I’m sure there are really unique and great ways to utilize AI in the educational setting, however, young children should not be the Guinea pigs. Prove that certain things are beneficial, not just think they are, and then implement with oversight. People need to stop overthinking everything and just take one step at a time, evaluate and then take another step.
If anything, it sounds like (you think that) they need to be more thoughtful and not just throw every new technology and technique at the kids and see if it works.
I’m not trying to nitpick, but slow down, think, and measure before acting seems like clearer advice. Really what you are fighting is assuming that new technology is useful and just trying out various ad hoc ways to discover how to realize that usefulness.
Who is the authoritative voice of reason for the effectiveness of any educational approach or tool? It takes years to sort things out and by then the approach of the day has moved on. Education is an area where everybody feels like they are an expert. In the US, we can't agree on the simplest things impacting our children.
> It takes years to sort things out and by then the approach of the day has moved on.
What? Good approaches, definitionally, have quite a lot of staying power. This is true in most fields but especially in education where, it turns out, we don't really figure out net new approaches that are much better than the last ones very frequently.
New approaches are tried in education all the time. What constitutes "good" is subjective and might take years to really play out. Education is like economics... so many variables and changing starting conditions
Clearly it should, at least, never be the company that stands to profit from selling said technology to the government. Like you I am highly skeptical, the idea of classrooms is an idea that is over 5,000 years old. It's kinda been nearly perfected at this point where pedagogy mostly points toward self-sufficiency as soon as possible.
Also think it's extremely unethical to experiment on school children using tools or methods that can be detrimental to their development (see chromebook debacle, moving away from phonics). We kinda know what works very well in a public education setting, the constant experimentation does not help.
Experiment on adults that can consent, not children.
The Los Angeles public school system will vastly restrict the use of AI at all grade levels, reported the NY Times and others. The news of the ban — which oddly had to be coaxed out of LAUSD employees (YouTube) at a meeting of the LAUSD School Board Generative AI Ad Hoc Committee — stunningly came as a complete surprise to both the LAUSD Board and K-12 AI usage protestors...
The job of the school is to teach and prepare the young children. If kids use things that could be dangerous outside of school, then that is the parents responsibility. Meanwhile, the school should do what they deem as most appropriate to ensure quality education.
It is quite common outside of the US. Actually I think other places are generally better with binge drinking in the late teenage years, but one of the few ways America really did seem to have a lead over the rest of the world in personal health was that we were able to cut down on teen smoking for a while. Then vaping got invented and I’m sure it’s a huge problem again.
yeah AI companies are pretty vehemently set on making kids dumb & dependent on their products for life. a school district doesn't have the power or bankroll to oppose them. what arrogance lol
Just saw this on Polymarket: JUST IN: El Salvador’s AI tutoring pilot in 171 public schools produced reading, math, & science results above the national average & comparable to Germany & Sweden.
you people pretend to hold a rather romantic notion about what school education is. most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask questions. LLMs are an incredible boon for self-education, second only to the Internet itself, being able to function as a tutor on every subject, and you're hand-wriggling about imaginary dangers of... what, exactly?
I've seen the same moral panic during the commodification of Internet access in my country in mid 00's -- "students are going to cheat on their homework and become dumb!!1", blah-blah-blah-fart-blah. you only pretend to care about kids to push your politics.
> most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask question
What absolute horseshit
I have met a lot of teachers in my life and I don't think I have ever met one that was remotely indifferent to their students. Its not like they're getting into it for the money :/
So let's get this straight: we have many underpaid, overworked teachers who aren't given the resources needed for students to succeed. Our solution to this, in lieu of better educational budgets (and appropriations of said budget), is to rely on the rugged individualism of primary schoolers to be motivated to just learn content by themselves. This being driven by trillion dollar interests who have the budget but not the incentive nor drive to actually make sure students succeed.
Meanwhile, private schools who have both budget and drive will teach kids who can afford it and teach them proper railguarding against such tools. Did I get your point of view correct?
my point of view is that "better educational budgets" is a fantasy and kids whose parents can't afford tutors -- the overwhelming majority of them -- are infinitely better off now, with LLMs being able to explain virtually anything much better than a textbook does. they are already better than most humans at it.
My point of view is that we have more control over our governments, and especially our local governments, than private corporations. I don't have faith that one day LLMs won't simply explode in price and become yet another tool out of reach for all but the most privilege. We already are seeing that as we transition from subscriptions to token based charges.
