Sublime

EVER-SMARTER COMPUTERS: FRIEND OR FOE?

While an independent educational profession of this kind would welcome many people whom the schools exclude, it would also exclude many whom the schools qualify. The establishment and operation of educational networks would require some designers and administrators, but not in the numbers or of the type required by the administration of schools. St

Imagine that we’re building something for “students”. I’ve got a picture of an American undergraduate in my head, and maybe you picture a British grad student, but we manage to agree on features and start building.

Crucial to how much anyone can learn on his own is the structure of his tools: the less they are convivial, the more they foster teaching.

But Herbert Simon, a cautious student of these matters, has said that “Insofar as we understand what processes are involved in human creativity—and we are beginning to have a very good understanding of them -none of the processes involved in human creativity appear to lie beyond the reach of computers.”

As a mathematician I know that one of the most powerful ideas in the history of science was that of differential analysis. From Newton onward, the relationship between the local and the global pretty well set the agenda for mathematics.