Kevin says learning is fun. In an increasingly A.I.-driven world, what do you think is the value of learning? Watch the full Hard Fork episode featuring guest podcaster Dwarkesh Patel at youtube.com/hardfork. #tech #news #ai

I think a lot of people right now, especially students and younger people, are questioning the value of accumulating knowledge. We all have these pocket oracles now that we can consult on basically anything. I'm curious what, for you, the value of broad knowledge accumulation is in an age of powerful AI. The thing I would say to somebody who is incredibly dismayed is like, why am I going to college? Why is any of this worth it? If you believe AGI, ASI is going to be here in two years, that's fine. I don't think that's particularly likely, and if it is, what are you going to do about it anyways? Might as well focus on the other worlds. And in the other worlds, what's going to happen before the fully automated robot that's automating the entire economy is these models will be able to help you at certain kinds of tasks, but they will fundamentally just give you more leverage on the world. And the kinds of things that you will be in a good position to do is if you have deep understanding of a particular industry, the relevant problems in it, this is probably the time to be the most ambitious, to have the most amount of agency. These models currently aren't really good at actually doing things in the real world or even the digital world. If you can do that and use these as leverage, this is probably the most exciting time to be around. Here's my answer for that. You don't want to be in a world where you just have to ask ChatGPT everything. Do you know what I mean? You'd be better off actually just getting an education and then checking in with the chatbot for the things that chatbot is good at, at least for, you know, I don't know, next few years. My sort of guiding principle on this is like, I think learning broadly about the world is fun and so you should do it if it's exciting and fun to you.