There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured. So why not hold the ones already using our money accountable?
>There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids
there isn't. AI labs don't give a flying fuck about kids, underprivileged or otherwise -- why should they? LLMs being useful for education is a side effect of them being developed to replace knowledge workers. but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that.
>and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured
by whom? the LLM market is delightfully competitive. and even if one of the labs makes a breakthrough and jacks up the prices on their SOTA, the rest of them won't just disappear.
I'm not suggesting we replace schools with LLMs. no one sane does. I'm just stating something that's been extremely obvious since GPT-4 almost 4 years ago -- LLMs are an incredibly useful tool for learning. fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been -- I'm old enough to have witnessed Soviet-bred boomers yelling at those clouds, and I'm baffled to see various Internet folx fighting the same fight using the same arguments. "we should fund schools better instead" is not going to happen. it was never going to happen even if LLMs didn't happen.
>but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that.
I'm not arguing usefulness. We have many useful tools, programs, and institutions out there. I'm sure some parts of this community directly contributed to such tech.
I'm arguing cost. Costs raise too much (and as you mention, they don't give a flying fuck about those who can't afford it) and we throw LLMs into the pile of "useful yet inaccessible" tools that increases the disparity of the passing and failing kids. So we're back to square one.
>by whom
Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public, and we've seen this playbook being run. They compete until competitors peter out, or they collude to make sure prices all increase in coordination. It's happening now with memory, happened years back with the streaming wars. I see no reason why LLMs are different.
>fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been.
I'm simply asking two questions long term
1. Who foots the bill?
2. Who gets the benefit.
From what I see you haven't answered #2. And for #1 you're just hoping competition keeps prices low despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs. Something's going to give, and history tells me it's not going to be the privileged families.
>Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public,
what I meant is that there isn't a singular entity capable of doing such a rag pull. even if/when closedai and misanthropic do it, open-weights models obviously won't follow.
>Who foots the bill?
primary schoolers don't need $50/1M SOTA. dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough, and even models that can run on consumer hardware are enough for great many things if you know their limitations.
>Who gets the benefit.
students who use it.
again, a LLM can essentially act as a fairly proficient and infinitely patient tutor on every subject, and you have unlimited access to it. that's the application I see for them in education. it would've been amazing to me to have that when I was in school.
>despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs
not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.
>dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough
And do you trust companies to keep subsidizing the "cheap" models? The reason for the memory crisis isn't due to consumer DRAM but affects it nonetheless.
Remember, the kinds of families being talked about here are on districts that apparently cannot afford basic learning supplies and it's a "fantasy" to get them more funding. Who's footing the bill?
>and you have unlimited access to it.
You keep handwaving the costs but not providing good argument for who's covering it. There's no such thing as a free (or in this case, unlimited) lunch. A disadvantaged family may not be able to bear yet another subscription (and again, that train has already left on subscription based syst3ms), a school district would need to fund this for thousands of students, likely funded by property taxes.
>not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.
Yes. Their earnings reports reflect this. The companies are running defecits to fund this. They are the ones subsidizing it.
We all know that will not last forever in this post ZIRP economy. Proponents for AI love to argue about the capabilities in 3-5 years whenever flaws in AI models arise, but seem sheepish to talk about the costs and monetization models. But the latter is the real important part when talking on the scale of an entire education system. I think we can all agree that the products that win such educational bids are rarely the highest quality ones.
Yes, I agree appropriation of funds matter more than increasing the budget. We need more money to go towards districts who literally cannot afford resources.
There's also matters of curriculum, but I'm not versed enough to advise on that issue directly. The small amounts of reading I've done on it suggests that other states need to swallow their pride and look to the statss improving for wisdom.
Imagine saying this about a graphing calculator, because that is essentially what the LLM is for knowledge work. You can either be dumb and spell 8008135 or you can get an education and make it sing. They definitely want us dependent on their products for life, because that's what capitalism is, but dumb kids won't be the profitable ones.
A graphing calculator for all knowledge work is just a(n artificial) brain. It’s not hard to see how offloading brain work to another brain makes your brain less powerful.
