Education shouldn't be held for ransom

danielciocirlan

Education is going to be left in tatters after AIs creep into every facet of (tech-enabled) life. Big tech doesn’t care about teaching people to think. All the money is in the capture of attention, and AI will only make everything 100x more convenient and a no-brainer (quite literally) to pick the hard way of thought and effort for just about anything… as long as the user is caught. Education has fundamentally the opposite goal.

SeanAnderson

I haven't felt as concerned about this news article as others. IME, schools really don't have a good grasp on what AI means in relationship to them and what policies would result in better outcomes. I work in the ed tech parent-teacher communication space. We offer automatic translations of communication to other languages via Google Translate. Google Translate uses AI. Schools come to us and tell us we need to disable all our AI features. We do. Then they freak out asking where their feature went. We explain. They say they don't want to lose translations they just don't want to deal with "AI stuff" It's not clear to me if this stance from Google is a new thing. Did they recently add AI to search and are trying to use bundling behaviors to incept AI into areas it wouldn't be? Or did policy recently become rabid against the use of AI without fully appreciating the ask and ramifications? Both?

lnkdinsuxs

EDIT: Downvote ALERT: I'm being downvoted so heavily I soon won't be able to respond to comments for atleast 8h. Sorry if I don't respond until tomorrow, I read every comment! --- This is a blessing in disguise. The worst thing we can do is build an entire generation of humans who are uniquely dependent on a specific company (or even 5) to help them think, research and learn. From there, it's incredibly easy to have forever customers for Gemini in a variation of Black Mirror Season 7, Episode 1: "Common People". In there, the wife is Amanda (Rashida Jones), and her husband is Mike (Chris O’Dowd). Amanda receives a treatment called "Rivermind" that restores her brain function but requires an ongoing subscription, initially $300/mo. ======= Spoiler alert! Over time, increasingly expensive tiers, worsening restrictions, and involuntary spoken advertisements make their lives untenable. Eventually, Mike ends Amanda's life at her request, while she is unaware during one of those ads. Spoiler alert! ======= This doesn't mean we embrace the other extreme and instead raise an entire generation that doesn't know what will be considered basic tools like Excel and Word have been since the 2000's. Infact, what would be fantastic if we, as a society, invested in (S)LLM tools that every student "owns" and can "tune" to their liking. Almost like an assistant that "grows" with them. The idea is that these tools are theirs , in their control and for them to manage. Unlike Fable, it doesn't arbitrarily stop a student interested in reversing software or hardware from learning the craft because they are not a licensed researcher.

alex43578

It’s so funny how schools are consistently 20 years behind on things. When I was in school, you were restricted from citing sources on the internet (regardless of reputation/quality) and had to look it up in a book instead. Now, apparently, you can’t make school work without searches, but don’t think about using AI.

spogbiper

I agree with the premise, but this item is a lot of advertisement for Kagi

ReptileMan

For what unholy purpose a school needs Google search?

ahmedfromtunis

It's ironic that Kagi uses confusion (as to not say deception) to market itself as the more ethical brand. Google clarified that admins can turn on and off each of the options independently, including search without AI. I don't like to defend trillion-dollar companies in my free time, but what Kagi is trying to do with this piece is not good.

bemtevi

I don't understand this at all. To provide children with a good education, you don't need Google search. You need a good teacher who will encourage curiosity of the students and some basic materials. I don't buy this post. It's just assumes that what Google is doing is harmful so that people will feel good about Kagi. Maybe Kagi's policy is better, but that doesn't negate the fact that Google denying search to students is holding education for ransom as the title suggests. Of course, it IS a bad thing that Google is trying to force everyone to use AI.

frangonf

Do you really need anything at all from the web nowadays to learn the school curriculum? Why? Can't we provide students with the material needed to study? Are we teaching kids the latest published papers?

thecrumb

Sounds good to me. Today kids we're going to learn about making choices. This is called DuckDuckGo.

lxe

I think the effect of AI on education is transformative, not destructive, despite what the public vibe seems to be. Google already provided us with all the answers and Google's AI section is not much different. It just gives you the result faster.

jeromechoo

Regardless of how much Google walks back, the real dystopian atrocity IMO is that your kids using Google Search at school get ads in their results that cannot be disabled. Your 13 year old researching in their school library sees more ads than you do (assuming you use an ad blocker).

paxy

Agree with what they are saying but no school district in America is adding a $10 per month per user subscription to do internet searches.

ChrisArchitect

Related: Google will turn off search for schools that reject AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50353192

legitster

I'm not particularly pro-Google, but I think it's worth giving them the benefit of the doubt here. Google Search is currently atrocious. Their "Gemini-assisted" search is not without problems but is at least an order of magnitude more useful. Google has basically admitted defeat on their legacy search indexing and is more or less all-in on the using Gemini. If they legitimately believe it's the best version of the product, giving students the inferior legacy version was not their first thought. Part of the issue here is Google's own self-imposed branding problems. They want to call everything Gemini, but in reality their search product is very different use case than their person assistant, which is different than their standalone Gemini experience.

alsetmusic

> Google's explanation, from Chris Phillips, its vice president for education, speaking to The New York Times, is that "Search and AI are deeply integrated," so one cannot be switched off without the other. Reminds me of when a certain Redmond company tied its browser into every aspect of its OS to prevent decoupling. History rhymes.

sssilver

I'm sympathetic to the message, but surely somewhere on the Kagi stairs we should see the " share holders " that we see on Google's stairs?

raviisoccupied

I like Kagi and I agree with the sentiment in this post, but having worked in EdTech, I'd be very surprised if any school or school group found budget, or even understood the need, for de-googled search. I would love to be proven wrong though.