Will AI Lead to Socialism?

Well, let's talk about AI.

That's how I found you is this essay that you wrote, and we'll link to it in the show notes.

That was not very long, but I've actually quoted it a few times since.

And you ask a few questions and really three important questions that I want to walk through with you one at a time here.

And one is the question of whether AI is making us smarter.

or dumber, and you have a kind of bifurcated view on this, that it's actually almost a choose your own adventure with some important implications for our society.

Yeah, I think, and some of this is inspired sort of by my own usage of it, but also I've I don't track a whole lot of the bleeding edge of AI discourse or whatever.

It seems very kind of whipsawing back and forth in a way that is sometimes not worth dealing with.

But one thing I've been curious about is tutoring.

I think you had someone on recently about educational uses of it.

Yeah,

yeah.

And only because, you know, that's sort of one of the things that I initially gravitated towards on it.

You know, like I have a hobby, kind of a hobbyist programmer type background, meaning I never did it professionally.

But as a teenager, I was really into programming and I've kind of kept up some of that at a hobby level ability, right? But that was an interesting example where, okay, I hobbyistically can write some programs and I've used it to do statistical programming for my think tank.

But I am not at the level that other people are.

But some of it is like, I see people doing things.

I don't really understand exactly how you pull that off.

So let's ask the LLM.

Oh, okay.

So that's... that's how you do this kind of web programming, or that's how this, you know, like, so for me, it was an initial, very useful to kind of get me more educated on something that I had a sort of hobbyistic interest in, but that I didn't really have enough time or interest to get all the way into.

So, and what was interesting about some of the tutoring stuff is there were some initial studies, the Brookings Institute had kind of rounded them up,

where they were finding

people Oh, you know, this can help people.

Like some students were given some of these things as tutors on specific subjects and then we tested them and they did better.