Appreciate your summary of this summary of the economist’s summary of the paper.

What is a doctor? The person recommending next course of action based on best practices. What is the best practice? Is it a globally decided on thing, a locally tested thing that has proven to be better? Is the global thing just the most popular because someone wrote it on reddit and it got millions of views (but isn't actually good).

If our society is organized on just delegating all authority to "the best answer" we can drop all jobs - and only the surgeon has some authority over the machine. When we have a surgery robot, then they can go to. And at some point we'll be recommending and forcing surgery for athletes foot because some kind of best practice or viral post going out of control and a bunch of openclaw bots randomly decide to make tons of recommendations online for amputation for athletes foot and GPT 8.6 agrees this is the way to go.

OR we can somehow decide there is a boundary, there is some room for human memory and decisions.

Good exams don't just test memorization

Memorizing stuff is good for understanding. Of course memorizing without understanding doesn't really help, which is what a lot of student last-minute "cramming" boils down to. But without concrete and memorized knowledge, any abstract reasoning skills become quickly impossible.

One more step towards eliminating the value of labor entirely. What "work" will people be doing on a daily basis, and what makes it valuable?

Definitely not fine. People are graduating from Computer Science programs literally unable to write a line of code without AI assistance.

These people have fallen into OpenAI and Anthropic's trap and are illiterate without the assistance of coin-operated slop generators.

So your complaint is...it's boring?

The point is to train the brain via repitition and iteration.

If your goal is entertainment, I'm not sure what you are looking for.

Yep, learning is hard work.

Meetings are still like exams, if you can't craft a line of thinking on the spot it doesn't come off well.

You don't need a final answer but you can't just answer "I don't know" otherwise you risk being slimed (shout out to anyone who still remembers "You Can't Do That on Television")

Every conversation you have with a person is an "exam." Not being able to extemporaneously express yourself or reason analytically without running to Claude seems undesirable.

In my professional career, my clients value the depth of ready knowledge that helps me use my tools with particular insight and finesse -- a kind of knowledge that exams demonstrated far more effectively than homework when I was back in school.

The exams aren't the thing that matter, they're an experiment to measure the thing that matters. Which, presumably, still matters at work!

Your employer gave you your job based on your exam results.

Your career is a continual exam and the assignments are just parts of it.

One of the main reasons safety standards are written in blood.

This is the answer. Many (all?) European schools don’t give homework (this is partly because of the way the grad programs work). It’s on the students to study in order to pass the (difficult) exams.

These are students aged 12-18. Even if we ignore all the other negative externalities of AI and assume it will be ubiquitous and cheap, kids need repetition and exercises to make inferences and develop intuition.

Sure - you can ask AI to, for instance, calculate how much money you'll have given a fixed principal and a compounding interest rate. But we need to get a kid to the point where they even understand what the question to be answered is. If they're using AI all along the way, they are developing less understanding of what fractions and exponential growth are.

Will it stop the really smart and motivated kids? Of course not. But at population scale there will be big consequences.

The important thing is that I could learn to use a flint and steel pretty easily if I wanted to. I don't need to carry out that particular task, but my ability to adapt to new problems means I can carry out more relevant tasks when needed. The most useful part of school and university for me wasn't that I learned the difference between a cirrocumulus and a cirrostratus cloud in geography class. It's that I learned how to learn.

If we let children cheat their way through school and justify it by saying they don't really need to think for themselves anymore, then we're going to end up with a generation of adults who struggle to take on any difficult tasks at all. I suppose your counter-argument to that will be "but we can just hand over everything to the AI" but that's an essentially an argument that humans should be considered obsolete altogether. I sincerely hope that that's not a path we end up going down (although I'm genuinely scared that it is).

Why one would care? Look at your comment from two days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363319

> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.

Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.

Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366313

You gotta pick a lane with your rah-rah-ism.

Sure. Let's not think too hard about what it means that general thinking and creativity are the skills we've stopped practicing this time. It will be fine.

(You may be making the same point as me or the opposite point, I can't tell what's sarcasm anymore. I try to make mine obvious.)

you know we let social media companies cause massive harm over 2 decades; but clearly, this will be deifferent!