Parents can still let their kids use AI when/where appropriate (outside the school's official curriculum). There's a lot more to life, growing up, and learning than what politicians do with traditional education.
Agency is key.
Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
151–160 of 183 posts
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t imagine how many shortcuts I would have taken as a kid/teen or stressed uni student if AI were an option. I can see even a well-meaning student stuck in this aspirational cycle of “I’ll do it myself next time, but right now I just want to catch up.”
The kid motivation is not the knowledge but the grade, in all subjects but the few that interest them. Until that will chance the any and all shortcuts will be used, because the goal of the kid is to: * get grades high enough to keep parents happy * do fun stuff The motivation to get knowledge for something other than your own hobbies/curiosity only comes when you need to start paying the bills and get a job
Agreed. Anyone advocating for heavy AI use in primary and secondary school education obviously doesn't remember their own motivations at that age.
I never cheated, but it's far too high a bar to expect adolescents to be able to restrain themselves from a magic answer machine.
And the more they use it, the further they're going to fall behind in the basics (being able to do math, read, and write).
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#153I wish we can limit AI in posts such as here, and/or for some creators.
As an example Two Minute Papers used to to be great but these days he's mostly covering AI advances, which to be honest become boring really quickly.
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
You bring up politics when this topic is about technology adoption in education. Grew up in Greece and was shocked that calculators are used in high school math. An interesting note: "And teachers will not be able to ask A.I. to grade assignments." This prevents teachers from using it as well, which is an interesting angle.
How is technology adoption in education not political?
It can become political, like anything else. But isn't inherently. It does not attempt to answer some political or ideological question.
The question is "do you want to teach the tool and its use or do you want to teach thinking manually". The west is under the impression that if you don't teach the tool then people will be unemployable.
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#155Even if you're pro-AI, there's a reason calculators are banned from math classes until a certain point. It seems like a no-brainer to have people learn on hammers before moving them to nailguns. I can't help but think of this Chesterton Quote: "It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly…
So why I Dont learn how semiconductors work before I do JavaScript? Or assembly code? I can cheat straight to JavaScript
Imagine if you had! You might be the 100X JavaScript writer.
More seriously everyone knows there are patterns that keep repeating themselves from low level on up. The more exposure you get the better you get at understanding them. I think there's a reasonable question about if the best methodology for understanding is to see the same thing repeatedly (that is just study JavaScript) or to see multiple variations on the same thing (that is learn the entire stack imperfectly).
The counter to this in my mind is that learning for it's own sake is often imperfect. If I know I'm learning about semiconductors simply to get on to learning Assembly and then JavaScript (my actual goal) I'll retain less then if the initial steps are the goal itself.
Pedagogy is a tricky thing.
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#156Good. Kids need to learn how to think before letting other stuff do it for them.
Do they? I mean so much of learning (certainly of school) is along the lines of "this is the way it is, don't worry about first principles just accept this"
If there's learning how to think stuff going on I'm not sure I want the schools doing that, it seems more like the job of parents.
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's like banning teachers or textbooks from school. LLMs are the single greatest learning technology ever created.
Saying that a human teacher is equivalent to an LLM is derogatory to the teachers and exaggerating the capabilities of the LLM. I say this as someone who uses these things daily in my work and personal life. Let's not murky the waters with complete falsehoods
The LLM is clearly better. I'd rather go back and forth with an emotionless computer to find the truth than to beat my head against a brick wall trying to get some radical emotional-logic driven University activist professor (or one of their inculcated stooges) to stop lying to me.
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We can't just bury our heads in the sand. Kids are going to need to engage with this This was the same argument made for smartphones in schools. > it cannot wait until after they graduate high school I have a strong opinion about technology in early education. The evidence is more mixed for high-school students—I don’t have a view there. If the argument is no AI in elementary or middle school, and controller introd…
>>solution is being developed by the state I'm curious, how do you envision this development happening? You're (presumably) calling for all school boards to ban any AI developed anything in classrooms like NY just did. Are you expecting public universities to perhaps carry out studies first? For reference, I think putting a tablet with an AI in front of kids to talk to is a silly boogeyman most people seem to be talk…
> how do you envision this development happening?
Idk. I don’t have a great solution. But I also don’t think kids being slightly less familiar with AI at schools is a real problem.
> how do you envision this development happening?
Literally two classrooms I’ve seen in the Bronx in the last 6 months. Tablets are cheaper than teachers.
> My vision was always teacher tooling
I like this. I support it. I don’t support putting it in front of kids. Given how corrupt our AI leadership is right now, erring on the side of caution seems prudent.
> calling for such blanket bans means we can't even test any of this
No? We still have AI everywhere. We can still do controlled studies.
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>solution is being developed by the state I'm curious, how do you envision this development happening? You're (presumably) calling for all school boards to ban any AI developed anything in classrooms like NY just did. Are you expecting public universities to perhaps carry out studies first? For reference, I think putting a tablet with an AI in front of kids to talk to is a silly boogeyman most people seem to be talk…
> how do you envision this development happening? Idk. I don’t have a great solution. But I also don’t think kids being slightly less familiar with AI at schools is a real problem. > how do you envision this development happening? Literally two classrooms I’ve seen in the Bronx in the last 6 months. Tablets are cheaper than teachers. > My vision was always teacher tooling I like this. I support it. I don’t support pu…
>> Given how corrupt our AI leadership is right now, erring on the side of caution seems prudent.
None of the headline grabbing CEO's have any official education relationships. This seems like a "I saw some bad headlines" vibey reaction.
>>No? We still have AI everywhere. We can still do controlled studies.
Not in schools we can't, where Teacher productivity has slumped. Teachers are spending more time doing admin work, and less time with kids. Meanwhile, rich parents who send their kids to Private schools can experiment ASAP (this ban doesn't affect them), and get any and all productivity enhancements. Shouldn't the government be creating some space for experimentation? Shouldn't it be the onus of the banning party to create this space?
Re: Mamdani bans AI in NYC schools
#160There are some truly excellent initiatives leveraging AI as teachers, rather than as cognitive crutches, and it's important that they are not tossed out with the bathwater. Math Academy is one. I hope for a Cambrian explosion of variations of this approach. Imagine a resourceful and infinitely patient tutor guiding you through the most difficult concepts of your education, deeply attentive to your signals about flaws…
> There are some truly excellent initiatives leveraging AI as teachers, rather than as cognitive crutches, and it's important that they are not tossed out with the bathwater.
It takes years to understand the effects of the changes we implement in our school systems and curriculums and this attitude of change it now and hope for the best later is what's gotten us to a point where high school students can't read at a high school level (and this problem was happening before LLMs).
Your hypothetical utopia of education should not be tested out on the masses.