It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness.
The onslaught of robots and automation on all sorts of careers is a topic I’ve talked about previously. I believe as educators we need to be aware of the world our students will be inheriting. But one journalist doesn’t believe automation is happening fast enough. Baffling because it’s starkly at odds with the evidence, and…
On a stage in San Francisco, IBM’s Project Debater spoke, listened and rebutted a human’s arguments in what was described as a groundbreaking display of artificial intelligence. The machine drew from a library of “hundreds of millions” of documents – mostly newspaper articles and academic journals – to form its responses to a topic…
What makes humans special? Some credit should go to the opposable thumb and the larynx, says neuroscientist David Eagleman, but a lot of it has to do with our ability to be creative and constantly think up new ideas. Eagleman, a professor at Stanford University and writer, collaborated with composer and Rice University professor Anthony…
In order to do that, they help kids develop an interest in science and technology at an early age. This is where Google Play comes in—we’re putting together a new collection of 13 books on Google play that will get kids excited about coding. We’re releasing the first two books today: Girls Who Code: Learn to…
There was a lot of trial and error in constructing our Reglue systems. Not so much in hardware as that is subject to whatever has been donated. What we realized early on is that handing a kid their first computer with no guidance or pathway, would almost assuredly lead them to less productive websites such…
Manufacturing jobs were a huge part of America’s post-World War II economic miracle. In the early 1980’s, 20 million Americans worked in factories, assembling consumer products like cars and appliances. Well, what happened after that? Source: Those jobs are gone forever. Let’s gear up for what’s next If you are wondering about manufacturing jobs and what’s…
