Knowledge and Employability: The Futility of Rote Education

Abstract

Our future employability and survivability will depend on our ability to competitively coexist with AI-embedded machines in the job market. We have to be smarter than AI machines. The alternative is working in the gig economy or finding a rare benevolent benefactor. Darwin’s theory of evolution says our existence depends on how Nature selectively weeds out the unfit in a given environment. Progressively we have thus arrived at a stage where survival dominantly favors those with superior intelligence and the ability to create new knowledge. At every stage of human evolution—hunter-gatherer, agriculturist, industrialist—survival demanded progressively greater intellectual contributions and competitively productive skills from individuals for success and a dignified place in society. The time has now come when survival will demand even greater intellectual contributions from individuals which rote education cannot provide because it is mechanizable in terms of artificial intelligence. Our future adversaries in the job market will be intelligent machines, other egotistical intelligent Homo sapiens, and combinations of them. The heart of AI is algorithmic computation. Computation is all about addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and comparison of numbers, and problem solving is all about attaching meaning to numbers.