Oslo acquires ChatGPT for 110k students and teachers

Isn’t denying these facts just as dogmatic as accepting them blindly?

In a future where every person has an all-knowing assistance in their pocket --a nearly perfect AI who knows it all-- what should we teach in schools, from early childhood to university?

The corollary to that question is:

When that happens, what will be important in people? How do people add value to an organization?

The answers are, as might be expected, varied.

Some are dismissive. They simply do not believe that moment will come or that it will be as described. That it cannot be as described.

Others are more apocalyptic and come very close to being fearful of this future.

Yet another group is glad they are older and will get to watch this happen while retired.

In some cases there's a struggle understanding how to teach certain subjects, mathematics being a typical example. If you have a device that can solve any and all mathematical problems --and even explain them-- what do you need to know about math?

My take so far --I say "so far" because this doesn't even approach a supportable conclusion-- is that the differentiating factor will be experience and the ability to effectively connect, or use, multidisciplinary knowledge.

Maybe I look at this from an entrepreneurial perspective. A small experienced team will be able to rent or buy thousands of experts and workers across every possible discipline and, using their experience, put them to work towards a stated objective. A person who is "mono-skilled" (I'm sure that's not a term), will not be able to utilize these tools to the same level of advantage.

And, yes, I think you will have to know a lot about a lot of subjects. That's the only way to understand if the AI tools and workers are rowing in the right direction. How we impart this knowledge is a different matter.

One thing is certain, education will have to change radically to address the devaluation of raw knowledge in favor of being able to take different types of knowledge lego blocks to make things happen.

It is possible that Norway's leaders just made a genius move by making ChatGPT available to everyone in this way. Brilliant.

There's its ability to write small one-off scripts for me. I've given it an example of a structured log file and told it to "write a pyparser script to parse this string" and it will do that. What would take me a hour to learn pyparser and get somewhere now takes a few minutes. You can literally see it iterate on different solutions until it comes up with something acceptable. (ChatGPT 3.5 doesn't do that.)

Another great use case is as an assistant when I'm learning some new topic.

I was reading A Mathematical Theory of Communications, the breakthrough thesis by Claude Shannon. It's quite accessible, but there are always points where you don't quite understand a point that is being made and you want to get more examples. I can ask ChatGPT to create a concrete example, use actual numbers, plot a graph that illustrates the concept. And it will do that, along with the Python script that it used to create the graph so I can double check what it did. "Create an Eb/No graph for the following parameters." And then ask to modify the graph to illustrate a particular point. Google can deliver similar information, but it will push me a document that contains the answer, along with a truckload of info that I wasn't looking for. ChatGPT pulls just the info that I'm looking for.

Or lately I was looking into Laplace transformations, low pass filters, pole/zero plots etc. ChatGPT 4.0 uses the SymPy symbolic math package to derive the math, I can once again examine the scripts, ask for concrete examples with graphs and so forth. It's way more efficient than doing the same thing with Google, which will usually send you StackExchange with an answer that is not quite what you're looking for.

In these kind of cases, I know enough math and subject knowledge to know when it's bullshitting, but it doesn't have to be 100% accurate to a huge help in learning.