I definitely don't disagree with screen or exposure or social media exposure being deleterious.

That said, I suspect this technology will allow us to study and mitigate those effects in ways we weren't previously capable of. That's in addition to the other broad swathe of things that should make us healthier and more intelligent (see some of my other posts here). I'm not particularly negative about our chances.

If the top students are doing better, especially if it is significantly better, I think that can be a net positive outcome. If you look at the distribution of contribution to society it's not like it's remotely even and there is an argument to primarily focusing on and pouring most of our resources into the top Nth percent instead of trying to slightly improve everyone.

> But in just 20 years?

Ahh, I think this bit on my part may need some elaboration. Here's my main underlying belief:

We are systematizing biology and turning it into a computationally tractable domain. I think we're going to make more gains in our understanding of it in the next 20 years than we have in the entirety of human existence prior to this moment (that's mainly because our understanding until now has been remarkably poor).

The average score peaked in 2009 though.

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/dashboards/pisa-education-and-s...

Ie it's been dropping since 2009.

For mathematics and reading the large drop off is between 2018 and 2022.

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Peptide style drugs already have clear positive effects on executive function, it's not particularly hard to envision that we'll find other classes of drugs that have similar effects in other cognitive domains. Twenty years is a long time, and we're set up to make absurd gains in our understanding of biology over that time frame. If we additionally are able to mitigate or cure various intellectual disabilities, that's a massive baseline performance boost to the population as well.

If you want some examples in how AI could improve education:

* Alpha School (https://alpha.school/the-program/) reports 2.6× faster learning growth with just 2 hours of AI-driven instruction daily, with students scoring in the 99th percentile nationally.

* Mindspark (https://www.povertyactionlab.org/evaluation/scaling-personal...), deployed in Indian schools, demonstrated gains of +0.22 SD in math and +0.20 SD in language in a randomized trial involving 6,500 students.

* A Harvard study (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12179260/) found more than 2× the median learning gains using AI tutors.

The broader implications are clear: individualized, adaptive tutoring at scale is becoming accessible in ways that historically required expensive one-on-one instruction. This is also going to be possible in places that historically never had access to this quality of instruction, which again, is a massive boost to the human baseline.

I don't think the future looks like Wall-E. I think it looks like insanely healthy people able to pursue their passions with a level of rigour and capability that has never existed before.

Edit: fucked up link 2, fixed

What high quality engagement on your part. Clearly you're the mature party here.

I'm 35 and have worked in ML generally for a decade and NLP for six years. Any other questions about my bonafides?