I’m not saying you can’t be intelligent in a world of LLMs but people who use the calculator analogy underscore the fact that the LLM isn’t just eliminating the drudgery of one subdomain of mechanical problem solving — every problem is one an LLM can provide and answer for, including what you should learn, what problems you should solve, what your next conversation with the LLM should be about. So they do pose at least a threat of people truly offloading indefinite amounts of their own critical thinking to models, and there’s also danger that such people will in general still be competent enough often enough (due to LLM competence) that they are hard to screen out of key decision making roles or even from highly profitable roles.
I truly don't understand why people think LLMs eliminate the need for mastery, or that they limit thinking. I have a lot more time to think when I use a good harness. It handles the pointless toil and I handle the thinking. I'm just thinking about different things. Instead of trying to coax the correct answers from a search engine, the LLM is doing that for me and parsing the correct output, so I'm not spending hours upon hours wading through detritus. While it's doing that, I'm using that time to think more about the problems I'm solving, the UX, etc.
I'm not sure what to tell you if you think the LLM solves for novel thinking.
The issue is at scale. A tragedy of the commons in a way. I have seen a situation where engineers can't write code by hand if challenged to. Not one. At scale (like the juniors got quizzed as an AI sanity check and couldn't hack it.)
Yet there were times where I was not allowed to use a graphing calculator in school tests (mid 00's). Honestly. if you are completely reliant on a graphing calc in an AP calculus course, you're definitely not getting a 5 in the exam. There is a signifigant time pressure that does not allow for that.
I was in school around that time and I always had a graphing calculator in class and most of the time in standardized tests, AP tests, etc. It was basically just math competitions that wouldn't allow it. The graphing functionality was almost never used for anything. But the multi-line display could be used for notes, which is why they were banned for competitions.
> Imagine saying this about a graphing calculator, because that is essentially what the LLM is for knowledge work.
A frankly hilarious statement given several key facts:
* You don't get and in fact are usually barred from using a graphing calculator outside of coursework designed around it
* Even when you DO use one, it is very often after years upon years of drawing graphs yourself. Analogous to LLMs even moreso than your core example, because to make use of an LLM in a way that is actually productive, you DO need to know what you're talking about with it, to suss out when it's made some bullshit up.
I use AI a lot and find it fascinating and probably the most exciting thing since discovering the web.
I’m not sure I disagree with this.
Schools need to figure out how to integrate it well in a way that both helps kids learn and teaches them how to use this new tool productively. I don’t think that’s been done yet. It’s not a bad idea to just keep it out until we figure it out, or there’s a risk of just slathering AI all over everything mindlessly.
At the very least it could be a giant waste of money. Schools don’t need to be spending their often limited funds thrashing around or chasing fads.
The ban should be lifted once educators figure out what to do with this stuff.
one in five children in the united states lives in a food insecure household. that has more relevancy to the “need” here than whatever you’re suggesting
I'd "need" to know what you see my interpretation of needs as being before I could answer better. But I'll give it a try without a dictionary.
In its most fundamental sense, a need is a requirement for life to continue and reproduce. These requirements typically involve the abilities to compete, to obtain food, to have shelter, to mate and protect the young, etc.
Isn't AI to serve needs? For example, the need to find bugs in software so somebody can compete economically and employees can meet their needs as described above? To buy food, shelter, raise children?
Quite seriously, I think this is an important underpinning of why AI is advancing, and where it's taking us. The fact that it overlaps with Marx, at least to me, is a fascinating and incredible irony, because its success is an application of the very seductive message behind Marxism.
I love that question. It's a great question because it's designed to elicit avenues of attack.
I'd say that Democratic Socialism, today among the general population of the United States the term Socialism has no set definition, no real understanding of its roots, and no real concept of how it would be enacted politically in a Democratic society.
So I'm really not sure what you mean by Democratic Socialist. I think you mean as defined by Wikipedia.
If so, in short I see Marx as being a root among many to Socialism, and so on to Democratic Socialism. The dogma from Marx follows through to an application for people to obtain their "needs": "More of whatever, less expensive, and better evrything! And AI is actually Socialist, so let's do it and vote for me!!!" That kind of cynical approach.
I can't continue the thread to answer your last, more definite, question.
I used an indefinite article on purpose in order to not go to a particular person. The topic I posed was on the relationship, not on persons. So any democratic socialist mayor for that matter.
If you are saying that AI would somehow be contributing to a socialist goal for Mamdani and you use Marx to advance that statement, kind of everything?
