Attention Economy


Sunday, May 24, 2015

Education and Learning in the Age of Machines

Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Shiller on “What to Learn in College to Stay One Step Ahead of Computers”:
“Most people complete the majority of their formal education by their early 20s and expect to draw on it for the better part of a century. But a computer can learn in seconds most of the factual information that people get in high school and college, and there will be a great many generations of new computers and robots, improving at an exponential rate, before one long human lifetime has passed.
Two strains of thought seem to dominate the effort to deal with this problem. The first is that we teachers should define and provide to our students a certain kind of general, flexible, insight-bearing human learning that, we hope, cannot be replaced by computers. The second is that we need to make education more business-oriented, teaching about the real world and enabling a creative entrepreneurial process that, presumably, computers cannot duplicate. These two ideas are not necessarily in conflict.”


Related:
Advice for college graduates from economists
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-22/economists-offer-these-10-career-tips-for-today-s-graduates