Anthonares

I’m reading a really fascinating book right now: “Radical Evolution” by Joel Garreau. In it, three scenarios for the future are presented, all based on the idea that continued technological development will soon become the driving force in human “evolution.” Garreau is undoubtedly a shiny-eyed optimist when it comes to these technologies, though he seems to ground his work on the importance of leaving unaltered the fundamental components of our human-ness.

Anyway, I’m not really writing about the book, as the title of this entry suggests. Instead I am writing to discuss the impossibility of a college education preparing a student to have the knowledge necessary to compete for a lifetime of work in this technological age. Consider, for instance, this anecdote: I started college in 1999. Google was not even 2 years old then. Googling was not a verb that your mother knew, even Napster was not yet to hit the scene in a really big way. If I were to have prepared myself for a career in internet technologies, studying books that were at least two years old, I would have had none of the necessary knowledge to compete upon leaving school. No, instead a modern student must prepare themselves for a lifetime of continued learning, and constant change. While this may seem worrying, consider it this way instead: a car’s position can be constantly changing, but it’s velocity can remain the same. So, by that line of argument, I only need to prepare myself for a world where I am expected to continually increase my knowledge and skills, right?

Well, not exactly. You see, if you’re one of the legions of techno-geeks whom everyday align their prayer-mats toward Silicon Valley, constant change means not change at a constant velocity, but rather change at a constant exponential power. That means that each year of my career, if the previous year I learned one book’s worth of new ideas, I will have to learn 2 the next. But, of course that 1 book gets twice as fat each year… Obviously some day, there will reach a point where my work can not have to depend on me learning so much. After all, the worlds’ most brilliant mind cannot handle exponential growth. Instead, I will have to use technology to distill the knowledge of the world down to where it illuminates only my tiny portion of the elephant of scientific advancement. This is already happening, in many ways. The internet, shortly after providing the means for humans to expose themselves to profound and terrifying floods of information, has given us the means to ignore almost everything in search of what we really want. RSS feeds, social browsing, blogging, podcasting, and Google, are some of the lynch-pins of the Web 2.0. That is what will enable us, all of us, to take exponential growth and change it into something we are capable of handling.

So, back to the point of my entry. In order to find myself a career at the cutting edge of societal and scientific change in the coming decades, the thing I need to learn most is how the people in my field operate, not what they know. Unlike most everyone I know, I’ve sold nearly every textbook I’ve purchased, using the Internet. Because by the time I’m out of school, all of the material in those textbooks will be available in equally reliable forms online. The tools I use today in my research will sit as discarded husks in 5 years. But what will not is the method, so now I spend most of my time learning how to be a good researcher, rather than reading journal articles. Because from where I sit, it seems to me that the institutions, technologies and ideas of 2020 will be perhaps unrecognizably different, but what will not are the methods and the practices, because those fundamentally human things change much more slowly than the knowledge we create. So, lately, I’ve kind of changed my educational career goals from doing this-and-that research project to getting this-and-that experience. And it is with that in mind that I am going to interview next month for summer internships at Chevron and Shell, two companies that last year I never would have considered working for. But there, they have taken science and turned it into a profit-generation tool, and that institutional practice seems like it would be extremely important to learn.

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