I’m sure there are really unique and great ways to utilize AI in the educational setting, however, young children should not be the Guinea pigs. Prove that certain things are beneficial, not just think they are, and then implement with oversight. People need to stop overthinking everything and just take one step at a time, evaluate and then take another step.
> People need to stop overthinking everything
If anything, it sounds like (you think that) they need to be more thoughtful and not just throw every new technology and technique at the kids and see if it works.
I’m not trying to nitpick, but slow down, think, and measure before acting seems like clearer advice. Really what you are fighting is assuming that new technology is useful and just trying out various ad hoc ways to discover how to realize that usefulness.
Who is the authoritative voice of reason for the effectiveness of any educational approach or tool? It takes years to sort things out and by then the approach of the day has moved on. Education is an area where everybody feels like they are an expert. In the US, we can't agree on the simplest things impacting our children.
> It takes years to sort things out and by then the approach of the day has moved on.
What? Good approaches, definitionally, have quite a lot of staying power. This is true in most fields but especially in education where, it turns out, we don't really figure out net new approaches that are much better than the last ones very frequently.
New approaches are tried in education all the time. What constitutes "good" is subjective and might take years to really play out. Education is like economics... so many variables and changing starting conditions
Clearly it should, at least, never be the company that stands to profit from selling said technology to the government. Like you I am highly skeptical, the idea of classrooms is an idea that is over 5,000 years old. It's kinda been nearly perfected at this point where pedagogy mostly points toward self-sufficiency as soon as possible.
Also think it's extremely unethical to experiment on school children using tools or methods that can be detrimental to their development (see chromebook debacle, moving away from phonics). We kinda know what works very well in a public education setting, the constant experimentation does not help.
Experiment on adults that can consent, not children.
"overthinking" was the wrong word, clearly, yes.
That gets in the way of making money though.
Los Angeles Public School System Bans Most AI for Students https://slashdot.org/submission/17350511/los-angeles-public-...
The Los Angeles public school system will vastly restrict the use of AI at all grade levels, reported the NY Times and others. The news of the ban — which oddly had to be coaxed out of LAUSD employees (YouTube) at a meeting of the LAUSD School Board Generative AI Ad Hoc Committee — stunningly came as a complete surprise to both the LAUSD Board and K-12 AI usage protestors...
i don’t mind this at all.
tbh im fatigued of the general public being beta testers for companies.
Ban calculators moment.
In my master's they gave me anything I wanted, laptop, internet, whatever. Gave 2 stupid hard problems.
That's the future.
Don't need school for that. Just ask the LLM for two stupid hard problems and get the equivalent skills of anyone with an MS.
Or maybe there was more to it?
Speaking of moratoriums, they also banned phone use. I am curious how that is going. No AI seems like it could be reasonable.
No quantitative improvements in test scores, but it seems to make kids socialize more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/04/us/did-school-cellphone-b...
The good news is, this won't do anything to stop the kids.
Don't ban smoking, this won't do anything for those who want to smoke.
Don't force seatbelts, those who don't want to wear are not going to
Don't try to restrict $A, it's against personal freedom/liberty that us at $corporate love.
The job of the school is to teach and prepare the young children. If kids use things that could be dangerous outside of school, then that is the parents responsibility. Meanwhile, the school should do what they deem as most appropriate to ensure quality education.
How many kids below 16 do you know that smoke and drink alcohol?
Clearly, laws have a not insignificant effect, even if you could easily ignore them.
It's their parents having significant effect, friend. Kids don't care about drinking laws.
It is quite common outside of the US. Actually I think other places are generally better with binge drinking in the late teenage years, but one of the few ways America really did seem to have a lead over the rest of the world in personal health was that we were able to cut down on teen smoking for a while. Then vaping got invented and I’m sure it’s a huge problem again.
But I agree laws have a huge effect.
yeah AI companies are pretty vehemently set on making kids dumb & dependent on their products for life. a school district doesn't have the power or bankroll to oppose them. what arrogance lol
Just saw this on Polymarket: JUST IN: El Salvador’s AI tutoring pilot in 171 public schools produced reading, math, & science results above the national average & comparable to Germany & Sweden.
you people pretend to hold a rather romantic notion about what school education is. most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask questions. LLMs are an incredible boon for self-education, second only to the Internet itself, being able to function as a tutor on every subject, and you're hand-wriggling about imaginary dangers of... what, exactly?
