I'm not sure about Australian culture and I think it's a disservice to educators to think GPT can realistically just replace them, but accepting that premise for a moment, in the US, much of the public education system acts as a tax subsidized babysitting service for the labor force. People rely to high degrees that their children are being watched and to some degree taken care of for a large portion of the day by educators while they work. Childcare is absurdly expensive.
So while parents have varying degrees of interest in the quality of education their children receive in terms of what public education can and does, the vast majority of people have a high degree of reliance on that public subsidized childcare portion. For some, education is a side effect, for others it's the entire reason (because they can financially support childcare service or private education).
In the US, I don't see any LLM replacing that function anytime soon. Could public education reshape to become a better optimized child care service where a future system could substitute the education function need? Perhaps. I'm not entirely sure we should want that as a species but all hail optimal capitalism for our overlords. We're not there yet, however.
My sentiment exactly: childcare needn't be that expensive or highly skilled, and therefore teachers needn't be (and generally are not) highly skilled either.
They don't command high salaries because pretty much any responsible adult with minimal skills can do a passable job of what we consider to be passable teaching.
It's not that GPT4 is a great teacher or great teaching aid (although it's not bad). It's that a classroom teacher with 30 students in a room, rattling off that week's geography unit, might as well not be there, except as a run-of-the-mill babysitter.
So while parents have varying degrees of interest in the quality of education their children receive in terms of what public education can and does, the vast majority of people have a high degree of reliance on that public subsidized childcare portion. For some, education is a side effect, for others it's the entire reason (because they can financially support childcare service or private education).
In the US, I don't see any LLM replacing that function anytime soon. Could public education reshape to become a better optimized child care service where a future system could substitute the education function need? Perhaps. I'm not entirely sure we should want that as a species but all hail optimal capitalism for our overlords. We're not there yet, however.