[jstummbillig]

I am positively excited about the upcoming first generation of humans who will have all their questions answered, correctly and in the way they can best understand, and as often and many of them as they want – and what that is going to enable.

[brabel]

The same anticipation of great things happening preceded the arrival of widely available internet, but all we really got was cat videos initially, and doomscrolling more recently. I don’t have much hope for great things anymore.

[int_19h]

I just did a crash course on lingustics by reading through a bunch of highly specialized articles.

30 years ago, just finding those articles would require spending many hours in the library (and that's if I'm lucky and the library has them).

It's definitely not just cat videos.

[mncharity]

I saw a Microsoft talk decades back, that was a dispirited "the people of India could be buying educational materials and... but no, all the money is in ringtones". For some kinds of business perspective, ok I guess. But for others, and for civilizational change, what's going on in the tail can matter a lot. Does China become a US engineering/science peer in early 21st C absent an internet/WWW?

[eru]

Well, the thing is that the educational materials are largely free. That's why the people of India don't need to buy them.

Isn't that a better world than one where the ringtones were free?

[mncharity]

Ah, perhaps I should have said something like "educational materials, and apps, and other useful things" (disapproving judgement in the original).

> Well, the thing is that the educational materials are largely free.

A triumph and fruition of these last decades of massive effort. Now we just need to deal with their quality (with commercial as bad as free). AI may help, by reducing barriers to content creation - you might for example, now more easily author an intro astronomy textbook, one that doesn't reinforce top-30 common misconceptions, something the most used (US; commercial) texts still don't manage.

[fivestones]

I’m pretty curious. What are those too 30 misconceptions in US commercial astronomy texts? Is there a list somewhere? Or can you name some?

[mncharity]

Sigh. One impact of AI will hopefully be more readily available systemic survey papers. [1] might-or-not be a good place to start... but it's paywalled (by the National Science Teacher Association no less), and I don't quickly see preprints/scihub/etc. Here's an old unordered list for browsing[2], and a more recent one[3]. Trumper did a series of papers asking the same few questions of various populations, to give a feel for numbers - like half not knowing day-night cause. Most lists are on subsets of astronomy, and most info on frequency on short lists. So... it's a mess. As are textbook reviews. Key phrases are "astronomy education research" and "misconceptions".

The one bit I explored was 'what color is the Sun (the ball)'. Asking first-tier astronomy graduate students became a hobby, as most get it wrong (except... for those who had taken a graduate seminar covering common misconceptions in astronomy education). So I libgen'ed the 10-ish most used intro astronomy textbooks in US according to some list. IIRC, it broke down roughly into thirds of: correct (white); didn't explicitly say but given surrounding photos, or "yellow" (as classification without clarification), there's no way students won't be misled; and explicitly incorrect (yellow). Hmm, bulk evaluation of textbooks against some criteria is another thing multi-modal models could help with.

(A musing aside re AI for systemic reviews. Creating one is a structured process. They have been very manpower intensive, so they aren't refreshed as often as is desired, nor consistently available. And at least in medicine ("X should be done in condition Y"), there's a potential for impact. I imagine close reads of papers isn't quite there yet. But maybe a human-AI hybrid process?)

[1] https://www.per-central.org/items/detail.cfm?ID=14009 [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20070209033543/http://www.physic... [3] appendix A of https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/etd/2200/ [4] https://www.oranim.ac.il/sites/heb/SiteCollectionImages/pers...

[reactordev]

We got more than that. We got 24/7 surveillance.

[6stringmerc]

I grew up with Mr Rogers

Gen Z grew up with Mr Beast

We are proper doomed mate.

[robocat]

I childishly looked for a historical quote on how we should all be doing science at home now. Google referred me to a gorgeous article written by Isaac Asimov:

   While computers and robots are doing the scut-work of society so that the world, in 2019, will seem more and more to be “running itself,” more and more human beings will find themselves living a life rich in leisure.

  This does not mean leisure to do nothing, but leisure to do something one wants to do; to be free to engage in scientific research, in literature and the arts, to pursue out-of-the-way interests and fascinating hobbies of all kinds.

Fortunately our good friends at the Public Gaming Research Institute have republished the article originally published in the Toronto Star where Asimov imagined the world 35+ years in his future.

Unfortunately the link seems to contain some advertisements so perhaps google yourself to find a better source. I looked for a filetype:pdf but that didn't help me (although Gemini AI did helpfully summarise the same article).

We are definitely fortunate to live in a world with free access to information.

Unfortunately my skills at search are getting rusty.

[lamontcg]

Sometime around 1992, I wrote a college essay on how the Internet was going to wipe out ignorance and enable true democracy...

[fransje26]

Ah, crickets! Just got the two nouns in the wrong order..

[xenadu02]

> who will have all their questions answered, correctly and in the way they can best understand

Highly unlikely as the feedback cycle used to train LLMs will choke off all future learning.

In other words if AI bots consume and regurgitate everything you publish on the internet what is the incentive to publish anything? No one will read it except the bots. The training datasets will either become stale (no longer learning anything new because nothing new and useful is published) or actively poisoned (because only bad actors will bother to publish).

And the generation constantly fed mostly correct information by AI will implicitly trust it further making poisoning of the models a high-value target.

Very few people will be left who understand how to think and have the motivation to do so. Even fewer will have the motivation and the means to publish to others.

[decimalenough]

I presume you're referring to LLMs here, but if so, your presumption that their questions will be answered "correctly" seems a bit optimistic.

[mncharity]

Does anyone have experience of early-childhood "Why?"-phase meets speech-enabled LLMs?

Startup wise, there's old work on conversational agents for toddlers, language acquisition, etc. But pre‑literate developmental pedagogy, patient, adaptive, endlessly repetitive, responsive, fun... seems a potential fit for LLMs, and not much explored? Explain It Like I'm 2-4. Hmm, there's a 3-12 "Curio" Grok plushie.

[kakacik]

... and due to that, people will not appreciate all the knowledge, we will take it as air - invisible but cut the access in a myriad ways and its a catastrophe.

We value what we achieve with effort, I would say proportionally to energy put in (certainly true for me, thus I like harder efforts in activities and ie sport climbing).

[ryanmcbride]

Me too but I don't think these sorts of Solved Society endgames are likely to show up. Basically presents the same issue with a utopia.

Progression and regression are always going to be at war with each other. There will always be humans that want to hurt instead of help, there will always be humans who TRY to help but ultimately hurt. There will always be misinformation, there will always be lies, and there will always be liars.

The good news is there will also always be people trying to pull humanity forwards, to help other people, to save lives, to eradicate disease, educate, and expose the truth.

I don't think society will ever be solved in the way you're saying because there will always be hurtful people, but there will also always be good people to keep up the fight.

[6stringmerc]

Hard truths are not desirable and I pity and envy your naitivity.

[Starlevel004]

When is that going to be?