My favorite American prophet is Neal Stephenson¹.
I first read his Baroque Cycle, which among other things is the story of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, which is to say it’s the story of the birth of calculus².
What a thing for me to have been unaware of, that independently two people living in different countries had the same thought, and expressed it in completely different ways. My curiosity in Jungian collective unconscious, something my Christian high school had declared as “woo,” was born in the pages of this story.
My name in fact came from Anathem, Stephenson’s heady examination of… what I might call quantum tunneling? Anyway, today I’m going to focus on one of his earliest works: The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer.
If you haven’t read it, I’ll summarize it under three bullets:
- AI / nano-hive-computer book saves the world.
- Claves is probably a effective system to organize a global society.
- Borderline incestuous father-daughter arc made Stephenson never want to write about sex again.
I’m just going to talk about the first bullet.
There is a lot of hype surrounding AI right now, it puts the hype in hypothetical. If we reach the singularity, if AGI surpasses us³, then it may be entirely impossible to predict the future anymore, because timelines will become meaningless.
But if we don’t reach the singularity, we hit a wall and stick with LLMs for a while, then education is what will be transformed more than anything else in the short-term.
And really it’s about damn time. Teachers have been in crisis for years⁴ in the US, due to factors like low pay and high absenteeism. We could simplify this problem by saying the structure of American education is still designed for a world that no longer exists.
LLMs make this problem far more approachable, and my guess is that in 1994, Neal Stephenson made an accurate prediction on what the future of education will look like.
In Diamond Age, Stephenson examines the diverging paths of three Victorian girls, and how an AI might adapt to teach children exactly what they need, based on their circumstances.
Each girl winds up with an AI book, for various reasons. Nell, the main character, grows up in a dangerous environment, and she is taught survival skills, along with whatever else she’s curious about. As her vocabulary improves, the book gradually raises the bar, until they are talking to each other at an adult level. The book essentially finds a way to put Nell in flow state, where she is always learning, but never too frustrated, and never bored. It’s method of doing so is by continuously adapting to live feedback, and paying attention to the environment for context clues.
With the new wave of LLMs⁵ having optical recognition capabilities, the core concept of Stephenson’s dream could be a reality very soon, minus all the nanobots. We could put a learning book in the hands of every child, its mission statement always “let’s learn something today.”
This would be a far more effective mode of education than pretending every child in the US, or any country, is going to learn exactly the same way. And we don’t need them all the same, we don’t need children for the assembly lines anymore.
The war can be over if we want it to be.¹Neal Stephenson, Neal Stephenson — https://www.nealstephenson.com/
²Who Invented Calculus? A Brief History of Calculus, Cierra Tolentino — https://historycooperative.org/who-invented-calculus/
³The basic reasons I expect AGI ruin, Rob Bensinger — https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eaDCgdkbsfGqpWazi/the-basic-reasons-i-expect-agi-ruin
⁴The Coming Public Education Crisis, Justin H. Vassallo — https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-coming-public-education-crisis/
⁵First Impressions with Gemini Advanced, James Gallagher — https://blog.roboflow.com/first-impressions-with-gemini-advanced/
