Paul: Education in the Future
Venkatesh Rao's post about the difference between 2017 and 2025 is hitting me hard lately, specifically in thinking about my son's education.
My son is two years old, so his education at the moment is fairly straightforward (although I'm aware that there's a whole culture of high achievement that begins with getting into a good preschool, and don't worry, I'm very stressed out about the fact that I'm by disposition totally unable to engage with that culture on his behalf). But eventually it's not going to be so straightforward, and Rao's observation about universities resonated:
[...] it’s hard to mourn the demise of universities when Trumpists are only doing what AI would have done in a few years anyway. I wouldn’t recommend college to any 18-year-old today. Find another script. You really want to go into debt for a piece of paper saying you spent 4 years amid DEI battles being taught by desperate faculty scrambling simultaneously to teach around AI and hang on to collapsing grant funding controlled by “cathedral” inquisitors?
I think about how my son will learn to read and write and do arithmetic. How he'll be at the mercy of whatever teachers are available to us wherever we happen to be. And I think, too, of how weird I expect the future to be—how I anticipate the tectonic plates beneath the world's affinity groups to continue to separate and fracture as the monoculture dies but humanity and history both grind on.
Sarah Connor's voiceover monologue in Terminator 2, which she delivers while watching a killing machine play with her son, comes to mind a lot these days:
Watching John with the machine, it was suddenly so clear. The Terminator would never stop. It would never leave him. And it would never hurt him, never shout at him, or get drunk and hit him, or say it was too busy to spend time with him. It would always be there, and it would die to protect him. Of all the would-be fathers who came and went over the years, this thing, this machine, was the only one who measured up. In an insane world, it was the sanest choice.
I don't actually have a neat conclusion here. Over the next sixteen years, I hope I can make the embodied world as appealing to him as the other one will surely become.