alt Hacker NewsIf the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
Between biology advances remediating disabilities, customized outcome-driven education, potential advances in drugs that regulate executive function/memory/etc., improvements in nutrition, improvements in access, reductions in stress, I think we'll see people flourish.
And that's completely ignoring the more out there biological/computer merger style Sci-Fi outcomes, which I believe have a non-zero chance of occurring.
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There's something going wrong in the US at least with elementary age kids that makes me pretty dubious about this unless your expectation is that everything splits into an underclass and an over class with the underclass eventually being replaced by robots and AI before dying out or something. And I really hope that's not what you mean.
Is it worth mentioning that the Flynn Effect seems to have been running backwards lately?
(The drug thing, maybe you've got a point. But in just 20 years?)
Advances made by a few with LLM assistance does not imply an increase in cognitive ability at the population level.
You better spare your stomach from indigestion by watching less sci-fi utopias and more of real-world news outside of the AI bubble.
> If the average human in twenty years isn't far more cognitively capable than the average human now, I'll eat my hat (assuming of course, we don't all die).
You do know that educational results based on the best evaluation we've created so far, PISA, have been dropping since 2015, roughly when smartphones and social media became widespread?
What makes you believe that LLMs from more or less the same companies will be any different?
Silicon Valley tech, including LLM based AI, is extraordinary at manipulating the digital world. I don’t think we have the evidence that it can cross into and manipulate the physical world in the same way.
Folks back in the early 1900s had from 10 to 30 points less IQ than today, as old renomalized test results reveal. Ellis Island even had an admissions test, and they rejected a significant number of people.
I'll be the negative nancy and say that I think it's more likely we see an acceleration of the current trend. If we're talking about students, the top students will be doing as well or better than today but the median might see a big regression.
I have friends who work in primary education and they say there's definitely been some sort of decline in cognitive skills. A lot more kids struggle with holding attention and thinking outside of the box.
I think too much screen exposure has been terrible for the average child.