I've seen the same moral panic during the commodification of Internet access in my country in mid 00's -- "students are going to cheat on their homework and become dumb!!1", blah-blah-blah-fart-blah. you only pretend to care about kids to push your politics.
> 40 kids at a time
i wonder why that is. what kind of attitude towards the value of education would allow this. grok help me out here
> most kids are being educated by indifferent teachers, 40 kids at a time, with little to no opportunity to ask question
What absolute horseshit
I have met a lot of teachers in my life and I don't think I have ever met one that was remotely indifferent to their students. Its not like they're getting into it for the money :/
So let's get this straight: we have many underpaid, overworked teachers who aren't given the resources needed for students to succeed. Our solution to this, in lieu of better educational budgets (and appropriations of said budget), is to rely on the rugged individualism of primary schoolers to be motivated to just learn content by themselves. This being driven by trillion dollar interests who have the budget but not the incentive nor drive to actually make sure students succeed.
Meanwhile, private schools who have both budget and drive will teach kids who can afford it and teach them proper railguarding against such tools. Did I get your point of view correct?
my point of view is that "better educational budgets" is a fantasy and kids whose parents can't afford tutors -- the overwhelming majority of them -- are infinitely better off now, with LLMs being able to explain virtually anything much better than a textbook does. they are already better than most humans at it.
My point of view is that we have more control over our governments, and especially our local governments, than private corporations. I don't have faith that one day LLMs won't simply explode in price and become yet another tool out of reach for all but the most privilege. We already are seeing that as we transition from subscriptions to token based charges.
There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured. So why not hold the ones already using our money accountable?
>There's no incentive to serve underprivileged kids
there isn't. AI labs don't give a flying fuck about kids, underprivileged or otherwise -- why should they? LLMs being useful for education is a side effect of them being developed to replace knowledge workers. but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that.
>and all the incentive to increase prices once the market is captured
by whom? the LLM market is delightfully competitive. and even if one of the labs makes a breakthrough and jacks up the prices on their SOTA, the rest of them won't just disappear.
I'm not suggesting we replace schools with LLMs. no one sane does. I'm just stating something that's been extremely obvious since GPT-4 almost 4 years ago -- LLMs are an incredibly useful tool for learning. fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been -- I'm old enough to have witnessed Soviet-bred boomers yelling at those clouds, and I'm baffled to see various Internet folx fighting the same fight using the same arguments. "we should fund schools better instead" is not going to happen. it was never going to happen even if LLMs didn't happen.
>but they are extremely useful, and there are no sane arguments against that.
I'm not arguing usefulness. We have many useful tools, programs, and institutions out there. I'm sure some parts of this community directly contributed to such tech.
I'm arguing cost. Costs raise too much (and as you mention, they don't give a flying fuck about those who can't afford it) and we throw LLMs into the pile of "useful yet inaccessible" tools that increases the disparity of the passing and failing kids. So we're back to square one.
>by whom
Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public, and we've seen this playbook being run. They compete until competitors peter out, or they collude to make sure prices all increase in coordination. It's happening now with memory, happened years back with the streaming wars. I see no reason why LLMs are different.
>fighting against them being used in education is as absurd as fighting against computers and Internet had been.
I'm simply asking two questions long term
1. Who foots the bill?
2. Who gets the benefit.
From what I see you haven't answered #2. And for #1 you're just hoping competition keeps prices low despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs. Something's going to give, and history tells me it's not going to be the privileged families.
>Shareholders. All the frontier models are going public,
what I meant is that there isn't a singular entity capable of doing such a rag pull. even if/when closedai and misanthropic do it, open-weights models obviously won't follow.
>Who foots the bill?
primary schoolers don't need $50/1M SOTA. dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough, and even models that can run on consumer hardware are enough for great many things if you know their limitations.
>Who gets the benefit.
students who use it.
again, a LLM can essentially act as a fairly proficient and infinitely patient tutor on every subject, and you have unlimited access to it. that's the application I see for them in education. it would've been amazing to me to have that when I was in school.
>despite it being well established that LLMs are not sustainable at current costs
not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.
>dirt cheap "flash" tier models are more than enough
And do you trust companies to keep subsidizing the "cheap" models? The reason for the memory crisis isn't due to consumer DRAM but affects it nonetheless.
