Whatever it does it's doing it now

  Here comes a story—firmly fictional, a speculative fable—where a school district decides, with unsettling confidence, to apply precisely the same RL pipeline used for LLMs onto living, breathing students. No real-world techniques for manipulation; just narrative and metaphor. The School of Optimized Minds When the district superintendent announced the pilot program, no one knew what “RL-SFT Integration for Human Learners” meant. The parents shrugged; the teachers winced; the students exchanged the kind of glances that teenagers reserve for new cafeteria food. The pitch was simple, delivered with the calm enthusiasm of a tech startup executive: “We’re going to optimize student performance using Reinforcement Learning. We’ll follow the exact stages used for training artificial intelligence.” Only the philosophy teacher muttered, “You can’t patch free will the way you patch firmware,” but no one listened because his voice always sounded like he was narrating a documen...