>> Why bother learning to retain any information when AI knows everything and can recall it in a split second.
> This is a real question though.
Is it? Why bother to learn how to add 2 numbers when you can just use a calculator.
> Learning means something different than it did in decades previous.
Not really. This is just the acquisition of a new tool. It can possibly be incorporated into education like how calculators were used in the 00s/90s, but you must know how to do the work without the tool.
You don't need to know how to do the work without the tool. Knowing how to add two numbers together is not the point. Knowing what numbers to add and why is what you need. Just computing the answer hasn't been an interesting skill in my whole lifetime.
Once smart glasses with displays or just talking to Ai in your earbuds becomes humanly ubiquitious then I believe the game changes. As long as it's 100% correct humans become know it alls.
I hooked up my local LLM with zim-tools and a 120GB copy of Wikipedia. With some very strict instruction it's turned into a bar-trivia machine, it can answer factual questions faster than I can look them up and it's all offline.
The fun starts when you ask it more complicated questions like 'i have a device that communicates with microwaves and draws a maximum of 20mA at 12v, is it safe for use near humans?' It will look up microwave safety, ionizing and non-ionizing radiation, workplace exposure limits and eventually come up with 1/4W is already safe and the device likely is not a 100% efficient microwave transmitter.