Remember, the kinds of families being talked about here are on districts that apparently cannot afford basic learning supplies and it's a "fantasy" to get them more funding. Who's footing the bill?
>and you have unlimited access to it.
You keep handwaving the costs but not providing good argument for who's covering it. There's no such thing as a free (or in this case, unlimited) lunch. A disadvantaged family may not be able to bear yet another subscription (and again, that train has already left on subscription based syst3ms), a school district would need to fund this for thousands of students, likely funded by property taxes.
>not a single third-party provider on openrouter is subsidizing their tokens.
Yes. Their earnings reports reflect this. The companies are running defecits to fund this. They are the ones subsidizing it.
We all know that will not last forever in this post ZIRP economy. Proponents for AI love to argue about the capabilities in 3-5 years whenever flaws in AI models arise, but seem sheepish to talk about the costs and monetization models. But the latter is the real important part when talking on the scale of an entire education system. I think we can all agree that the products that win such educational bids are rarely the highest quality ones.
Florida is getting better test scores with smaller budgets. It's not a money problem.
Yes, I agree appropriation of funds matter more than increasing the budget. We need more money to go towards districts who literally cannot afford resources.
There's also matters of curriculum, but I'm not versed enough to advise on that issue directly. The small amounts of reading I've done on it suggests that other states need to swallow their pride and look to the statss improving for wisdom.
Imagine saying this about a graphing calculator, because that is essentially what the LLM is for knowledge work. You can either be dumb and spell 8008135 or you can get an education and make it sing. They definitely want us dependent on their products for life, because that's what capitalism is, but dumb kids won't be the profitable ones.
A graphing calculator for all knowledge work is just a(n artificial) brain. It’s not hard to see how offloading brain work to another brain makes your brain less powerful.
I’m not saying you can’t be intelligent in a world of LLMs but people who use the calculator analogy underscore the fact that the LLM isn’t just eliminating the drudgery of one subdomain of mechanical problem solving — every problem is one an LLM can provide and answer for, including what you should learn, what problems you should solve, what your next conversation with the LLM should be about. So they do pose at least a threat of people truly offloading indefinite amounts of their own critical thinking to models, and there’s also danger that such people will in general still be competent enough often enough (due to LLM competence) that they are hard to screen out of key decision making roles or even from highly profitable roles.
I truly don't understand why people think LLMs eliminate the need for mastery, or that they limit thinking. I have a lot more time to think when I use a good harness. It handles the pointless toil and I handle the thinking. I'm just thinking about different things. Instead of trying to coax the correct answers from a search engine, the LLM is doing that for me and parsing the correct output, so I'm not spending hours upon hours wading through detritus. While it's doing that, I'm using that time to think more about the problems I'm solving, the UX, etc.
I'm not sure what to tell you if you think the LLM solves for novel thinking.
The issue is at scale. A tragedy of the commons in a way. I have seen a situation where engineers can't write code by hand if challenged to. Not one. At scale (like the juniors got quizzed as an AI sanity check and couldn't hack it.)
Yet there were times where I was not allowed to use a graphing calculator in school tests (mid 00's). Honestly. if you are completely reliant on a graphing calc in an AP calculus course, you're definitely not getting a 5 in the exam. There is a signifigant time pressure that does not allow for that.
We were not allowed to have graphing calculators in elementary or highschool (90s), either.
I was in school around that time and I always had a graphing calculator in class and most of the time in standardized tests, AP tests, etc. It was basically just math competitions that wouldn't allow it. The graphing functionality was almost never used for anything. But the multi-line display could be used for notes, which is why they were banned for competitions.
Yeah, not us. If our calculators had more than one line or a suspicious number of buttons, it was disallowed in class.
> Imagine saying this about a graphing calculator, because that is essentially what the LLM is for knowledge work.
Can you plot a graph from an equation by hand?
If you can't, but you can use a graphing calculator to plot the graph then it seems like it has led to you not learning that skill.
And being able to look at an equation and plot a graph in your head is pretty valuable imo
> Imagine saying this about a graphing calculator, because that is essentially what the LLM is for knowledge work.
A frankly hilarious statement given several key facts:
* You don't get and in fact are usually barred from using a graphing calculator outside of coursework designed around it
* Even when you DO use one, it is very often after years upon years of drawing graphs yourself. Analogous to LLMs even moreso than your core example, because to make use of an LLM in a way that is actually productive, you DO need to know what you're talking about with it, to suss out when it's made some bullshit up.
