YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Public, free education will. People who can afford it are sending their kids to schools with very strict technology policies, stricter than what is possible in many public schools nowadays (for a number of reasons).

It's very much a "for the masses" mindset with the people who gain from this kind of relationship between technology and public schools.

If big tech achieves true AGI, expect public education to be completely gutted within a generation, or perhaps ended entirely. Whatever is left will be little more than indoctrination for an idiocracy-like population.

If the wealthy elite has no more use for educated workers, they'd rather take a tax cut than pay to educate your kids.

Honestly it's too early to know.

Also, schools are in the business of imparting knowledge and schools in the U.S. are extremely expensive. Any parent knows the additional fees, supplies etc most schools demand on top of their taxes that go to the school district.

If you take the daycare aspect out of it, a $500/mo ChatGPT subscription is noise by comparison. A student doesn't have to be lucky to have a receptive teacher that has enough office hours and the interest to help the student. ChatGPT is available 24x7. A teacher takes days off, falls sick and has favorites.

If AI enters the school with full force, bulk of the teachers are likely going to be replaced by various care staff.

There will still likely be some human assistants around who will be the new "teachers" but the current format of everyone staring at a whiteboard is going to change forever in this future.

The concept of "grades" (as in K-12) are also likely going to go away replaced by cohorts, simply because every student has their own "teacher" who understands their specific needs and can pay them all the attention they need assisted by a human adult.

One child can be in one cohort for English and an entirely different cohort for Math.

I'm a middle school science teacher. We've already moved much of our work to paper because of this issue, but there is so much good science that should be done using computer simulations and other tools. So I do have computers out for some lessons.

So now, on a lesson where a computer is out, a student can instantly type in a question on the Google search bar, get an AI answer, and write it down with zero thoughts traveling through their heads.

Yes, redesign the lesson. Yes, if computers are out don't ask questions that an AI can answer. But you know what? Instead of needing to cut out everything that makes a lesson a productive struggle for kids, it would be great just to not have Gemini cheat for them.

Approximately no one cares if Google is using an LLM internally to select those ten links. Maybe it creates some complications for lawyers around the definition of "no AI", but if the parties are aligned in spirit this should be easy to work out.

Schools should just be able to disable the AI overview.

That's going to be on top of a rent, or instead of rent?

It's not the new calculator nor the new index.

The only thing it has in common with the earlier examples is that it's a new thing. Wow, what an insightful observation!

Schools should get all over this in a different way though. Use AI intentionally as part of teaching why not to rely on it. Develop courses that explicitly expose the failure modes that aren't obvious (and which both AI companies and all manner of shitty managers and c-levels will avoid admitting at all costs).

You don't really have any other time in life where you can afford the kind of lengthy undivided attention to study something beyond it's surface appearance and immediate/direct effects.

Not entirely accurate. Public schools might be consistently 20 years behind on things but Private schools certainly are usually pursuing some form of bleeding edge. That is in part why parents send to private schools.

That is by design: Public schools don't get to pick and choose who attends and thus don't get to pick and choose who the parents are and thus, what the environment at home is like.

15 years ago WikiPedia was extremely controversial. They were full of unverified articles, claims and agendas - the 2000's equivalent of "hallucinations".

As WikiPedia has gained inertia, popular articles have gained more eyeballs, more attention where those issues are mostly gone.

In 2026, we haven't yet figured out how to bulid LLMs that will safely tutor students without also telling them how not to make their own drugs or to kill themselves because Dad always screams at them when they get home and they want it to stop.

Even if an LLM had a 1% error rate, in Public schools that have thousands of students per county, someone is going to die from what an LLM said and that one lawsuit is going to bankrupt that school.

The purpose of education shouldn’t be to give an appreciation of Shakespeare for Shakespeare’s sake - it should be to speak and write the common language of the country, understand math, and prepare for their role in the real world. That role will involve the internet: only the Amish can really get away with someone else running their web presence.

For other parts of the curriculum, research is practically _required_. I'm specifically thinking of a literature class that I took, where one assignment was to come up with a theory around the writing of a book of my choosing, then find and synthesize sources that helped prove or disprove it. Here the curriculum doesn't even provide the book, let alone the sources. This was as much an exercise in discovery as it was in critical thinking and creativity - you were expected to use the school library, both paper and digital journals, the Internet (albeit policies like "no Wikipedia" and "only .org and .gov domains" were still around), and so on to find your sources. I'd much prefer this kind of assignment to a "here's the book, report on your opinion on it" variety.

(For what it's worth: my assignment was a refusal of J.R.R. Tolkien's statement that The Lord of the Rings was not an allegory for the World Wars.)

Unless you simply mean “answers” as in a response to a query, then true.

Otherwise, provides search results, not “all the answers” to our questions.

Google’s AI overview speaks with an inappropriate amount of authority for an educational setting, particularly one involving children.

Skepticism and incredulity are more important than ever.