[MarcScott]

I think teaching is one of the few roles that can't be replaced by AI. If you're a self-motivated learner, eager to gain new skills, then AI is perfect for you. Having a virtual Feynman coach you through a Physics course is perfect.

Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated. The pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer to do, when they don't have a physical teacher standing over them, which is bugger all. We send kids to school, in the hope they get some education, but the reality is that we use schools for free childcare while we work. If parents have to additionally monitor their child's learning, it breaks down pretty quickly.

I see AI being more of a teaching assistant, rather than a replacement for teachers. Having been in the education game for over twenty five years, I know the difference in impact when comparing virtual learning to in-person training.

[renjimen]

I really agree. And I think it's likely your detractors have not stepped foot in a classroom lately.

The issue is not engaging teachers. The teachers we have here in BC are excellent and love their subjects (my wife and many of my friends are teachers). The issue is behaviour, which has deteriorated significantly since COVID, though the changes have many other contributors.

Try asking an AI to engage with 30 kids who are on their phones with earbuds in. You absolutely need a human as a teacher.

That said, AI teaching could be a great teaching assistant.

[MarcScott]

I was walking to my classroom last Thursday, and a kid pushed another kid down the stairs, right into me. I went ballistic, and sorted it all out, but there is no way an online AI tutor can deal with that kind of behavior. So if you want social education, you need physically present teachers. If you want online education, then parents are going to have their work cut out.

[whimsicalism]

We use teachers as enforcers. But in my experience going to a big urban public school, the best enforcers are often completely orthogonal to the best knowledge-conveyers and I think we could have specialization for each of these roles.

In my opinion, the best enforcers generally are charismatic yet firm and come from a similar community/background to that of the students. The best teachers have an infectious passion for their subject, but oftentimes that trades off with their ability to enforce.

[mirekrusin]

Why would you have more than one student per ai teacher?

[fritzo]

AI would engage individually with each student via those earbuds

[OmarShehata]

> Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated

this seems like a bizarre conclusion. In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated. You won't see that if you have a very narrow definition of what is it that they're supposed to be learning

kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong).

I appreciated hearing this echoed by Conrad Wolfram in a recent PIMA episode: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-do-we-still-teach-peopl...

[MarcScott]

> In my experience, most people, the world over, are in fact self motivated.

In your experience? The world over? Can you tell me your experience. I've been a teacher for a long time. I've worked in the UK, the USA, PNG, and Kenya.

The vast majority of kids in the developed world don't really care about education. A few do, and they get great grades. Most care more about social status, their cliques, or just surviving the jungle that is school.

School is important. It teaches you how to deal with other people. It teaches you how to deal with people in authority. You can't get that at home, in front of a screen. Learning stuff is secondary. I'm sure there are plenty of people here that are not working in whatever they majored at.

[abdullahkhalids]

> kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong).

Most kid athletes are also not self-motivated to run laps, or do boring repetitive drills, when they know from experience that these activities help them win games within the next few months. Usually need a coach to force them to do them. Same for young music players. Practicing scales endlessly does make you a better musician. But they won't do it till forced.

The primary reason kids don't like running laps or playing scales or doing math drills is because they are boring.

[sillysaurusx]

I think it might be worth considering whether you’ve had a privileged upbringing. Thinking back on it, the majority of people probably would have been content to play games all day. You could argue that that’s learning, but unfortunately it’s not the kind of learning that society tends to reward.

I’ve heard that kids in upper middle class circles are totally different in this regard though. Maybe they want to do more on average.

[TrainedMonkey]

> the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong

The real real answer is that it probably does, but on a much longer timescale that we generally consider and it is really hard to explain why. Something like better math skills lead to better life outcomes. Maybe due to a better model of the world and sharper thinking, but I am just guessing.

[skhunted]

There is evidence that a person’s ability to understand and succeed in algebra is mostly determined by whether or not they can do arithmetic with fractions. Number sense is important in my opinion. Relying always on the calculator or a CAS leaves students confused and befuddled. I see this all the time in calc classes that I teach. The CAS loving students just don’t understand as well.

