Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…No, I will hire faculty because there are domains in which I’m not an expert. That’s the only way to offer the state-of-the-art experience for the student ultimately. I do expect that I would hire faculty, but I will probably stick around in AI for some time. I do have something more conventional in mind for the current capability than what people would probably anticipate. When I’m building Starfleet Academy, I do probably imagine a physical institution, and maybe a tier below that a digital offering that is not the state-of-the-art experience you would get when someone comes in physically full-time and we work through material from start to end and make sure you understand it. That’s the physical offering. The digital offering is a bunch of stuff on the internet and maybe some LLM assistant. It’s a bit more gimmicky in a tier below, but at least it’s accessible to 8 billion people. I think you’re basically inventing college from first principles for the tools that are available today and just selecting for people who have the motivation and the interest of really engaging with material. There’s going to have to be a lot of not just education but also re-education. I would love to help out there because the jobs will probably change quite a bit. For example, today a lot of people are trying to upskill in AI specifically. I think it’s a really good course to teach in this respect. Motivation-wise, before AGI motivation is very simple to solve because people want to make money. This is how you make money in the industry today. Post-AGI is a lot more interesting possibly because if everything is automated and there’s nothing to do for anyone, why would anyone go to a school? I often say that pre-AGI education is useful. Post-AGI education is fun. In a similar way, people go to the gym today. We don’t need their physical strength to manipulate heavy objects because we have machines that do that. They still go to the gym. Why do they go to the gym? Because it’s fun, it’s healthy, and you look hot when you have a six-pack. It’s attractive for people to do that in a very deep, psychological, evolutionary sense for humanity. Education will play out in the same way. You’ll go to school like you go to the gym. Right now, not that many people learn because learning is hard. You bounce from material. Some people overcome that barrier, but for most people, it’s hard. It’s a technical problem to solve. It’s a technical problem to do what my tutor did for me when I was learning Korean. It’s tractable and buildable, and someone should build it. It’s going to make learning anything trivial and desirable, and people will do it for fun because it’s trivial. If I had a tutor like that for any arbitrary piece of knowledge, it’s going to be so much easier to learn anything, and people will do it. They’ll do it for the same reasons they go to the gym.…

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