Learning on Demand

It is shocking how useful AI is as an educational assistant. I recently started using Claude to help me understand lecture notes for one of my classes, and I realized how I was asking it so many questions I would be hesitant to raise to, say, a professor or TA. Ironically those dumb questions end up shaping my intuition the best, because I can understand things in the niche and weird way my brain likes to understand them rather than the canonical way they are explained for a general curriculum. Sure, not every explanation is the best, but if I’m not happy with one I can just ask again. I have not yet encountered a setting where AI was unable to help me grasp a concept.

This is probably a much bigger deal for people younger than me. College seems like the first time where you realize you can really just learn anything. Up until then, your entire schooling follows a standardized, narrow curriculum. But imagine being a high schooler now and having essentially unlimited access to a tool that can teach you anything at all?