alt Hacker News> In practice, yes. In theory a machines can do about everything a human can, but better and cheaper.
If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)
If you'd have a ~5y old yourself, what would your prefer for your kid?
> One of the main constraint for education is available tutor time, see e.g. Bloom's 2 sigma experiment.
Interesting! Also note a caveat (quoted from Wikipedia):
The phenomenon's associated problem, as described by Bloom, was to "find methods of group instruction as effective as one-to-one tutoring".
Perhaps it would be better to focus on that problem?
> and not many parents will send their kids to public schools if the kids can learn much faster at home while being happier.
How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario? Toddlers on a video conference call hours a day? Physical contact is a basic need for humans. Especially kids.
> eventually machines will become better teachers than teachers
Ah yes: WILL (and although likely, not guaranteed). How about re-evaluate our options & stragegies once that's the case?
Replies
> If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art,
I don't know about Ello or whether is it better than human tutors yet.
> How do you see peer-to-peer contact in that scenario?
Neighbor kids gather and play as they please, which is also easier if they have more time on their hands, stay home, and overall live in each other's proximity.
> If you could time-travel back to your 5y old self, would you prefer to be taught by AI tutor given the current state o/t art, or taught by whatever teachers you did have when you were 5? (with all the existing hallucination, breaking through guardrails etc problems of current AI in mind)
I had to choose between my elementary school teachers and something like Claude Fable 5 with a good teaching-focused harness, I would definitely choose Fable 5.
On the place of schools and peer-to-peer interaction:
My oldest is about to start kindergarten in a few weeks. From what I can gather, she's already reading at approximately a mid-2nd grade level and doing math at a late-1st grade level. I expect that divergence would only grow if I kept her at home. So I already firmly believe my kids would learn much faster at home, and this is with us sporadically spending maybe 10-20 minutes on some days doing intentional, structured learning. School is apparently 7 hours 5 days a week, which seems insane to me. We have federal proposals to reduce the definition of full-time to 32 hours for an adult.
From that perspective then, my wish already is that schools could offer to act as a sort of hub for families to meet/organize socialization, and offer the ability to sign up for classes more a la carte. e.g. maybe they can take art or music or science lab, or organize sports teams, and kids that need it can take take math, etc. Basically, act as a support system for homeschooling to fill missing gaps (going up to handling the entire curriculum or effectively acting as childcare for families that need/want that).