[endisneigh]

I’m curious - have you ever taught in a public school?

[ugh123]

>kids aren't motivated to do boring math drills, because they don't see why it matters to their life (the real answer is: it does not, they are not wrong).

I think you are partially right in that the dryness of much of math teaching hides a lot of the underlying material's applicability to life. I think one thing AI could do is help design rich situational lessons that could are prompted, vetted, and updated by teachers and then taught to the class. It could be trivial to create incremental difficulty of problem materials tailored to each student's progress and goal.

[choppaface]

Feedback is a critical part of education as well as motivation for learning. But the act of giving feedback is very hard to scale, even for virtual learning. Enter an LLM chatbot, which is imperfect but can fill a lot of gaps in expectation. Chatbots certainly aren’t for everybody, but the large gains in accuracy in years past make them on average more effective.

[moffkalast]

Yeah if anything, current education system is so garbage that it manages to completely demotivate curious kids who want to genuinely learn. It's designed around adults that need to run the place, runs at the wrong pace for most students and focuses on PTSD-inducing high anxiety testing constantly because it's easy to do for the teachers. Not to mention piles of pointless busywork as homework that's been proven to not help with learning at all.

[koonsolo]

> In my experience

So you are a teacher?

[trod123]

There are quite a number of experts who would disagree with your conclusion.

Upon reaching a certain threshold of technological dependence, the need for rational thought (which includes calculation) is tied to the need for food. The actual yield may be low based on other factors, but it is absolutely necessary for survival.

The alternative you suggest, is where technology no longer advances.

Logically then, population growth hits a malthusian trap, the old crowd out the young since they have the most influence, and then a depopulation occurs as the old naturally die off, and replacement births cannot sustain those dependent systems used to feed the masses.

You get a dragon-king event where everyone its a free for all over food and bare necessities, farming no longer becomes possible (because of looters), and the world order collapses to pre-agrarian levels, assuming the environment isn't destroyed in the chaos (i.e. MAD and Nuclear Fallout).

There are much better ways to calculate than are currently taught in schools, Trachtenberg System and Vedic Maths have worked well in many places.

Mental math has been around for quite some time, and the principles of math are all about finding uncommon knowledge or information that is not immediately apparent (though it becomes so via various mathematical transformations).

The current pedagogy of math is all about sieving and exclusion, and rote-authority based teaching, since it is a requirement for any specialized area of science (and is only taught in relation to mathematical concepts, instead of intuitive approaches). This is why they adopted a burn-the-bridge strategy right around trigonometry at the grade school level (intended to cause PTSD/suffering/torture), to safeguard against disruptive innovators at the source.

Algebra -> Geometry -> Trig

1 -> 2 -> 3

What do you suppose happens when the passing grading criteria in 1 is changed from just following the process (but not correct answer) to 2 (separate unrelated material which is passed) to 3 (correct process and correct answer).

If they fail Trig, and the problems are from Algebra (not something a teacher paid bupkiss will bother to look at), how do they go back if they passed Geometry? The students not knowing why they are failing are simply told, well you maybe you are just not good at math and should consider other paths if you can't do it.

This structure is called burning the bridge because it makes it so you can't go back from a progression standpoint. Ironically, this structure was adopted at the request of representatives from the National Teachers Union in the late 80s/90s, and largely remains the same today.

There are several other progression sieves embedded in academia intended to make it almost impossible for us as a society to develop a large number of creative people who reach einstein-level achievements in math and science (outside-self study, or specific environments/private schools).

This broad push largely started in the 1970s in publishing, and expanded from there.

