My little sister's use of ChatGPT for homework is heartbreaking

I asked an LLM the first example question (convert 3 minutes to seconds), and it provided not just the answer, but that there are 60 seconds per minutes, so that's 3 * 60 = 180. I don't think an 11 year old is harmed by that sort of assistance.

The truth is the way humans process information has been radically altered by LLMs and we're in the absolute infancy of understanding what that means. It is going to be far more disruptive than the keyboard or calculator. As we discover the implications, we are repeatedly going to find ourselves disturbed and disoriented. There are skeptics who think it's all hype and that current approaches are a dead end. Even if that were true, I'm 100% convinced that even if AI didn't meaningfully improve on today's capabilities, it will still be incredibly disruptive.

Buckle up.

There will be 2 categories of winners of the AI revolution: the quick and the deep.

This poster's little sister is "the quick". She is using AI intuitively and aggressively. Whether it's right or wrong isn't important, because if the payoffs of it being right are more than the costs of it being wrong, she will be vastly more productive than people who are not using AI. A lot of the thinking school has traditionally trained us to do is officially commoditized.

"The deep" are people with strong conceptual understanding of the problems to which they are applying AI and/or strong understanding of the AI itself. They will use AI to create things that didn't exist before. They will take seriously the risk management (although, they will still not be able to successfully predict all unintended consequences).

People will benefit in the new world proportional to their ability to create or extract value.

Some time, between then, and now, they started mandating graphing calculators.

I know that many universities now assume that everyone uses word processors, and have a zero-tolerance stance on typos.

Someone else posted an article, where the person was complaining about Apple (always a crowd-pleaser), and quoted Steve Jobs, talking about how bicycles acted as "force multipliers" for human efficiency, and compared the personal computer to that.

LLMs are here. Can't put that genie back in the bottle (sorry Jafar). They are now a part of the landscape, and we're still in the old "big iron" phase. They will become much better, pretty quickly.

Kids will need to work with them.

I find things like this to be great, because they free me up to learn more stuff. They raise the baseline.

People think that primitive folks were "dumber" than we are now. This was almost certainly not the case. They just didn't have the infrastructure that we have (dadburn kids, with their fancy "wheels," and "fire." Humpfh), and our kids will have a far more powerful infrastructure than we do.

I'm fairly hopeful. If we can keep from blowing ourselves up, I think we'll be fine.

It's hard to generalize here, as Americans are a heterogeneous bunch. Demographic subsets exist where education is seen as a vigorous competitive sport, where the goal is to achieve admission to the "right" college. The parents are as involved as the kids, usually for better but sometimes for worse.

At the same time, among other groups of Americans, the goal is simply for kids to reach adulthood without too much interaction with the police. You can't draw sweeping conclusions that will cover the entire spectrum.