By Matt Beane
The front half was very familiar. It felt a bit overstated/over dramatized. The author described Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development in different words. People learn best by stretching to the edges of their capability but not too far past them.
The book emphasizes Challenge, Complexity, and Connection as the keys to skill development. The concern is that adoption of automation, AI, and remote work are removing these C’s from the work environment. Although the automation is cost effective, efficient, and potentially more accurate than using novice humans to perform the same tasks, it breaks the chain of development. There are still expert roles that technology cannot yet replace but now the path from novice to expert has been corrupted. Novices don’t work with experts in the same way. How will we get new experts?
The author described the patterns of some “shadow learners” who essentially worked around the system and deviated from rules an expectations in order to develop their own skills. This behavior helped their development in some ways but still limited connection and doesn’t scale across the workforce.
It ended with some dire warnings about how pending technological developments in AI, nuclear fusion, and quantum computing are going to quickly change the world. Maybe. They seem to be low risk prognostications. If any of it pans out, the author will write more material pointing back at his prophesy. If it’s way off the mark, we’ll all forget about it and move on. There are no stakes, so he took the more dramatic take because that’s more interesting now. It makes it feel less credible to me though.