meta-aptitude and productivity growth
The article makes the useful point that a front-loaded ETL style education already looks like last year's hipster beard. This is where you extract a bounded corpus of data from trusted (old) sources, transform it to please your teacher, load it into your brain, and then dispense it at zero marginal cost and get paid forever. This may seem improbable in our sector, and it is partly a myth, but it is how large swathes of the population think of education - as something you can finish.
In contrast, I don't know whether learning how to learn is the answer to automation, but I don't have a better one. There are two problems.
The first is that although employers rely heavily on employees' meta-aptitude, that is, on their raw learning ability, they wouldn't recognize it if it bit them on the leg.
The second is that a generation of left behind people are at this moment being sold the notion by Donald Trump that if only we can make Apple make the iPhone at home, then ETL education will be good enough again, retrospectively. We'll just bring back the jobs like in pappy's day, and then productivity growth won't matter so much.
That is a flat lie. The truth is way scarier: If you don't have the neural infrastructure to bootstrap your way into Spanish or monotonicity or erosion or stakeholder management or royal prerogatives or Bayes or the Persian Empire or recursiveness from a standing start, no matter what you studied, you're a goner, Trump or no Trump.
P.S. You might be a goner even if you can.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