[dead]
“Good news” yeah…
All rules have leakage, they don’t have to be perfect.
I use AI a lot and find it fascinating and probably the most exciting thing since discovering the web.
I’m not sure I disagree with this.
Schools need to figure out how to integrate it well in a way that both helps kids learn and teaches them how to use this new tool productively. I don’t think that’s been done yet. It’s not a bad idea to just keep it out until we figure it out, or there’s a risk of just slathering AI all over everything mindlessly.
At the very least it could be a giant waste of money. Schools don’t need to be spending their often limited funds thrashing around or chasing fads.
The ban should be lifted once educators figure out what to do with this stuff.
It's a very powerful learning tool that, when misused, lobotomizes students.
Students who use it correctly > students who don't use it > students who use it incorrectly
Related:
New York City Bans A.I. in Elementary and Middle Schools
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49542443
and I suppose the rest of us will have to wait until the grim laws of finance do their work before our own sweet release.
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one in five children in the united states lives in a food insecure household. that has more relevancy to the “need” here than whatever you’re suggesting
If that's an important issue for you, could you use your collective resources more thoroughly in addressing it?
are you implying that kids should eat data centers or something
I and many others are trying. Turns out "think of the children doesn't work so well" when it comes to impacting homeowners' property value.
I'm suggesting that AI fundamentally meets a tenet of Marxist dogma, and I'm surprised a Socialist mayor hasn't taken advantage of that fact.
i am suggesting that your interpretation of what a "need" is is wildly inaccurate
I'd "need" to know what you see my interpretation of needs as being before I could answer better. But I'll give it a try without a dictionary.
In its most fundamental sense, a need is a requirement for life to continue and reproduce. These requirements typically involve the abilities to compete, to obtain food, to have shelter, to mate and protect the young, etc.
Isn't AI to serve needs? For example, the need to find bugs in software so somebody can compete economically and employees can meet their needs as described above? To buy food, shelter, raise children?
Quite seriously, I think this is an important underpinning of why AI is advancing, and where it's taking us. The fact that it overlaps with Marx, at least to me, is a fascinating and incredible irony, because its success is an application of the very seductive message behind Marxism.
I appreciate everyone's time in challenging this.
people still pushing "just learn to code" in 2026, almost makes me nostalgic
you seem nice, good luck out there
> I'm suggesting that AI fundamentally meets a tenet of Marxist dogma
And why would be relevant to a democratic socialist?
I love that question. It's a great question because it's designed to elicit avenues of attack.
I'd say that Democratic Socialism, today among the general population of the United States the term Socialism has no set definition, no real understanding of its roots, and no real concept of how it would be enacted politically in a Democratic society.
So I'm really not sure what you mean by Democratic Socialist. I think you mean as defined by Wikipedia.
If so, in short I see Marx as being a root among many to Socialism, and so on to Democratic Socialism. The dogma from Marx follows through to an application for people to obtain their "needs": "More of whatever, less expensive, and better evrything! And AI is actually Socialist, so let's do it and vote for me!!!" That kind of cynical approach.
> a Socialist mayor
Who is that "Socialist" mayor you speak of?
I can't continue the thread to answer your last, more definite, question.
I used an indefinite article on purpose in order to not go to a particular person. The topic I posed was on the relationship, not on persons. So any democratic socialist mayor for that matter.
Is not a Democratic Scoialist also a Socialist these days?
Again, who is this "Democratic Socialist" you speak of?
> Is AI not in an important way from humanity's abilities, and is it not being used to help meet our needs?
So would this suggest we should take and redistribute AI capacity in some way...?
It's definitely being redistributed through the market. Also, I believe there are efforts underway to create open source AI.
I'm not advocating a Marxist dogma, so I can't affirm "we should take and redistribute AI capacity in some way".
Nobody who isn't already falling for the "promises" of AI is going to fall for word games like this.
Now that's interesting. One reason I fear AI is exactly because of the relationship you call a word game.
The point you are arguing here is wildly antithetical to the entire concept of dialectical materialism. A child's analysis of Marx.
What's that got to do with anything?
If you are saying that AI would somehow be contributing to a socialist goal for Mamdani and you use Marx to advance that statement, kind of everything?