Talk:Learning Learning/Parable 3

Absolutely. You hit it right on the nose.

And while we're at it, there's no reason for them to learn to use a pencil or pen either. A keyboard is so much faster. And even that will be obsolete when we get better voice recognition. Technology for reading and speech synthesis is improving rapidly, so soon it will not be necessary for anyone to learn to read. We also need to take a look at the interface. Written characters are highly inefficient for storing and transmitting information. Human language could be stored much more efficiently in machine form, and that would eliminate the need for (1) paper, (2) keyboards, and (3) visual displays.

As long as children can carry around a laptop, computers are so good at remembering things that there's very little need for them to remember anything. In fact, they won't really need to learn much at all except how to get along with each other and how to turn on the computer. Socialization is probably best taught at recess, so there won't be much need for classes, or classrooms any more. With improving communications we are rapidly reaching the time when face-to-face interaction is no longer needed, so even the recess can go.

Machines can do our work for us, and even most of the chores will be done with machines. So that really doesn't leave much humans will be needed for, except, of course, programming. All this will happen much sooner than we think -- probably even before Firefox quits leaking memory, some time by mid to late 21st century. Now if I can just get this &*#$@ program to compile and quit crashing....

Laptops? Yes, laptops for all. Just one problem, though. It's hard to learn number theory until one has a thorough concept of numbers.