Bret Weinstein on the Melania Trump AI teachers:
"I get it. And it’s not that it is impossible to imagine robotic teachers doing an excellent job, but it is stunning to watch a sophisticated person fail to recognize what happens when you think that that’s what you’re going to produce, and you set it in motion.
Let me point out that Wikipedia has many of the advantages that Melania is describing in this video. It is completely democratizing of knowledge, such that it doesn’t matter where on e arth you are. If you have an internet connection, you’ve got Wikipedia. It’s like an extension of your own mind, and it will make us all brilliant.
Now, of course, that didn’t happen, did it? Wikipedia is a hellscape of misinformation, much of it targeted based on a political agenda. We are less certain of what we know, and less capable of reasoning on our own.
Now, that doesn’t all come from Wikipedia, but my point is the promise of Wikipedia was not realized. And what we got instead is arguably worse than what we had before it was invented.
The same thing is virtually guaranteed here, because you’re talking about not only the capability of educating students using a robot that has vastly more knowledge than a human teacher would, but you’re talking about the irresistible opportunity to capture those minds and steer them in one direction or another, whether that’s political or economic.
The idea that these robotic teachers are going to be immune to the kind of flights of fancy that have ruined teaching in the modern era is preposterous. In fact, they will likely be even more easily steered.
I would caution everyone to simply realize the distinction between complicated systems and complex systems. AI is a complex system. Human beings are complex systems.
And any time you intervene in these systems, thinking you know what’s going to happen, you’re going to be embarrassed by the discovery of the unintended consequences that will come to dominate your project.
As much as I like the idea of smarter, wiser, more empathic teachers, and as much as those possibilities do exist in the space of AI, we are still at a very early point in this revolution, and anybody who thinks they can predict it with this kind of precision is actually a hazard."