// a large blame for this can be placed on disinterested parents //
Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents.
LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs.
We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we lived in, or the careers we had. Their world is going to be very very different.
By your own wording, before you learned programming, you learned to compute by hand. Then programming served as a way of automating what you already knew, but you learned it first, and that's the key issue. Don't skip the foundational learning step.
LLMs are just today's flavor of automation. We've automated tasks in the past, and we will automate tasks in the future. Automation happened and will continue to happen regardless of shape and form.
I agree with the high-level sentiment, "We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we live in." Still, we must also be careful not to skip foundational subjects simply because they're suddenly easy to automate.
Back at the beginning of the 20th century, you had to learn both Latin and Greek to qualify for Harvard or Yale. Because they were foundational. How could you learn the classics without being able to read them? If all you ever read were translations of them, you miss out on so much...
Bread machines exist. They produce acceptable bread. Do you train a good baker by giving them a bread machine? Can you even be a good baker if the only bread you've ever eaten is white loaves from a bread machine?
LLM are a tool that has to be guided by human experience. It's really hard to do that if you don't have experience outside LLMs.
Do you train a good copy typist by giving them a xerox copy machine? Can you even be a good copy typist if the only documents you've ever copied is from a xerox machine?
No and nobody cares because copy typists don't exist any more.
LLMs are 2 years old. Xerox machines took much longer than that to become reliable and economical. Are you supposing that AI systems have peaked and will no longer improve?
I can find threads from 12 months ago claiming LLMs will not be able to do things they now do all the time.
I think blame should be taken to mean "root cause" as opposed to a moral culpability. The degree to which a parent takes an active role in their child's education is incredibly important, more important than their teachers or the school they go to, and sadly many parent's do not take much of an interest in their children's education, thinking that it is mostly something schools manage.
> who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs.
What if instead of these fantasy gains you won't be able to do any meaningful work since you can't count to 10 and just ask LLMs without any ability to tell whether the result is correct?
Is this really something to which we need to attribute blame? I mean, after I learned how to program, I never again sat down and did 100 computations by hand. But I never felt a need to feel culpable or blame my parents.
LLMs happened. They are not going away. There is not an employer on the planet who would prefer their employees to do 1/10th the work by hand, vs. 10x the work using LLMs.
We have to be very careful not to prepare our kids for the world we lived in, or the careers we had. Their world is going to be very very different.