[obastani]

This is exactly the problem we have found in our research on generative AI for education [1]. We ran a pilot in a large high school in collaboration with math teachers, and found that students basically copy answers from ChatGPT, resulting in worse performance compared to students not given ChatGPT. If students don't want to learn, ChatGPT isn't going to fix anything.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4895486

[verdverm]

You are just giving them ChatGPT with a bit of prompt engineering, and evaluating them on math problems, which we know LLMs make errors on because they are not calculators. You aren't putting in the effort needed to build a real tutor and learning assistant. I would not extrapolate from these results

There are also a lot of things that can come in before you build a full on tutor. One example is being able to tailor word problems (transform the nouns) to subjects interesting to the particular student. They could also be used to help understand where students are struggling. We are still at the early phases of useful AI, optimism is more appreciated, especially as contemporary times have become so pessimistic

Sal Khan provides a more optimistic take and demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJP5GqnTrNo

[elliotbnvl]

> The pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer to do, when they don't have a physical teacher standing over them, which is bugger all.

This is not true. The pandemic showed us exactly what children who are accustomed to being force-fed information and whose natural learning mechanisms and curiosity have been suppressed in favor of a generalized one-size-fits-all approach do when suddenly removed from the only learning paradigm they've ever been exposed to.

My kids (not yet old enough for school) are extremely self-motivated to learn and explore the world around them. So am I, and that never went away over the course of a full homeschool education.

[infecto]

Totally incorrect. The vast majority of the population are relying on schools and teachers to potty train, teach manners, instill excitement for learning and basically do everything a parent should be doing. Large number of kids have no real parent figure and thats from all types of backgrounds. We are not talking about kids who have strong households where learning and general manners are being taught.

[dontlikeyoueith]

The ignorance of this post is astounding.

You and your kids are not typical of society at large.

[skhunted]

There is an interesting physics education experiment. A random group of students are shown a lecture on a topic and take a quiz after watching the video. The students rate the lecture. Repeat with a different lecture on the same topic. The students did worse with the higher rated lecture.

There’s teaching students like. There’s teaching where students learn. Sometimes the two intersect. Will an AI education company optimize one that students enjoy or one where they learn better?

[ryanjamurphy]

Thanks for this comment. I think I found the article: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1821936116

Layperson coverage: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/09/study-shows-t...

[lacy_tinpot]

Most people that are academically inclined are self motivated and have a desire to learn more.

Most people aren't academically inclined so it follows that most people aren't academically self motivated. Therefore among those that are academically inclined it is important to provide them with all the tools necessary because they're the ones that will most likely excel in an academic environment.

It is odd that the curriculum tends to accommodate people that aren't academically inclined at the expense of those that actually want to learn.

People that aren't academically inclined should not be forced to learn, or at least forced only insofar as they're baseline literacy so that they function in today's world.

[pessimizer]

It's not odd to me at all. The most "academically inclined" (although I don't think that's just one type of person) are people who have the ability to help themselves with very little advice from others. We shouldn't be going out of our way to provide anything for them; we should provide all levels of materials for everyone. It's the stupid people who need to be coaxed and trained to use them, whereas for the smart people, it's enough to make them available and give them advice when they ask.

Teachers like gifted kids because they'll be successful no matter what they do, and the teachers can test out all of their dingbat social and pedagogical theories with no consequences. They can start with elite kids, finish with elite kids, yet somehow take the credit. Not impressed. Make dumb kids smart, then I'm impressed. You might even be holding back the smart kids, but they're probably smart enough to see through you and do well anyway.

That being said, there are some people who are motivated to learn entirely by the desire to impress teachers and other authority figures. They need attention to develop. However, I do not think that most people are like this, and I honestly think those people should be in therapy.

[corimaith]

Looking outside at places like China, society unfortunately does require more experts in specific domain fields than there are self-motivated workers.

You can't run a billion dollar chip industry on passion alone, you are going to pull in people who may be working for external reasons. What matters then I'd that the education they receive is effective regardless.

[bruce343434]

> Most people that are academically inclined are self motivated and have a desire to learn more.

Isn't that by definition? Most xes are x.

> Most people aren't academically inclined

Is that so?

> It is odd that the curriculum tends to accommodate people that aren't academically inclined at the expense of those that actually want to learn.

