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Einstein had a rule don't memorize anything you can look up. With massive cheap memory just in our phones and much more so on our tablets and computers will we change our utilization of memory? Could this vastly change learning, instead of inefficient and limited memorization, you learn how to use specialized platforms that manage not only memory, but the information used. Any thoughts on learning platforms replacing much of traditional education? Also, since we carry massive memory in our phones and they have more connectivity than ever with high power data centers, what other changes do readers foresee in the future of work and social interaction? I believe we are in the very early stages of massive moves in work and social interaction. All thoughts in this area appreciated.
This change in education has already been happening for decades. As for cheap memory affecting anything, not likely. Memory was already cheap, a temporary glut for the next year or two won’t change computing or our lives. Right now the big struggle is what to do with all of the memory we have? Hence all of the hype around cxl as a more efficient way to use it, and all of the work for making viable embedded memory applications.
Einstein had a rule don't memorize anything you can look up. With massive cheap memory just in our phones and much more so on our tablets and computers will we change our utilization of memory? Could this vastly change learning, instead of inefficient and limited memorization, you learn how to use specialized platforms that manage not only memory, but the information used. Any thoughts on learning platforms replacing much of traditional education? Also, since we carry massive memory in our phones and they have more connectivity than ever with high power data centers, what other changes do readers foresee in the future of work and social interaction? I believe we are in the very early stages of massive moves in work and social interaction. All thoughts in this area appreciated.
The trick is to know what to look up, and how to use it.
Or at least, that was the trick. I find in my current work lots of the people I talk to have no idea of the basic science involved. I once helped a VC do due diligence on a small startup that thought they had a revolution in bandwidth efficiency based upon amplitude modulation. So I pointed out their modulation would cause sidebands, that the efficient use of bandwidth required efficient use of spectrum (thank you Shannon for so much of this modern world) and AM was very poor on spectral efficiency, and they looked at me blankly. So, I said I would be back and went to the university bookstore to find the relevant textbooks. Only to find to my horror that apparently you could get an EE degree without ever learning Fourier transforms or learning about the relationships between various forms of modulation and their spectrum. Shannon was not even indexed. The textbooks, all the ones I could find with likely subjects, just left those topics out presumably as too specialized to be taught. Fortunately, my VC friend knew enough to understand the issues but the startup folks were just angry. You know "no one believes in you when you have a revolutionary invention".
So the problem I see especially with online education being available to all is how do you know what to learn, and how do you get guidance on diving deep and mastering it as tools to think with? Numbers can indeed be left to calculators and lookups, but you still need to grasp the concepts and have the intuition for what the numbers might do. Enough grasp to do the BOTE estimate, and also to spot the opportunities no-one else has explored. But that has always been a problem. A lot of my contemporaries peeled off to careers and training that did not require focus and a love of continuous learning. It is hard to say the current generation is really different, just has other directions to go than were the interests I followed.
I sure adore the internet as a tool for my own work. I can learn as much in a week on the internet as I had available in a month with physical libraries - and partly because the internet has allowed me to identify which books need to be on the shelves around me, not just in computer files. I think Einstein would have been in clover.
I find Google one of the most valuable tools ever created and use it frequently. I feel Google should create a super model on a subscription basis to open an entirely new market. I hope Google is still in its infancy as to potential.
