The AI-Education Death Spiral a.k.a. Let the Kids Cheat

That’s a nice premise, but it seems the author imply the school has to come up with some idealized activity that would magically kids teach kid reading, writing or doing maths problems without really doing it, because it’s supposedly boring.

But in reality at one point kids have to acquire the love for these, that they are worth doing and rewarding for the sake of it.

So my (maybe unpopular) opinion is that the author is part of the problem. Because the root cause is that it’s parents, not school and teachers, that forgot it’s their role to nurture their kids into this. I’m not blaming parents for the multiple complex reasons they aren’t doing it, but it’s time we stop putting everything on teachers.

1. "AI is a filter. It strips away everything that can be automated, leaving only what requires actual thinking: creativity, collaboration, real-world problem-solving."

At any reasonable school-college level this is false. LLMs are perfectly fine replacing creative and collaborative aspects of work or study at intermediate levels. Yeah, they are unrealiable in results, but the participants don't care. LLMs produce data in shape of creative and collaborative work and that is enough to submit it.

What I mean by this, is when the house of cards will burn down (and it won't, because education is not a purpose of a school), it will also burn down creative training too.

2. Solving real/actual/applied/etc problem at the education facility of any level is nice and all (running business or solving community problems), but some studies just don't afford to be that "real" or "applied". All humanities, most of the harder STEM, etc. In USSR we had a whole separate class of higher-ed facilities, below universities called "technicums", which focused only on the applied knowledge. They were fine, but they definitely didn't fill all the demand.

I'd love to hear how. I'm a firm believer in education, but saying we can fix the wealth gap by just educating our kids even more is like saying we can stop deforestation if only we had even sharper axes.

The wealthiest are the luckiest, but also the best at exploiting resources like an educated work force. I can't think of a single invention of our modern day that has lessened the wealth gap. (The last one that did was probably the guillotine, and even that was a small blip on the graph.) The latest invention AI, is only accelerating the widening of the gap, just like other inventions before it. Point being, just being smarter seems to only accelerate the gap, not fix it. Unless you know of some hidden inflection point coming up.

I do think having a good understanding of our political systems, etc is obviously important. And I suppose that would fall under the umbrella of education. But if we just pumped out more doctors, each doctor just gets a smaller slice of the doctor pie. Elon isn't magically going to get less money.

I do want to push back that higher level of education attained equates to universally better outcomes, because there's opportunity cost to being in school into your twenties, not becoming a taxpayer, getting deep into debt only to become underemployed. Again, people I've met who entered work at a young age are plenty intelligent and more skilled in their field than peers who went to grad school. I don't know that schools increase your intelligence, just your credentials.