Well, if what you say is true, isn't it fair that the program is catered to the majority, who are apparently not academically inclined? For one size fits all mass education, catering to the largest mass is the best you can do.

> People that aren't academically inclined should not be forced to learn, or at least forced only insofar as they're baseline literacy so that they function in today's world.

Isn't that what the curriculum already accommodates then? Didn't you just say that?

[silverlake]

I worked on online learning for a bit. Turns out people are willing to pay for the inconvenience of in-person learning, even flying to another location. It's the only way most people can focus on a topic. Otherwise, work, kids, life interrupts and they can't stay on track. Replit's 100 Days of Python says only 0.4% of those who complete day 1 finish day 100.

[mym1990]

Weirdly enough I was not very curious in my schooling years, barely getting through classes. As I have grown up, I have so much more curiosity about the world and my willingness to actually learn has skyrocketed. I feel like this could be a great space for adults who are seeking to do the same. I always thought calculus would be daunting to learn(and I still do), but with AI tools I feel like I can approach it with a different mindset.

[pessimizer]

I don't think this is true at all. People failed to learn during covid because the technology is bad. I don't think most people are motivated very much at all by the disappointment of some stranger standing over them. I don't even see it as a desirable aspect of someone's personality that they can be extrinsically motivated by the approval of strangers.

What a teacher provides is a sometimes customized, sometimes flexible schedule, that (sometimes) pays individual attention to what aspects of a concept a student is falling behind at, and (sometimes) comes up with personal recommendations and alternative approaches to break down a student's involuntary resistance to a concept. This might be doable with A.I.. It's not doable with actual teaching anymore because class sizes are too large. A.I. will be cheaper.

And I'm not saying that teaching is so simple that A.I. can do it, I'm saying that teaching is so complicated that it might be that only A.I. is sufficient to largely replace it. I think that what I'm arguing against is that the idea that teachers could be replaced by glowering scarecrows, or fur-covered wire armatures like they once used in experiments to replace animals' mothers.

I don't think that teachers make as good parents as parents do teachers. I don't think most people are mostly motivated by the approval or judgement of their teachers.

What people need is constant, helpful, personalized guidance, and that is very expensive to get from employees.

[ilaksh]

AI certainly can't completely replace teachers, but the potential gains for personal tutoring from SOTA LLMs still seem enormous to me.

And I'm not trying to make a general argument against in person training. But I think the details of how virtual learning happens matters quite a lot. AI can make it much more personalized and make tutoring relatively affordable. Don't you think?

[dinobones]

AI has personally tutored me about obscure, deep linear algebra concepts. It's so great to get applied examples and be able to ask why/how something works, rather than reading a stuffy Wikipedia article or math textbook.

It's been extremely effective for me, where reading a math textbook/wikipedia article seemed like too much effort, but a friendly conversation with my AI tutor was just fine.

[eldaisfish]

A major part of the learning process is your peers. Learning is groups has benefits especially when you can bounce ideas off other humans.

You cannot replace that with a machine.

[Ylpertnodi]

>The pandemic showed us exactly what children would prefer to do, when they don't have a physical teacher standing over them, which is bugger all.

Amend to: The pandemic showed us exactly what children's parents would prefer to do, when they don't have a physical teacher standing over their children, which is bugger all.

[KerryJones]

> Most learners, the world over, are not self-motivated

This is the exact opposite conclusion and methodology of Maria Montessori (and her schools with the same name). Children are naturally curious and want to learn, but they may not want to use a poor education system designed to mark grades in a hyper specific focus.

[whimsicalism]

the only people i knew growing up who went to montessori we’re very affluent white kids with hyper involved parents.

even when given access to school choice, less affluent and minority parents do not choose montessori and there is absolutely a reason for that.

[ugh123]

> I see AI being more of a teaching assistant, rather than a replacement for teachers

That is exactly what he says in the tweet.

I think the problem with traditional teaching, as in any skilled profession, is often in short supply and underpaid, not happy, and unable to keep up with 25+ kids in a class. The world needs orders of magnitude more teachers that are highly competent and more easily accessible.

