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Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

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Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#41

Post by corimaith »

akasakahakada wrote: post #3

Current education system is broken. You can't learn anything. Learning need feedback loop, but this do not exist. In school, you hand in your homework, get the feedback only after Christmas. Because human cannot evaluate 100 students' homework efficiently. Majority of academic textbook are trash. Some author even say "we have 300 new exercises in this edition" proudly, while the solution is often either nonexistent,…

Problem with education is that it has a dual goal of both educating everyone and "filtering the cream of the crop". On the long term such goals begin to clash, but it's much easier to do the latter than the former.

It's easy to blame the individual, but I wonder what are the collective social costs of such stringent attitudes on the long term.

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#42

Post by fragmede »

lisper wrote: post #38
lewhoo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do teachers as we know them even exist in a world where that idea of tutoring goes to scale ? Do students as we know them even exist in such a world ? I'm thinking if AI can effectively teach (AI asks questions to the student, gives feedback and leads the lesson, reacts to situational events, maintains discipline etc.) then AI can also do. Aside from the romantic take of learning for the pleasure of learning why woul…

> Why would humans even have the drive to learn stuff Because someone still has to make decisions . Much as the educational-industrial complex would have you believe otherwise, living the good life does not equate with getting the right answers on standardized tests. One of the unfortunate aspects of the education system we've built over the last several hundred years is that it conceals this from most people. This i…

Until we decide that decisions can also be made by AI, that is.

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#43

Post by fragmede »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #33
seanhunter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s ever safe to procnosticate on the basis that something is “Just an efficiency increase”. Plenty of tech that is just an efficiency increase has ended up having profound impact on society.

>just an efficiency increase has ended up having profound impact on society. truer words haven't been spoken. one big one off the top of my mind was the us governments decision to allow civillians to access gps at the same resolution as the arms. with that, all sorts of applications that require realtime location tracking. uber, lyft, rappi, gojeck off the top of my head.

More fundamentally, the telegraph was "just" a more efficient way to send messages over sending a message via pony express, and the Internet evolved from there.

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#44

Post by dtnewman »

Maybe AI is going to save education, but the next few years are going to be very rough. I built a plugin for Chrome that helps detect cheating [1] so I've been talking to a bunch of teachers lately and pretty much everyone acknowledges that ChatGPT is a game changer for how schools will need to run. Plagiarism, tutors and parent help have been around for a while, but they still required most students to put in some effort. Now, any student can have chatGPT generate a book report for Lord of the Flies in less than 5 minutes. The common theme I hear from teachers is that the education model will need to flip, where students do more writing in class and more learning outside of class. It sounds simple, but it's actually a massive change to implement and things are gonna be very tricky over the next few years until the dust settles more.

[1] https://www.revisionhistory.com, which I originally thought would be most useful for cheating, but interestingly, many teachers are more interested in using it to help students work through revisions. I've gotten feedback from teachers that they plan to have students use ChatGPT to start their assignments and then task them with updating, modifying and annotating them, so I'm trying to figure out which features to build to support that.

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#45

Post by mtgentry »

logicchains wrote: post #10

One of the biggest factors impacting education outcomes is students per teacher. Students tutored one-on-one learn better than students in small classes, and students in small classes learn better than students in large classes. Because if there are fewer students per teacher, the teacher can devote more time and attention to each student. AI promises to put a decent one-on-one tutor in the hands of every student for…

The “small classes are better” idea has been disproven. You may be right about one-on-one tutoring though.

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#46

Post by ben_w »

fragmede wrote: post #42
lisper wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would humans even have the drive to learn stuff Because someone still has to make decisions . Much as the educational-industrial complex would have you believe otherwise, living the good life does not equate with getting the right answers on standardized tests. One of the unfortunate aspects of the education system we've built over the last several hundred years is that it conceals this from most people. This i…

Until we decide that decisions can also be made by AI, that is.

Plenty of people have already made the decision to delegate decisions to AI.

We generally hear about this under headlines like "man attempts to drive into ocean while following satnav" or "flash crash in stock market caused by algorithmic traders" or https://money.cnn.com/2013/03/05/smallbusiness/keep-calm-and...

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#47

Post by L_226 »

I really see the potential here (if it is not already happening) for fine-tuned LLMs to start generating bespoke defence and economic policies. Think about the amount of data you could feed a system about orthodox management strategies, current supply chains, demographics etc.

Probably at least 50% of current global governments / bureaucracy could be wholesale replaced by a single decent LLM, and the economic and social outcomes would be far better.

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#48

Post by ben_w »

morelisp wrote: post #23
routerl wrote: post #14

So, Khan Academy is experimenting with providing every student with (what they call) a "personal tutor". Examples given are: in coding and math, identifying potential mistakes in partial solutions, and suggesting how the student might get unstuck; in literature, an AI impersonates characters in a novel so the student can ask them questions (e.g. "Mr. Gatsby, why do you keep staring at that green light?"); in writing,…

> the student can ask them questions (e.g. "Mr. Gatsby, why do you keep staring at that green light?") We are removing the last vestiges of empathy and interiority from our reading process? Good good, carry on then.

I'm not sure what you mean, to the extent I'm wondering if either or both of "empathy" and "interiority" are auto-corrupt?

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#49

Post by mcpackieh »

mtgentry wrote: post #45
logicchains wrote: post #10

One of the biggest factors impacting education outcomes is students per teacher. Students tutored one-on-one learn better than students in small classes, and students in small classes learn better than students in large classes. Because if there are fewer students per teacher, the teacher can devote more time and attention to each student. AI promises to put a decent one-on-one tutor in the hands of every student for…

The “small classes are better” idea has been disproven. You may be right about one-on-one tutoring though.

'Disproven' is too strong, it's trivially true at the extreme edge cases. But smaller class sizes fail to eliminate all the performance gaps between schools, so the idea of class size (and/or school funding) being the explanation for all school performance gaps has been disproven. Particularly, smaller class sizes can't eliminate a performance gap caused by different conditions at home, whether students bully each other for trying to learn, etc.

But there's really no question that a small class where teachers can know each individual student is better than a large class of hundreds of students or more, where the teachers can't realistically remember who is who.

Re: Sal Khan: How AI could save (not destroy) education [video]

#50

Post by ben_w »

aio2 wrote: post #18
logicchains wrote: post #10

One of the biggest factors impacting education outcomes is students per teacher. Students tutored one-on-one learn better than students in small classes, and students in small classes learn better than students in large classes. Because if there are fewer students per teacher, the teacher can devote more time and attention to each student. AI promises to put a decent one-on-one tutor in the hands of every student for…

That's one factor. But the way I've learned best, is through stories. My teachers told all sorts of stories, and it made me very engaged in my classes. How can the same be said with AI? How can it make an engaging learning experience? Even if you want it to, how could it make a very engaging environment when deep down inside you know it's fake?

> Even if you want it to, how could it make a very engaging environment when deep down inside you know it's fake?

So, like all good fiction from the Iliad and Odyssey to soap operas and Star Trek and wrestling kayfabe?

If anything I expect a problem where AI will become too capable at making things entertaining, such that reality no longer appeals.

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