Just as "there is no royal road to mathematics", no AI can do your learning for you. The need for memorization of essential math identities (like multiplication tables and use of fractions) or rules of grammar (like verb conjugation or use of anaphora) will never be enhanced by AI. There is an essential role for good old fashioned rote learning that can't be avoided. To pretend AI will not impede that learning is a fool's errand, literally.
I do not see the point of either of your examples of rote learning. What do you lose if you do not know the? You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths, native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising (you do need to do it if learning foreign languages). Anaphora is a technique which cannot really be rote learned - and most people to try to use it do so badly and just sound repetitive.
> You will pick up enough of multiplication tables through doing maths
You will not do maths casually until you have memorized enough multiplication to make it not torture. You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator any more than you will pick up programming from using a computer.
> native speakers of a language will conjugate correctly without memorising
They do not. They have memorized, through massive, constant, and forced practice, and now they conjugate correctly. The alternative of consulting a computer every time they need to speak is not a realistic one.
> You will not pick up multiplication from using a calculator
Sure you will, at least assuming we're still talking about memorizing multiplication tables here and not how to do long division or the like. I don't think algebra or even basic calculus has any convincing need to involve rote memorization.
I've ended up unintentionally memorizing many things due to frequently needing to consult various lookup tables.
> conjugation
Competent ones will. Wrong conjugations usually "sound" wrong to me even when I haven't seen them before and that's in English of all things.
And s/he was right. Most students who were brought up with calculators in math class cannot do basic math without one today. When shopping in groceries, they have no idea if one product costs more than another by weight. They're easy to bamboozle with the simplest misrepresentations of numbers. Is one choice of product really better than another, fractionally, or corrected for a shifted baseline? They don't know and can't use basic algebra to find out.
This is bad -- an F grade for the education system that let them slide by without learning an essential skill. The chinese aren't this lazy. And if we persist in not learning this, America's future will regress to us asking them, "Do you want fries with that?"
That is poor teaching. My kids were almost always allowed calculators (always after the age of 8 or 9) and they can do all that and a lot more (my older daughter is an electronics engineer, in R & D).
For one thing you do not need to do much arithmetic to do algebra, for another estimating and getting a feel for numbers is not the same skill as learning a bunch of arithmetic techniques. No one is going to do long division while shopping.
According to the article's graph of the fresh grad unemployment rate, the present climate is about as bad as in 2003 but less than a third as bad as it was in 2010. Unemployment during the pandemic spiked well above 2010, but only briefly, before returning to pre-pandemic level.
Krouse points to a great article by Simon Willison who proposes that the killer role for vibe coding (hopefully) will be to make code better and not just faster.
By generating prototypes that are based on different design models each end product can be assessed for specific criteria like code readability, reliability, or fault tolerance and then quickly be revised repeatedly to serve these ends better. No longer would the victory dance of vibe coding be simply "It ran!" or "Look how quickly I built it!".
This is my hope as well. We now have time to write things a bit better. Comment on the pr with a quick improvement and it can just happen. But I’m failing to convince people at work. The majority seem to just be happy for code to go away and for us to never think about it again.
I abhor small talk. It's physically painful. I've heard that's often true of some cultures, especially northern europeans.
I think the trick to converse on a more engaging level is to introduce conversation that invites deeper thought. Somehow you need to intrigue the other person. Compel them through curiosity to leave their comfort zone and join you where you'd prefer to be.
IMO, even disagreement can be agreeable if it's not confrontational, if you genuinely express curiosity to learn what they think, what they care about.
I don't think so. A decent C programmer could pretty much imagine how each line of C was translated into assembly, and with certainty, how every byte of data moved through the machine. That's been lost with the rise of higher-level languages, interpreters, their pseudocode, and the explosion of libraries and especially, the rise of cut-and-paste coding. IMO, 90% of today's developers have never thought about how their code connects to the metal. Starting with CS101 in Java, they've always lived entirely within an abstract level of source code. Coding with AI just abstracts that world a couple steps higher, not unlike the way that templates in 4GL languages attempted but failed to achieve, but of course, the abstraction has climbed far beyond that level now. Software craftsmanship has indeed left the building; only the product matters now.
The problem for software artisans is that unlike other handmade craftwork, nobody else ever sees your code. There's no way to differentiate your work from that which is factory-made or LLM-generated.
Therefore I think artisan coders will need to rely on a combination of customisation and customer service. Their specialty will need to be very specific features which are not catered for by the usual mass code creation market, and provide swift and helpful support along with it.
If fluid intelligence is based on the ability to recognize new patterns (unsupervised learning) and crystallized intelligence on recognizing known patterns (supervised learning), then more than physiology, age alone may differentiate the two.
Youngsters know no patterns so they can't match new events to known ones. Oldsters know that most seemingly new stuff is not really new, it's just the same old stuff, so they reduce the cost of thinking and reject the noise by adding the new unlabeled event to an existing cluster rather than creating a new noisy one. That's wisdom. But that's also a behavior that will inevitably increase as we age and our clusters establish themselves and prove their worth.
So aren't those two forms of intelligence less about a difference in brain physiology and more about having learned to employ common sense?
reply