In 2002, Maine became the first state to implement a statewide laptop program to some grade levels. Then-governor Angus King saw the program as a way to put the internet at the fingertips of more children, who would be able to immerse themselves in information.
By that fall, the Maine Learning Technology Initiative had distributed 17,000 Apple laptops to seventh graders across 243 middle schools. By 2016, those numbers had multiplied to 66,000 laptops and tablets distributed to Maine students.
King’s initial efforts have been mirrored across the country. In 2024, the U.S. spent more than $30 billion putting laptops and tablets in schools. But more than a quarter-century and numerous evolving models of technology later, psychologists and learning experts see a different outcome than the one King intended. Rather than empowering the generation with access to more knowledge, the technology had the opposite effect.
Yeah thats click bait.
None of tbe cognitive assessment tools we have are reliable in any scientific way. It’s all IQ test level of fundamental misunderstanding of human intelligence.
That being said there is 1 truth in the article - we do need to address learning to ways of human actually learn. Laptops or books or whatever it’s mostly irrelevant. Grades and exams and class of 20 people is not how humans learn. The entire education industry needs to be fundamentally reshaped.
Unpopular opinion: AI is the right tool for education revolution and many people are already taking advantage of this tool while education institutions close their eyes and push paper tests. LLMs are never going away.
Are you basing this assumption on the idea that they’re free to use? Because that’s not sustainable.
The every single time an AI company has tried to actually require compensation for the tokens burned for AI queries, even amounts that would hardly cover a fraction of the operational cost for that ‘work’, contracts have mass-canceled immediately.
You don’t have any control over token churn, either:
First of all, no matter how simple the prompt, LLMs can get stuck in thought loops that can chew through thousands of tokens before an answer can come out.
And second, every prompt you make not only eats a bunch of tokens incorporating the system prompt that can be billions of parameters long, but also includes every PRIOR prompt you put in, AND all their responses for “Context”, therefore token use increases geometrically for every next prompt.
The only thing holding its usage aloft is that nobody has had to pay up front. But the bill is racking up more and more every day for the power and cooling and facility upkeep, presently “paid for” by massive debts. When these firms that took out those debts file for bankruptcy, you do realize what’s owed doesn’t just magically poof into smoke, right? Even if a court literally ordered an injunction that those debts be stricken from the books as if they never happened, there is no financial firm on earth that wouldn’t find some backhanded way to balance the loss by shifting the burden to its other clients.
Maybe if any one of these companies posts a net profit, EVER, I might change my tune… but so far, this has been the emperor’s new clothes all over again.