David Deming: “I believe that in this new third era of undergraduate education, we should lean into our strengths and become radically more communal, enabling other forms of learning in which technology is of little use. Many of the most important skills and habits of mind are best learned in community with other people. The ability to explain a concept so that other people can understand it, to inhabit the mind of another person so you can understand their motivations and work alongside them, to persuade others of your point of view, to negotiate over resources and navigate conflict, to lead and be led, to give and receive criticism and to earn another person’s trust— these skills are central to a college education.” [via Arnold Kling]
WSJ: “Most entrepreneurs dream big. [Alan] Dorfman does the opposite. He spends every waking hour trying to shrink things to their smallest possible size without losing their functionality. He has churned out miniature versions of thousands of products including the Rubik’s Cube, the Operation board game and Hungry Hungry Hippos. In a world of endless entertainment options, somehow there’s growing demand for impossibly tiny toys. Dorfman says Americans’ enduring appetite for novelty has gotten stronger recently as people seek out the low-tech thrills of earlier eras.”
Joe Cruz: “What if we are mistaken in treating writing as the highest cultivation of thought? The evidence that supports this belief is thin at best…I believe colleges can permit the use of A.I. writing tools without undermining the next generation of thinkers. But to get there, we need to embrace a different image of a university education — one in which ideas are expressed in real time and analytical thought unfolds as a debate or an oral defense or a group discussion. It will take courage to demand that students demonstrate active, participatory mastery of ideas. And it will take courage on their part to abandon the safe recursion of revision and narrative refinement. To be sure, there will be challenges of scale, and not every kind of institution will be able to adapt. The benefits, however, may be enormous.”
Mike Cannon-Brookes: “If a frontier model is capable of coming and running the entire business for you, if it’s truly running the whole thing, even assuming four or five years worth of increase, you have a relatively simple business. Most businesses aren’t simple. They are global conglomerations of rules, compliance, laws, staff in different places, human inconsistency — which is the same as saying human creativity — that they’re putting it all together to try to deliver products and services for their customers in their industry: healthcare, university, finance, automotive, or whatever the industry is. They’re trying to compete with some other business. They are still going to have a huge number of humans, I would argue more knowledge workers, more developers, in five to 10 years time than today because the ability to do tasks to compete will go up.”