AI could massively scale high quality teaching with still a teacher in the loop.

[owenpalmer]

> I think teaching is one of the few roles that can't be replaced by AI

So far, AI can't replace good teachers. But there aren't that many good teachers. In my experience, GPT4 is better at explaining advanced concepts than 70% of college professors. Unfortunately, education is often oriented around this horrifyingly archaic method of instruction, which prevents people from imagining what an AI oriented system could look like.

[red_admiral]

I remember when the future was MOOCs. Let's get the top 30% (or 10% or whatever) of teachers to record high-quality videos, then everyone can have a top education. Even the rest of the professors might learn something!

AI based education might or might not be "MOOCs 2.0". Even for the less good teachers, having a real human in the room is one of the features that lots of people appear to be ready to pay lots of college fees for.

[p1esk]

His point is an AI teacher cannot force someone to learn, while a human teacher can (maybe).

[toomuchtodo]

https://www.khanmigo.ai/ is adopting this ideal, and I would agree you with your perspective. It's a tutor, not a teacher.

> Khanmigo is an AI-powered personal tutor and teaching assistant from trusted education nonprofit Khan Academy.

[627467]

The teacher/tutor certainly won't be replaced by an AI. But those we call 'teachers' nowadays - possibly even for decades - are struggling glorified janitors because society treats schools as daycare. It's understandable that 9-6 parents need daycare. But why do we keep confusing daycaring with teaching? And why do we expect teachers to be perfect at both roles? And why all 30 students in the class should focus exactly on the same aspect of education simultaneously? That's the main issue with 'teaching'.

[logifail]

> We send kids to school, in the hope they get some education, but the reality is that we use schools for free childcare while we work

We also send kids to school to learn social skills they can't learn by themselves.

My kids sometimes watch science shows (on TV as well as online) and tell me all kinds of fascinating facts about black holes and the human immune system and {insert_huge_list_of_stuff_I_don't_fully_understand}. That's the easy bit.

"Getting along with other people" isn't something you learn ... by yourself.

[whimsicalism]

May I suggest that the kids of HN commentators are being sampled from a very different distribution than the kids of the general public.

[zulban]

I imagine a world where a 19 year old takes a few courses in first aid, child psychology basics, and now they're a licensed "class supervisor". They aren't university educated but the AI is what offers personalized learning and expertise to the students.

Most teachers today aren't experts anyway, we just pretend they are. So I'm not sure "replaced by AI" is the right way to frame the conversation. Instead, it may change education.

[freejazz]

> Most teachers today aren't experts anyway, we just pretend they are

Experts in what, grade school math? Do you mean professors?

[visarga]

I think online courses and AI education need the kind of supervision you mentioned. But they should also be able to give career advice, not just watch the room and push students to focus.

[meindnoch]

Sounds fucking afwul to be frank.

[bruce343434]

> Most teachers today aren't experts anyway

Lmao what

[Lichtso]

If the technology is truly as capable as humans in many domains (and that might still take a while), it will not matter anymore whether it is a good teacher or not. The need for (and thus value of) human labor will depreciate and so will its "supply chain" the education sector.

> hope they get some education, but the reality is that we use schools for free childcare

Exactly, teachers will be less and less pedagogs and more and more wardens.

[andrepd]

> Having a virtual Feynman coach you through a Physics course is perfect.

So would fusion power, unfortunately such a thing does not exist yet, nor close to.

[renonce]

Even as a self-motivated learner I fail to see the bigger impact of AI. For a “virtual Feynman” I would prefer the online video courses and books which exist without AI. The best I expect an AI to do is to answer my questions and confirm my understandings. At AI’s current state I can use it as a better search engine but due to hallucinations I can’t expect reliable answers yet.

[danielmarkbruce]

Using gpt-4o?

[fsndz]

When it comes to AI, self learning is dope, and Lycee AI is a pioneer: https://www.lycee.ai/courses/91b8b189-729a-471a-8ae1-717033c...

