Your pragmatic and applied approach is valuable, as is the idea of choosing where we decide tp place that line (which to me is a moving and not always sharp edged entity).
I do have to say as someone who spent a chunk of my post education getting 2 and a fraction degrees in geology, though diverged and never made it a career, that the value of learning is not in the facts and details we do not remember (though knowing that the mnemonic device for the geologic eras was a silly sentence I wont waste time with here gives COPDMTJC), the value was the ways of thinking that one learned, how to approach classification and unknown identification schemes, seeing relationships in three dimensions, visioning, 2D (maps) to 3D (world) visualization, this is the stuff that actually was foundational for later learning, you know, up the old pyramid.
I forgot. Are you sure you want to leave AI out of History101? Likely that people who want to study history have built some expertise. By modus ponens, students in History101 could benefit logarithmically more than Generic Student101 who have not declared any expertise.
This mirrors my own experience pretty closely. I keep having a feeling that I should be using Ai for everything, and have loads of processes and applications for every little thing, but the truth is there are some things (writing) that I don't want to use AI for, and other areas where the impact of AI is more limited. But at the margin it continues to offer a lot of utility, and the constant stream of updates and new products means it is hard to settle on a constant routine.
This line really resonated: "For me, generative AI feels most like conversation or audiobooks whereas running and writing are places where I converse with myself." As impressive as the capabilities of the latest generative tools are, I think what's changed is the way we relate to them. I know (and I keep saying) that we've had chatbots that seem like conversational partners since ELIZA, but the quality of the exchange is different and a steep increase in the number of people having the exchanges has been the real change. Like you, I'm only finding limited use cases that I think are actually useful. Writing is not an area where I find utility in generative AI. I do find it in the way I bounce off a question I ask it. Nice piece, Lance.
Your pragmatic and applied approach is valuable, as is the idea of choosing where we decide tp place that line (which to me is a moving and not always sharp edged entity).
I do have to say as someone who spent a chunk of my post education getting 2 and a fraction degrees in geology, though diverged and never made it a career, that the value of learning is not in the facts and details we do not remember (though knowing that the mnemonic device for the geologic eras was a silly sentence I wont waste time with here gives COPDMTJC), the value was the ways of thinking that one learned, how to approach classification and unknown identification schemes, seeing relationships in three dimensions, visioning, 2D (maps) to 3D (world) visualization, this is the stuff that actually was foundational for later learning, you know, up the old pyramid.
I forgot. Are you sure you want to leave AI out of History101? Likely that people who want to study history have built some expertise. By modus ponens, students in History101 could benefit logarithmically more than Generic Student101 who have not declared any expertise.
This mirrors my own experience pretty closely. I keep having a feeling that I should be using Ai for everything, and have loads of processes and applications for every little thing, but the truth is there are some things (writing) that I don't want to use AI for, and other areas where the impact of AI is more limited. But at the margin it continues to offer a lot of utility, and the constant stream of updates and new products means it is hard to settle on a constant routine.
This line really resonated: "For me, generative AI feels most like conversation or audiobooks whereas running and writing are places where I converse with myself." As impressive as the capabilities of the latest generative tools are, I think what's changed is the way we relate to them. I know (and I keep saying) that we've had chatbots that seem like conversational partners since ELIZA, but the quality of the exchange is different and a steep increase in the number of people having the exchanges has been the real change. Like you, I'm only finding limited use cases that I think are actually useful. Writing is not an area where I find utility in generative AI. I do find it in the way I bounce off a question I ask it. Nice piece, Lance.