Big tech does not care if your kids learn anything.
That sounds like a controversial statement, but it is an honest fact. This is not to say that the people who work at those firms do not care if your kids learn. It is not to say that the people who sell the crap tools to your kids’ schools do not care if your kids learn. I suspect that many of them do, and that many of them have convinced themselves that their tools actually help. But that turns out not to be the truth. And the firms themselves either know this or choose to ignore it.
For well over a decade, we have been sold — and it was sales job, make no mistake about it — the benefits of technology in the class room. More, we were sold the notion that learning to use high tech was a requirement for succeeding in life. In the 2010s, tech firms pushed the idea that learning to code was a requirement of modern life and the technology that was supposed to help kids learn. Even then, even as someone who coded for a living, that was obviously bullshit. You teach kids to solve problems and they can pick up whatever tools they need to solve the problems they are interested in. Nothing in programming is mysterious or arcane. Today, we have largely the same group of people making largely the same kind of argument about imitative AI. And it is just as wrong.
The most important thing to remember about the push to get technology into schools is that it made no difference to student achievement. All the Chromebooks, all the coding classes, all the iPads — none of it helped kids learn more. Unsurprisingly, imitative AI is even worse — it appears to be actively harming kids ability to learn. Which, again, unsurprising: these systems provide the answers, sometimes the wrong answers, rather than teach kids how to think, reason, or work out problems. We don’t give kids calculators until they understand the basic principles of multiplication, additionetc. — and those are correct 100% within their operating bounds. The argument that kids need to learn how to prompt an other wise use imitative AI is similarly bullshit — prompting is not hard, and the tools are changing rapidly. What is standard and useful today will not be tomorrow. As with coding, the syntax and the tool matters almost nothing compared to the ability to think.
Look, let’s assume that imitative AI survives the bubble. Let’s assume that it is widespread outside a few technical fields. Hallucinations will not go away — the hyper-scalers themselves admit that bullshit output is an inevitable result of the math behind these systems. And that means any output has to be validated by a human. But humans that do not know things can verify neither jack nor shit. So having kids use imitative AI in class is actually the shortest route to making them unemployable. Something that is not only prove by multiple studies, such as this one, but intuitively obvious. Putting imitative AI in classrooms is nothing more than a money grab by imitative AI companies at best. At worst its a deliberate attempt to create the permanent underclass they all seem so keen on appearing. Call be a Luddite, but I think kids deserve better than that.