I’m an unusually good programmer, I’ve worked in over 25 different programming languages and have been doing it since I was 6. I’ve spent most of my career as an applied researcher in research orgs where my full time job is study.

Finding new relevant things to learn gets progressively more difficult and LLMs have blown that right open. Even if they haze zero new ideas the encoding and searching of existing ideas is nothing live I’ve seen before. If they can teach me things they can definitely teach less experienced people things as well. Sometimes it takes a bit of prodding, like it will insist something is impossible but when presented with evidence to the contrary will resume to give working prototypes. Which means in these very long tail instances it does still help to have some prerequisite knowledge. I wish they were more able to express uncertainty.

I think the primary reason Ed Tech hasn’t been disrupted is that an expensive education is a costly signal and a class demarcator, making it cheaper defeats the primary purpose. Grade creep, reproducibility crisis, plagiarism crisis, cheating scandals fail to undermine this purpose. In fact the worse it gets the more it becomes a costly signal. As inequality increases so does the importance social signals. In many countries Universities are given special privileges to act as a gateway to permanent residency which is extremely profitable. If anything is to replace education it would have to either supplant this role as a social signal or the reward for the social signal will need to be lost and I don’t see either happening anytime soon short of a major calamity.