I don't know if this is what the GP meant, but obviously classrooms do scale, in the sense that almost every kid in the world has access to a classroom. But arguably, for better or worse, this scaling was enabled by "cramming" many of those kids into relatively large classes, with little 1:1 attention from the teachers, and with standardized (mostly multiple-choice) testing, rather than old-school oral testing.
As I see it, it is a very salient question - what would the economics of global schooling look like if we decided that it's imperative for every student to get personal pedagogy and regular individual professional oral examinations for their schoolwork?
Indeed. Education isn't supposed to "scale". We've mucked around with education so much and subjected it to tech fad after tech fad that we hardly have anything resembling education.
Because this has been going on so long, most people's reference point for what constitutes "education" is simply off, mistaking "training" or something like that for it. But the purpose of education is intellectual formation, the ability to reason competently, and the comprehension of basic reality, which enables genuine intellectual freedom (there are moral presuppositions, too; immorality deranges the mind). This is what the classical liberal arts were about.
The very bare minimum criterion (and it is a very bare minimum) for someone to be able to claim to be educated is not only knowledge of their field, but knowledge of the intellectual nature, foundations, and basis of their field in the greater intellectual scope. I would not hold someone with only that bare minimum in especially high esteem vis-a-vis education, but even that bar is higher than what education today provides.
There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education, at least not for the current rate of teacher salaries (and it's very far off). The educational strategy has to scale to real people, real teachers and real students as they are in the flesh, not some ivory tower pipe dream. We've had decades of this "we should teach how to think, not what to think".
Alternatively,if you don't care about scale, as in rolling out a system to the population at large, then yeah, this kind of advanced education exists, it's just very selective and is in advanced extracurricular or obtained through private tutors.
This also assumes that universal education is a sensible aim. I think that's doubtful and that it contributes to these sorts of burdens and waters down the quality of education in the process.
As a concrete example, for a few decades now, we're been pushing primary school students toward university education quite aggressively and broadly. It was quite common to scare students toward university by claiming that without a university degree, they would be flipping burgers at McDonalds. This, of course, is completely false and it is disgraceful that such dishonest and manipulative tactics were used. Today, because of rising university costs and the dubious value of most university education, we're seeing this idea challenged at the level of the university. Gen Z's interest in trades has increased by something like 1500%. I don't see this as a negative. In Germany, for instance, there is a more balanced distribution across trades and university.
Now, I admit that the situation is a bit different in the case of primary education, but here, too, I think we do well to think in terms of reform rather than technology and patching up a pedagogically and administratively broken system. The American education system spends an inordinate amount of money on each student with little to show for it. If, for instance, those funds were allocated wisely, then a number of problems would likely go away or become smaller issues.
Of course, what does "allocate wisely" mean? Education systems require a principled grasp of what education is for. If you don't have a sound anthropological grasp of what it means to be human and how education is supposed to enable one's humanity and serve human persons, then you are in no position to run an education system or decide school curricula. I cannot stress this enough. Our education system today is very "pragmatist"; we're constantly told we're being prepared for a career and a job market. That's not education: it's job training. Of course, schools are quite mediocre as training facilities, because they're sort of a halfway house between training and whatever residue of classical education still lingers. So that's one distinction: training vs. education. Now, if we simply accept this distinction, we should ask: how should one organize training on the one hand and education on the other to enable each to be successful within its own circumscribed domain? And what if we keep things as local and decentralized as possible? I guarantee you would not see the inept system we have today.
So, with this...
> There are simply not enough teachers who can provide such an ideal, imagined education
...I agree, but again, my view is that at best we are buying time with these sorts of technological gimmicks. We're also social animals. We cannot keep isolating ourselves behind technology under the pretext of "practicality".
Yes, Germany has different educational tracks that are decided fairly early, at 10 or 12 years old (with some opportunity to change tracks). I don't think Americans like this idea.
Still, 40% of young adults have a tertiary degree (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2025/09/education-at-a-...) while it's 47% in the US, so I wouldn't say it's a huge difference. And its not just a US thing, Denmark stands at 45%. So I wouldn't spin too big of a narrative around this.
Education is a field where decade after decade they try some new fad which is basically the old fad re-dressed and never really learn much. That's because teachers and their methodologies don't really have that big of an effect. A stable non-chaotic learning environment and access to the learning material though any kind of presentation, and books gets you to pretty much as good as it gets. To have a real effect, you need private tutoring for the gifted or very small groups of talent nurturing, which goes far beyond the default curriculum. But again, these don't fit the current zeitgeist, so they will keep on pushing "critical thinking" and "how to think", no matter how much they fail.
Yes. Tools like Khan Academy help lots of talented kids to progress in the curriculum beyond what's available in physical classrooms available to them.
The problem seems to be that many students going to college can't seem to read any substantial texts anymore, while somehow getting themselves into college. It's pretty worrying imo. There's a bunch of articles about this as well: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-eli...
