All of them will. There's zero value in higher education nowadays. In fact I'd argue there's negative value. An inquisitive 13 year old backed by AI can be more productive and resourceful than a team of 100+ Ivy League educated PhDs. Sad, but true. And this is today. Fast forward twenty years after massive AI augmented improvements of hardware and more advanced models have occured and it's game over.

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contemporary343 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Have you ever… been in an actual lab..? There are more disciplines in the world than computer science, you know

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Haunt1000 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A hyper inquisitive 13 year old was never the target market of universities anyways. Historically they've always done very well.

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JumpCrisscross 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> hyper inquisitive 13 year old was never the target market of universities anyways. Historically they've always done very well

Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.

A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one. If you've met an exceptionally brilliant small-town mechanic, you see how that applies within countries as well.

	▲	pessimizer 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for. I have no idea what you mean by this. I'm pretty sure that inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones do as well or better than dimwits in war zones, and I'm absolutely sure it's selected for. I don't know why you think stupidity is an advantage in a dangerous or difficult situation. Too many resources are invested in children who would do well no matter what situation you put them in; imo as a retroactive justification for withdrawing resources for racist reasons. You'd think if you had an intellectually inferior group (whether genetically or due to environmental reasons), you'd invest most of your resources into them - but instead it's generally used as an excuse to withdraw resources. The biggest secret when it comes to selective schools and universities, is that you don't have to do anything to a smart kid in order to graduate a smart kid. If the reputation of your institution is based on the achievements of its alumni rather than the improvement of its students, selecting for smart kids is loading the dice. They'd do well without you. That's basically the model of the modern private university: give full scholarships to really talented kids (who have already proved their superiority in often very adverse circumstances), and charge the sky to the idiot children of the upper middle class, who gain prestige through paying for the credentials that the talented were paid to take. > A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one. I have no idea how you've decided this. I don't even know what you think a rich country is. If it's rich with no class mobility and no access to higher education or reasonable subsistence for the poor, he'll do badly. If he's in a peaceful poor country without an overbearing class structure, where he can learn in his leisure and his belly is always full, especially now with communication the way it is, he'll be able to do whatever he wants to do. The problem might be class war zones, not war zones. An bright poor kid is running the risk of getting shot or disappeared for doing his best to improve the lives of the people around him in a way the bosses don't like.

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RandomLensman 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

By what measure of productivity?

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4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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keybored 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

HN’s love for the Platonic autodidact meets HN’s agreement with whatever tech SC is shoving down our throats (mudulo “sad but true” or whatever value judgements which still agree with the investor trajectory).

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mindslight 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> An inquisitive 13 year old backed by AI can be more productive and resourceful than a team of 100+ Ivy League educated PhDs

This isn't necessarily a good thing. cf The Lisp Curse.

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hibikir 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If the value of higher education is purely book learning, sure. But if the value is signaling and the creation of ingroups that will become future elites, they can be valuable even if you do not learn a thing in class. It's a debate about elite higher education that has been going on for decades, as top institutions refuse to grow their class sizes, even as they could find 4x the students that would fit qualifications.

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nradov 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The "elite overproduction" theory might also factor in here. For society as a whole it's better not to have more students graduating from elite institutions than there are elite jobs for them to fill. The disappointed, underemployed extras tend to cause social unrest. But it sucks for the individuals who get unfairly locked out of those opportunities through no fault of their own.

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RandomLensman 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Then AI might also struggle to find a big enough market, no? Or will it move into things like plumbing?

	▲	ben_w 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The AI will be pushed everywhere, but as it's currently not succeeding at driving across the USA without a human around for emergency intervention* despite a trillion or so miles of real world experience, I suspect the initial success of AI in plumbing looks more like "humans being meat robot e.g. by wearing AR headset while physically at customer site" and less like "AI controlling metal robot that is physically at customer site". That said, the economics of AI… eh. I can see it replacing the $3T/year cost of hiring software developers, but this doesn't mean people will spend $3T/year on AI; I mean, Wikipedia killed demand for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, but nobody values Wikipedia at the 16 trillion or so USD you'd get by multiplying the cost of the EB with how many people are online. * even the CyberCab, which was announced as "no steering wheel or pedals", is geofenced and if it's like their other vehicles has human observers on standby for remote control.

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LtWorf 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When I reed comments like yours I can't help but wonder if you got rejected by the university you wanted to go to or failed to graduate.