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RE: Credentialing and Self-education
There are many fields with apprenticeship like knowledge. Those are less susceptible to automation in the short term. Selected databases are something that is being constructed (initiatives like MIT's, Irvine's and Stanford's Open Course Wares, EDX, Coursera, Udemy, there are more and more and this will only advance, I myself I'm putting some work into it.
The motivation problem is one of gamification, that's a far more interesting problem but one that is also being solved as we speak by open source software. In my opinion, the biggest problem is quality, as Naval said, credentialing is there for a reason. That's what needs disruption.
I was raised Jewish, and you're not an adult in Judaism until you get your second college degree, as the old joke goes, so I'm a bit caught up in the credentialist system, despite my love of autodidactic learning. I think that ultimately some combination of the two systems will work best, but we'll see!
As for automation, I read a really interesting breakdown of what job types will be vulnerable to it, dividing jobs into 4 categories- routine manual, routine cognitive, non-routine manual, and non-routine cognitive. The routine jobs are already getting shredded by automation, and its only going to get worse. The non-routine jobs are actually increasing in demand.
You can always count on the Jewish people to do a great job at almost everything :) I'm a witness the joke rings true.
One can always expect Baumol's cost disease to kick in, so employment is not gonna be a problem. For instance, my profession is medicine, the probability of automation in the next 30 years is at 2%, being one of the lowest among their competitors.1 Nonetheless, that's merely at the surgical level. The biggest resistance to automation in diagnostic settings comes from doctor's notes. The archives are so poorly written that is one of the biggest barriers for A.I. to learn. Most of this barriers are due to artificial scarcity.
The need for specialized cognitive workers is gonna decrease by a lot in less than 5 years.
Although automation is another story, the thing is that while credentialling has served as a selection mechanism it makes less and less sense as information's value concentrates more on privacy than on existence. The big problem for disruption is how to assure quality, and that's a gamification problem that someone is bound to solve in the following years.
1 https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-jobs-automation-risk/
What about research science? It's about the most non-routine activity out there, and it's hard to imagine easily automating or even gamifying it- it simply requires too many new paradigms, new research methods, intuitive leaps, the invention of new tools and measurement standards, etc, etc for me to easily believe that another, gamified Feyerabrandian system might replace it. (Admittedly, as a future research scientist, I might be deluding myself- always a risk.)
Again, automation is not what this post is about. Is about
About your comment:
we are speaking on a gamified platform whose incentives have economic consequences on the real world, that was not possible even 2 years ago. Most questions about automation are problems of "when" not "if", is a consequence of the principles of universal Turing computation.
How secure is research in one or several areas? well, I don't know and nobody knows, but one thing seems sure. Things will change.
Ah, my bad, I keep using automation language. Sorry, seem to have gottenstuck in a wee mental rut there for a sec. On the purely credentialist front Feyerabend makes even more sense to discuss- he wanted to grant the public more control of and more access to science. I personally don't think it's a great idea- look how susceptible the public is to anti-vaxxer ideology, flat-earther ideas, and even just old myth like the "you only use 10% of your brain." The current credential system (the university) for science does a decent job at weeding those most vulnerable to those ideas and that sort of anti-scientific rhetorical manipulation.