Employers are already increasingly unwilling to pay people to be bad at something. Demand for junior engineers is low. And it's not AI, AI can't replace them yet, if it ever can. Everyone just wants seniors, but nobody understands that juniors turn into seniors when given experience.

As a new teacher, I'm increasingly concerned at the number of colleagues I have who are generating their lessons, assessments, and even their entire units using AI. The entire goal of writing good lessons and assessments is asking yourself what you want the students to know, what you want them to master and present to you. All these people asking "write me a worksheet on ____" are totally missing the point. Even if they're checking them for mistakes (which according to some of my students their teachers are definitely putting out stuff with mistakes in them), they're not actually aligning what they're giving kids to their assessments. This is exactly how you get kids saying stuff like "our exam had stuff we had never done in it" or "the homework was useless, it wasn't even on the exam". Your formative assessments (the work in class and homework) should, from the first time you give it, be aligned with whatever your end goal is!

It's exacerbating the problem of AI because now we have students using AI to answer questions written by teachers using AI and... wait what are we learning and why?

Bleak. Gives me good motivation to make my own stuff, but scares me that so many think it's saving them time and creating the same experience, and don't see how this is a drawback.

I work at a national lab. The new Secretary of Energy visited recently and kept repeating “AI is Manhattan Project 2.0”. He intended for this to be a rallying cry to get us excited, but it ended up putting the fear of god in me.

You don’t build a child. Sometimes you raise psychopaths.

It's not "us as a species" that have acted with a lack of caution. It's a very small minority of our species who hold an extremely disproportionate amount of power who have acted with a lack of caution out of their own greed and self-interest.

"They keep telling me that destroying the Earth is bad but imagine how many paperclips you can make out of it, and those are really good."

"We invented Doritos the moment we possibly could," would be another book I'd buy.

„More dangerous than a monkey with a knife“ suddently has a whole new perspective.

My CFO is freezing entry-level positions. He's 60, will retire in a few years, doesn't care, can say he's saving 20% on labor, and the AI can't do the work, but it can make a few people 3-4x more effective. Not him, he can barely send an email or schedule a meeting. The people at the top are tech illiterate (focusing solely on money), the folks in the middle are seeing efficiency gains (but not wage gains), and the folks at the bottom are being shut out.

"You want wood? I made a bunch and don't even need it!" laughed SO HARD at that.  Reminds me of the discovery that bats do sonar, and an anecdote about how some officials were like "There's no way that little thing does sonar! We only learned how to do it recently and with high tech electronics!" Nature has had a while to learn, and does hard stuff easily, often.

Tech company: at long last, we have created "it" from the book If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies

YouTube is so shady for recommending this to me rn

Oh god a hank green video longer that 60 minutes EVERY ONE PANIC

2:46 "At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus"

Autocomplete so fancy, it temporarily dims the entire city's lightbulbs to predict the next word.

"So you're telling me if we train them well enough, they'll be able to tell truth from lies?!"

I keep wondering this same thing about humans.

When I was in high school we switched from handing in hand written assignments to printed assignments. My father, a teacher, used to refer to the stack of assignments he had to grade as “a load of QUAP” Quality Uncertain. Appearance Perfect. Each paper gave the appearance of quality since it was neatly printed, instead of hand written with crossed out parts and corrections. However on close inspection the contents were frequently crap. I feel this is an acronym we need to apply to a lot of the current AI models.

For anyone wondering why the thumbnail says "AI is Alchemy", here's the quote from the book:

"If you know the history of science, this kind of talk is recognizable as the stage of folk theory, the stage where lots of different people are inventing lots of different theories that appeal to them personally, the sort of way that people talk before science has really gotten started on something. They’re the words of an alchemist who’s decided that some complicated philosophical scheme will let them transmute lead into gold."

("this kind of talk" = the vague reassurances of today's AI CEOs, many of whom publicly stated in 2023 that AI is as dangerous as nuclear weapons.)

15:37 as a law student, this has LITERALLY happened. My classmates have advised younger students not to use any AI to do homework and to just read our textbooks because it literally makes up cases from thin air for them to cite in their arguments.

It’s not an encyclopedia; it’s a statistical ghost of everyone who ever wrote anything online. Mind-blowing