Re: US Science Education Sucks

From: Brian Atkins (brian@posthuman.com)
Date: Fri Aug 24 2001 - 14:49:20 MDT


Eugene Leitl wrote:
>
> On Fri, 24 Aug 2001, Mike Lorrey wrote:
>
> > Because of specialization, of course. You don't train people to be
> > chemists when they are going to pound nails all their lives.
>
> It is extremely difficult to stick to just pounding nails all your life if
> you live in the beginning 21st century. It would have been possible a few
> decades ago, but barely.

Actually where I live, housing construction continues to boom to the
point where if we didn't have all those Mexicans moving here we'd be
in a real shortage of labor.

>
> Whether people like it, or not, they will be forced to change careers
> during their productive lifetime, and they should have the broadness of
> skills and meta skills assisting them in something which is not supported
> by biology, quite the opposite.
>

Strangely I don't see a large movement in the US to replace service and
labor type jobs with automated methods. So as far as I can tell the
realistic viewpoint is that manual nail pounding will continue right up
until Singularity. Hell even my local Subway sandwich shop still has a
crew of 3 humans making my dinner. Webvan failed here because 80% of
people actually prefer wasting an hour or more pushing an old cart around
a store and then lugging the food up their house. Neo-Luddism or just what
consumers really want?

-- 
Brian Atkins
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
http://www.singinst.org/



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