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by ori_b 2 hours ago
Banning it in classrooms isn't going to fix things, not when adults are broadcasting to students that (in the actual words of Sam Altman) "intelligence will be too cheap to meter", that (in the words of Darius Amodei) half of white collar jobs will be gone by the time these students graduate school, and so on. If intelligence is too cheap to meter, mental labor is a losing proposition. We've also spent decades emphasizing STEM and de-emphasizing arts and culture. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?

So, it's no surprise they're going to opt out of a system that's investing trillions to make education useless.

Even if the people building this world are wrong -- not all students are equipped to call some of the wealthiest people in the world complete bullshitters. Not all adults are ready to call them out as bullshitters, for that matter.

4 comments

> If intelligence is too cheap to meter, selling your mental labor is a losing proposition. In a world like that, why would anyone value an education?

The ban is for elementary school. I don't know about you, but when I was 11, what motivated me to go to school definitely wasn't the idea that I could monetize my intelligence later on.

11 year olds don’t want to go to school.
"intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.

What makes you think school students are being told that? I've heard that they are told everyone will be using AI to help them write.

> "intelligence will be too cheap to meter" has been shown to be wrong. They've started metering it.

They’ve always been metering AI access (whether this is meaningfully intelligence is a separate question), but that doesn’t prove that there isn’t some time in the future where it won’t be worth metering, only that if there will be, it isn’t here yet.

OTOH, it is still worth noting that from a a consumer-of-the-service perspective, the trend is for more metering, not less (even if that is due at least in part to the rollback off unsustainable subsidies and not to the fundamnetal shifting what is sustainable farther from unmetered access.)

Do you think they're too illiterate to read what industry leaders are saying? I assure you they're not.
Hm maybe I was sheltered or something but I was definitely not reading what industry leaders were saying when I was under 13. I don't think I really even knew who industry leaders were at that time...
I was definitely reading articles online by the age of 13. This is not exactly a small part of the discourse.

I'd expect, at this point, it's rather hard to avoid hearing about AI and its impact.

I’d argue education (especially those early years) is less about making them good white collar workers and moreso making them well rounded people. Education has value beyond monetary gains
it'll start to raise the question of not only is college not worth it, but why should we even have compulsory education through high school? (just think of all the money we could save aka spend on the military instead)