"Independent study" is an interesting phrase. You can still browse MIT courses despite AI. You can still read the translated works of Friedman.
This is a commonly used meaning of independent study. But it isn't quite the same as Curie's independent study.
If Stackoverflow is experiencing a steep dropoff it suggests that people are more satisfied with AI. Presumably they are still learning independently with the help of web-based AI.
You should see the damage AI is doing to classroom instruction. People who are trying to learn can benefit from AI just like they could from the massive human effort of Wikipedia. People who are trying to dodge can hurt themselves with AI in the same way people hurt themselves with Wikipedia.
I see it as a tragedy of the commons sort of situation coupled with a sleep walk over a cliff. There are plenty of cases where certain things have culled their featureset or offer less than what a previous offering did. Unfortunately most people don't evaluate options based on technical merits, but more subconcious emotional response. If their friends all left myspace with its ability to customize your page to your liking for facebook with its prescribed profile pages, that is what people do even though it is objectively a lesser offering. The idea that more people are using AI therefore does not say to me that AI is truly a better option than what was around before. To me it just suggests it became meme status through marketing and got the sleepwalkers hooked. And case in point, you have most people on this corner of the internet where people are more inclined to evaluate technical merits having low opinions of the state of AI.
The way marketing works is you will always see technology develop towards commercializable technology vs just genuinely good ideas. There is no great lobby out there pushing for technical blogs for example, despite their high signal to noise ratio and utility. That is done solely from the goodness of the authors heart for the most part, a cost to them in website maintenance not a profit center. You do see AI companies lobbying every government on earth right now, on the other hand, because they are working hard to entrench their tooling into the mindshare of as many people they can. It is pretty dystopian how the incentives are so aligned towards a few people who are cracking the deals. Even on the microscale they align like this: you see people on HN complain their employer bought them a copilot license they don't use because of the problems with it, but no doubt whoever secured that contract for the business probably looks great in front of the shareholders who are more concerned with keeping up with the Joneses than if the tool actually works as it is pitched. Seems we are far more concerned with the next quarter than the next ten years.
This is a commonly used meaning of independent study. But it isn't quite the same as Curie's independent study.
If Stackoverflow is experiencing a steep dropoff it suggests that people are more satisfied with AI. Presumably they are still learning independently with the help of web-based AI.
You should see the damage AI is doing to classroom instruction. People who are trying to learn can benefit from AI just like they could from the massive human effort of Wikipedia. People who are trying to dodge can hurt themselves with AI in the same way people hurt themselves with Wikipedia.
None of that means the web is dying.