4781 t1_j9si4gm wrote

I don't know enough about neuroscience to say anything of meaning. I would assume you would have to articifically connect neurons.

As someone else has pointed out in the comments. Having knowledge of something does not equate to understanding it, let alone being able to implement your understanding. You would have to be able to download the understanding and muscle memory that comes with experience, training, and practice.

If the AI can literally reprogram your brain by reconnecting individual neurons...at what point are you just an organic robot robbed of all agency and a mere play thing of the AI?

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asyrin25 t1_j9utgp0 wrote

Counterpoint:

Now that my cars and phones have had nav for years, I know how to get to most places within 5 square miles of my house, and that's it.

This is theoretically a problem when I don't have access to the tech.

This has never happened and would take a near apocalypse event to happen.

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Asleep_Barracuda4781 t1_j9uz51e wrote

How is this a conterpoint? It proves my point. Either you have been educated in how to read a map and road signs and therefore could navigate without GPS navigation, or you would be screwed without your phone or car.

If you ever have to borrow someone else's car or rent a car that doesn't have nav, and your phone's battery runs out of energy...then you're reliant on your previous education. It doesnt take an apocalypse.

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asyrin25 t1_j9v5y8v wrote

If I'm in a car, I have something to plug my phone into. I then have Google Maps.

If I didn't have my phone, where would I even get a map? They don't sell them at gas stations anymore and I certainly don't keep a map book in the car. Being able to read road signs isn't remarkably useful for navigating somewhere you don't know how to get to. That requires an understanding of the layout of the streets and freeway system, the former of which doesn't even necessarily have a logic to it.

That understanding is only useful in a nearly catastrophic situation. One neither I nor anyone I know has run into in recent memory.

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Asleep_Barracuda4781 t1_j9v83nh wrote

Yes, today's navigation infrastructure within cities is quite robust. You probably won't have to worry about not having at least indirect access to Google Maps unless the GPS or telecom networks go down.

I still don't see how this is a counterpoint. OP's question assumed AI is instanteously available and implied that this means you would just rely on the AI for all info and direction in life. (At least the recent similar questions have all hinted at this) My point is no infrastructure is perfect, infomation transfer takes time which you don't always have, and finally knowledge doesn't equate to understanding or give you the ability to apply the knowledge.
Therefore you will still need to learn, memorize, and practice stuff in anticipation of needing it later or to provide a foundation to build further learning on. Is that not a working definition of education?

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asyrin25 t1_j9v8xb3 wrote

My counterpoint is that, at least in my case, technology has caused me to forget that education. I lack the ability to navigate far without the tech because those skills are no longer used. In theory, I could spend the time and effort to educate myself but with the tech so reliable, my chances of getting a benefit from doing so are very small. Even if I spent the time, the tech performs the task better than I could. Maps has access to life traffic data, for example.

So, to OP's point, what other skills will we lose once technology makes them defunct?

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iamthesam2 t1_j9vzgpc wrote

and thus the knowledge (and wealth) gap will continue to widen.

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hmspain t1_j9w18gc wrote

Just like we need to learn how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide ... even after calculators were everywhere :-).

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FintechFusion t1_j9y0fa2 wrote

"future AI has no bearing on education" Really? Are you sure you wanna say that? 🤔

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