| I understand your perspective as a marketer, but I think you're creating a false dichotomy. Yes, persuasion tech has stronger financial incentives, but that doesn't prevent beneficial applications from emerging simultaneously. The "super tutor" isn't some distant fantasy - millions already use ChatGPT, Claude and similar tools daily for personalized learning. They're imperfect but genuinely helpful for programming, languages, math, and countless other topics. Look at what happened with YouTube: millions of people transformed themselves into programmers, musicians, mechanics, and countless other professions through free video tutorials. Khan Academy revolutionized math education. Coursera and edX brought university courses to anyone with internet. This wasn't utopian thinking - it was practical technology solving real educational problems at scale. What's different now is that LLMs enable the missing piece: personalization. The one-on-one adaptive experience that was previously limited to those who could afford human tutors at $50-100/hour is now available to anyone at negligible marginal cost. Your skepticism about cancer applications too ignores the technological trajectory we've been on for decades. Just as YouTube and online platforms democratized education, technology has been steadily dismantling bottlenecks in medical research. The human genome project initially cost $3 billion and took 13 years. Today you can sequence a genome for under $1,000 in days. This wasn't utopian thinking; it was technological progress following its natural course. Think what LLMs will do here. |