If you have not caught on to this yet, I thought I would dedicate some thoughts to this topic. Learning has completely changed in the last year. The traditional learning model has been, for the last several centuries, curriculum to lessons to exercises and then tests. Or more commonly, the explain, demonstrate, practice, and evaluate paradigm in more practical environments. This has fundamentally shifted now, and in dramatic ways.
We all now have the ability, using any number of LLM-based tools, to create our own generative learning experiences on the fly. The new paradigm is shifting to be intent to experience to feedback to adaptation. The learning experience is created as you learn, adjusting to your curiosity, decisions, and performance.
Just for fun, imagine that you woke up this morning and said, “I want to understand quantum computing.”
AI might construct an interactive laboratory, introduce an expert mentor, simulate experiments, challenge the learner’s assumptions, and invent new exercises as understanding progresses. Another person exploring the same subject could receive an entirely different experience. Neither person follows a course that existed before they began.
Your modalities can shift with no high cost or preparation. You can create a simulated world, build interactive role-play scenarios, design intellectual detective-style gameplay, establish a council of experts, reverse-engineer discovery, run hypothetical labs, build memory trainers, and the list goes on. All of these are quickly built and quickly discarded. You can find a topic and, as you struggle to understand it, ask an LLM to construct a better way for you to process it.
If you think about this, it is really a natural reaction to the ever-increasing complexity of our society. We are a land of specialists. If you want to earn any amount of money in our society, then you need to be an expert or specialist in something. However, the learning curve is getting intense. In some cases, you could be in school for more than 20 years in order to even get to the entry-level stages required to be considered eligible for certain specialist careers.
It seems that our recent technology innovations are targeted right at this problem. Remember when Trinity asked Tank in the movie The Matrix to download her instructions on how to fly a particular helicopter? This is almost where we are today. You can seriously accelerate your learning, discovery, and adaptation process using recent AI innovations.
People are lamenting the loss of jobs due to AI, and any innovation is going to do that, no doubt. However, there is going to be an explosion of new job titles that we have not even heard about yet, and our society is going to become even more specialized than it is even now. Like it or hate it, that is the path we are on. Personally, I would like to find a way to live on a quiet farm somewhere in the Midwest, slowly watching a crop grow. However, reality is that I might get close to that, but the window of my office will be staring out at that field while I pound away at my keyboard, relying on my satellite uplink to keep me connected to the giant hive mind.
The point is that all this new AI technology is not only about creating fake cat videos; we can also use it to help ourselves learn, and that may prove to be not only useful but absolutely necessary to survive this crazy future we are heading toward.
