you seem to implicitly assume that a college education is an unnecessary expense for most and that therefore, it shouldn't be really given away so readily. this suggests to me that you assume that the real purpose of college is job preparation. your reasoning makes sense from the perspective of a higher level institution (or corporation, or possibly a government) seeking to be as efficient as possible regardless of the impact on typical human individual's well-being.

college is not a 'factory' (or any sort of industry) that 'manufactures' workers for companies.

The only reason people are willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for college is that it is a credentialed degree that people think will open up career doors. We shouldn't beat around the bush on this fact.

I agree, but you won't have a sheet of paper proving it. It's like that infamous scene from Good Will Hunting. Question is whether you want an easy way to PROVE you're educated. Which is what a license, certificate or diploma grants you.

Why else would you need to prove your education except for work?

Essentially a new way to establish hierarchies.

But we're nowhere close to that. Also, if it's being used to establish hierarchies, I could still see that proof being important.

Getting “there” doesn’t happen overnight, but the point is that we are already heading there, and to the question “why get a degree if not for work”, I presented a potential future option.

> I could still see that proof being important.

This is key to the point I was trying to make. Essentially that the purpose of education may change over time, but the value of gaining an education will still be there in one form or another.

If learning is “merely” a diversion, I don’t see why people would think about it any differently. Whether or not it still makes sense for that proof to carry a six figure price tag is a separate conversation.

Yes. That changed on February 28, 1967.[1][2]

[1] https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-day-the-purpose-of-col...

[2] https://archive.is/G11YT

The spike in demand drove a ton of "normal" schools (teachers' colleges) to become proper colleges and even universities, plus a bunch of new ones to pop up, but rather than increasing the supply of (previously) college-level education, it mostly created a kind of knock-off, lower-tier product—there just weren't enough excellent professors to meet demand, not enough good, experienced college administrators, not enough anything, including, arguably, students who were fit for college (as it had previously been) in the numbers that were now attending.

Unfortunately, the vocation focus of college has been a driving force since the early days of the industrial revolution, dating to the 1850s. The Morrill Land-Grant Act explicitly states that colleges (at least in the case of land grant schools) are there to train people for work:

>without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

I respect and value the other traditional purpose of college, but we can also acknowledge that these purposes can change as society does.

In seriousness, I feel like the only hope here is that the general population gets more and more aware about the negative impacts on all this hyper-targeted advertising. Certainly we've been making strides there with things like GDPR and documentaries like the Social Dilemma, but with so much money on the line it will be hard to fight back.

> - Reduced need for education.

This subset is the radioactive bits of AI impact. We can always address the rest, but that requires thinking and an education.

Not only this, but the realtime trade-to-trade performance of companies is also easily available. If I was building an AI, I would let it make realtime decisions on where to put money as the "actuator" of society and advertising/consumer spending metrics as the sampling mechanism.

Whereas in the past there was some breathing room for society to catch up, evaluate and control this technology [0], today the rapidity has converted it into a wild west: tech entrepreneurs and their financiers declare their self-serving moral standards as the new norm, the broader public is dazed, confused and misinformed and public institutions, nominally at the service of the citizenry are only as good as their weakest, most capturable link

Name one development over the past decade that indicates we [1] are actually capable to control what is happening and the above dark picture is mere scaremongering.

[0] think e.g., about regulatory constraints around insurance or financial data and models

[1] as in citizens anywhere in the world

This is not a matter of “if”, it is a matter of “when”.

I've long suspected China had the right idea here, and am, in this case, not happy to be proven right.

Especially what do you think China's idea is?

And also how that idea relates to, in your words but abbreviated, «choosing between a network and democracy».

Thank you.

This was part of what was going on in the recent novel "Mountain in the Sea". An AI-controlled fishing corporation figured out that replacing robots with enslaved humans on it's AI controlled fishing fleet was more cost effective (the ocean air was hell on the robots apparently, they kept breaking). Each fishing boat was controlled by an AI which had the objective of maximizing profits. As a result the oceans were being depleted of fish at a rapid rate.

I actually run some Manna-esque systems in my own small business (most notably a system for stock picking and shipping) and this isn't something to worry about in the near-term.

It greatly, greatly reduces the amount of frustration and stress people experience in mundane jobs, greatly reduces cognitive complexity and just generally makes the work more satisfying.

Maybe there's a risk of humans losing their jobs to machines, a la chapter 2 of Manna, but to be frank it's no different to the threat of outsourcing which has existed for 50+ years.