[SubiculumCode]

Most highschool / gradeschool is being forced to sit in a chair being baby sat until 3PM each day, with no opportunity to select goals, and act towards them. My daughter transitioned to a Montessori jr high, and she went from enduring school to actively engaging in self-directed learning.

[unraveller]

>teaching ... can't be replaced by AI.

Teaching is not the end goal of education though, the educated student is. Or so I was taught.

Part of the reason why teaching is considered noble is because it is an act of assured replacement, inspiring not dependency imparting skills of self-motivation and will power.

[azhenley]

We just published a paper on this topic. I wrote a summary of it, “Learning to code with and without AI”.

https://austinhenley.com/blog/learningwithai.html

[blackbear_]

What is the baseline performance of the LLM in solving those programming tasks? And did you test the performance of the students in the Codex group at the end of the course without allowing them to use Codex? Essentially I'm asking how can you conclude that these students didn't just learn to call a LLM, but actually learned to code independently?

[afarviral]

But how to harness "Bugger all" so that it results in educated students? Because my understanding is everyone likes to do stuff.. no one really does nothing, but often unproductive/consumptive things if not channelled.

[tomcam]

Disagree slightly. I think AI can be used to generate average quality course material, which may be useful to below average teachers, or good teachers thrown into a subject they haven’t taught yet.

Obviously someone like Andrej will totally crush it.

[yaj54]

Kids, when given the choice, will choose to play games (of many different kinds) above just about anything else.

The future of education is the playful gamification of relevant skills, knowledge, and behaviors.

[toofy]

kids will choose many different kinds of activities at any given time.a lot of kids really don’t like games, some do, some don’t.

i’m not trying to be pedantic, but anytime someone implies a human, particularly a kid will be at all predictable shows an incredible lack of understanding of people. the vast array of moods, time of day, quality of sleep the night before, are they hungry, mood of the parents when they drove them to school, how did their school/work day go, how was their social day, and on and on and on.

again, apologies, i’m not trying to be pedantic but i think in this particular topic it reeeeaalllly matters.

[koonsolo]

I also noticed the material of an entire day can be learned or made in a few hours. So indeed I also realized it's mainly daycare with a bit of, or slow learning.

[dyauspitr]

Completely disagree. ChatGPT has taught me more than I could ever learn from any lecture and I have a doctorate. A moderately motivated student will do wonders with AI.

For instance, I’ve had trouble understanding exactly how heat pumps worked. Sure I knew the basic concepts of condensation and evaporation but not the nuances of pressures and boiling points at various stages. I asked chatGPT to explain it to me from the perspective of the refrigerant. It started with “I am R-134a, a refrigerant just leaving the evaporator…”, and proceeded to give me the most thorough understanding of heat pumps I could imagine, complete with working pressures, boiling points, pressure differentials at the escape valve etc. Follow up questions led me down interesting paths where it came up with a brilliant comparison to quantify the greenhouse potential of the refrigerant R22 ie 1 pound of R22 has the same greenhouse potential as a human being breathing for 787 days in a row.

[dimal]

> I see AI being more of a teaching assistant, rather than a replacement for teachers.

That’s what he announced he’s doing. Creating an assistant, not a replacement.

[surfingdino]

Except what you'll get will be an all-seeing, spying, hallucinating LLM.

[awahab92]

i think kids would be self-motivated with the right system.

I got a lot more motivated to learn when i learned programming.

during the pandemic, the world was in shock, so of course kids are going to play video games when their parents are anxious and filled with cabin-feever.

[hackinthebochs]

I do wish people on this website would stop using themselves as an example of the median anything.

[fragmede]

yeah. When trying to learn, say algebra and getting stuck on a problem, what's better for learning? staring at the problem until you get bored and wander off, looking at the back of the book for the answer and then maybe going back to figure out why, or individual instruction where you're able to ask someone who knows that they're doing about why you're stuck, and have them give you hints until you get unstuck, and then give you another, similar, problem for you to work through?

[onemoresoop]

AI can augment teachers though.

[surfingdino]

How?