General discussion • Re: BBC Podcast with Eben, quite an interesting one.

The web page for it
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clypr8p2lewo

After turning off JavaScript so the subscription advertisement doesn't block viewing the article, I could read something. Thanks.

I'm also interested in how AI affects what subjects are chosen by students to study. Students may get discouraged when they see that a chatbot can do science, engineering and mathematics homework better than they could ever hope. Alternatively, it's possible a chatbot can fill missing background a student might have in technical subjects and lower the barrier to learn those subjects.

On the corporate side there are projects that try to decrease costs by using chatbots and those that try to increase quality. The tradeoff between doing what you've always done but cheaper versus doing something new and better can get out of balance. In my opinion Intel is a case study since 2005 of that balance swinging more and more wildly out of control, but never mind that.

I think the observation that AI makes a better tool is what was meant when

You won’t lose your job to AI—you’ll ‘lose your job to somebody who uses AI.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/28/nvidia- ... es-ai.html

Other perspectives on the impact of AI include

viewtopic.php?p=2296129#p2296129

viewtopic.php?p=2301485#p2301485

viewtopic.php?p=2104886#p2104886

There is also a case to be made that the ability to read and write programming languages is not only a skill for software engineers but a humanity that belongs in a liberal arts education the same way as the axiomatic study of Euclidean geometry.

viewtopic.php?p=2120549#p2120549

This relates to an observation by the creators of Basic, that programming is easier to learn than the other mathematical sciences and should be made accessible to every student.

viewtopic.php?p=1791284#p1791284

Statistics: Posted by ejolson — Fri May 15, 2026 7:07 pm

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