Its unclear how they intend to fix these fundemantal problems tbh. Things like "Automate the 'must not fail' moments with rules, APIs, and triggers." And "Use policies, templates, function calling, and explicit do/don't constraints." Make sense but if you have deterministic workflows, what do the llms still add?
Using APIs makes sense but isnt the whole point of these things that they can automate away stuff, it feels like we're building really big complicated frameworks to put these things in. Does it still have any actual benefit for stuff like this?
I'm not Salesforce obviously, but a combination of LLM as an input interface and the deterministic APIs doing the recurring automation behind would work.
For instance you talk with the LLMs for a while, they give you a workable set of DSL commands, you check what they do and make sure they match your needs, and set them to run as frequently as needed.
This pretty much matches my preferred workflow for scripting with LLMs: don't ask it to do the task, ask it to write a script that does the task, then validate and execute or refine.
It doesn't have to be reliable! It just has to flag things: "hey these graphs look like they were generated using (formula)" or "these graphs do not seem to represent realistic values / real world entrophy" - it just has to be a tool that stops very advanced fraud from slipping through when it already passed human peer review.
The only reason why this is helpful is because humans have natural biases and/or inverse of AI biases which allow them to find patterns that might just be the same graph being scaled up 5 to 10 times.
I hope I'm wrong but I haven't seen anything like this in practice. I would imagine we have the same problem as before where we could use it as an extra filter but the amount of shit that comes out makes the process not actually any more accurate, just faster.
Having seen from close-up how these reviews go, I get why people use tools like this unfortunately. it doesn't make me very hopeful for the near future of reviewing.
that's why I wanted someone to actually do a real test to see if it has even a shred of accuracy since that means it could be improved upon in the future.
Appropriate compensation is a non-issue? I have the impression many people jump on the hate-EU train for no other reason than there's many comments reinforcing it.
What do you really think about this case in particular? I'm pretty curious where this comes from.
Who should receive the compensation? If I want to know the answer to a particular question and most search results point to SEO garbage which doesn't even answer it, then who should be compensated and for what? If those SEO garbage websites are to be compensated, doesn't that just incentivize more garbage?
I don't know. I don't really care about the details in this case, I just don't really get the dismissive attitude that often surrounds things like this. Do you think this is not something that is worth looking into if it happens at such as large scale?
Just do be clear, I use genAI all the time for finding info and answering questions, so my browsing habits changed as well. I'm the kind of person who this case would indirectly be about. But don't you think that it's valuable to look at how do we compensate people who create content when their content is being used by genAI.
Many people seem to have the feeling of 'oh it's too late and those websites were garbage anyway (whatever that means), who cares'. Don't you think that's a bit of a silly way to go about this?
> But don't you think that it's valuable to look at how do we compensate people who create content when their content is being used by genAI.
But why should we compensate them simply because their content is being consumed by AI? For me, any kind of compensation MUST take relevance into account, otherwise we'll reward quantity and not quality, thus quality won't be preserved.
Maybe the answer is to actually NOT do any compensation like that, instead focusing solely on attribution so that it's in people's interest to reward select creators manually to keep the content valuable.
If using data from those websites in a way decreases their visitors or something similar then I think there's an argument to be made for that. I don't know the details to case but just because something is publicly visible doesn't mean that you can just do anything you want with it.
Every major news site in Europe is full of articles full of "The New York Times reported that [summary]" so I'm a bit confused as to why, all of a sudden, it's a problem.
Newspapers have been doing this for at least a century, while news radio and news broadcasts have done it since their inception.
There is no guarantee that a website would get a visit if there was no AI summary. Also you can do anything you want with public domain information. That's the whole point of it being public. Otherwise it should be licensed or copyrighted content.
I just read the 'original affluent society' and (most of) your linked essay, I kind of agree with you. That said, the conclusions of Kaplan lead to estimates or 35-60 hours a week (excluding some depending on the group) and that surprised me a lot. That's very different from the image I got from some other comments in this thread talking about extremely long days with constant back-breaking work. Would you agree?
Constant, backbreaking work was not a feature of hunter-gatherer societies in the way it was of early agricultural societies, yes; at the same time, they still worked equal to or longer hours than we did, at things we would likely consider quite grueling and boring (mostly food processing), and what they got out of it was a level of nutrition even they regularly considered inadequate; moreover, a lot of the reason the average per day work estimate is so low, as the paper covers briefly, is that there were very often times, especially during the winter, where food simply wasn't accessible, or during the summer, where it was so hot it was dangerous to work, so there was enforced idleness, but that's not the same thing as leisure.
Whats the problem with attached bottle caps or volume warnings?
I used to find these things annoying when I was younger but I do realise things like that can be very useful, even though they are small steps.
What is so fundamentally different about DID proposed in the UK or the US then? I read through some of the documents about it and the data scoping that will be available, which isn't with something like BankID seem to be the only difference. What am I missing here?
If an authoritarian state tells a bank to block you as a customer you get exactly the same result. All these options of blocking people are already available to states in general.
reply