Thoughts on AI and Education

AI changes how we learn forever.

In the advent of Lovable, Base44, Codex and Claude Code, prototyping ideas have become increasingly trivial. Finding the proper skills, creating agent swarms, even getting on the latest bandwagon craze buying Mac minis for OpenClaw is what people in the industry are after. Or rather what has become popularized over the past few months. One could argue with all these tools at hand, we could finally rise above the menial work of "implementation" to "orchestration". The big question no one is asking: is the current societal structure compatible with this change? Does this change bring about better standards of living to all who participate in the economy?

Going through K-12 (or a similar education journey) presents the first major crossroads for many people in their life. One popular choice is to advance one's knowledge of the world (or a subject) by attending a university. Many people get this wrong. When we take a step back, these are the most formative years to learn how to integrate oneself into society. To learn valuable skills to generate incomes through which one could support oneself in such society. To learn about how to "learn". People often focus on the first two whiling leaving the last (I argue the most critical piece especially this day and age) as an afterthought. However, do we really need to shell out the equivalent of buying somebody a Corolla a year for four years to learn "how to learn"?

For thousands of years, the answer has been a resounding yes. Whether it's due to the lack of resources or inequality (in many places still to this date), only the people who were spared from the menial manual labor had the time to devote themselves to great studies and discoveries. Experiments were costly. Scriptures were esoteric to untrained eyes. Learning how to advance oneself was gate kept to few that had the power, time, and resources to make it happen. As we progress into the modern age, skilled workers have found themselves in demand. In response, schools have transitioned from a place of learning to a place of "skilling" or "training". Its job is to make sure it produces the set of people who can meet society's demand as it grows. The question is: is it worth it, from an economics standpoint, to train and skill humans to meet society's demands while it's a thousand times cheaper to have machine do the same?

AI has made the entirety of human knowledge indexable and searchable. Through clever prompting, fine-tuning or RAG, we can tap into and learn from a source that has infinite patience. So it seems that education has lost its purposes to provide the fastest viable path for people to a well-paying job while the very thing that supplants it returns human knowledge seeking to its very core. Food for thought, huh?