“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”
― Robert A. Heinlein [1]
No, it is not a vow everybody to be everything. It is a reflection of the fundamental human fungibility [2]. The average human can be taught to take any human role. The exceptions of true organic geniuses (those who are hard to be replaced) and morons (those who are incapable to replace), only confirm this general rule of shear numbers [3]. This is what makes the mankind so scalable [4].
''Know'' is synonymous with ''can''. Literally. Knowledge = technology. Even etymologically [5]. Knowledge is praxis [6]. Only. There ain't such thing as impractical knowledge. If it is not a skill, it is not knowledge. I mentioned once [7] that we're all AIs. Ref.: feral children [8].
We are not what we eat [9], but we are what we've learnt. You are what you know/can. And you can what you have learnt. Learning is from the taking side. Teaching is on the giving side. Of one and a same process. We do not have a word to denote the modulus [10] of learning/teaching, it seems. But it will come.
We are taught by the others, the society. We are the cherry ontop of a layer cake of culture onto nature [4]. We are learning by ... living. We acquire skills in plethora of contexts from family, street, school, job, media ... Learning [11] is not a monopoly of man, countless systems are also learners. Maybe one of the basic definitions of life and intelligence is the ability to learn [12]. Giant topic, yeah. We won't graze into it here now on what is learning, but on how we learn.
Due to our neurological bottlenecks we spontaneously form hierarchies [13]. This hinders our scalabilty [4] by forcing humanity to be more or less a fractal of 5. We are close to a number of breakthroughs which to mitigate these innate limitations of ours into a number of ways [7] [14] [15] [16]. But the general case is not subject of this article - herein we focus on HOW we are taught. How we acquire knowledge, and how this knowledge of ours gets recognized and utilized by society. And the hierarchic emergent structuring is of course in full force upon us in teaching as well as into everything social else.
So comes education [17], such comes exam [18], knowledge certification [19], certified skills application [20], knowledge creation verification [21], job fitness testing [22], CVs and employer recommendations ... etc., etc. With all the bugs and the so little features of this 'map is not the territory' [23], situation.
It is all centralized and hierarchic - exactly as the global fractal of double-entry accountancy ledgers which we call fiat financial system is. In fact it is so interwoven with fiat finance than it is almost inextricable from it [24]. And as much inefficient and imprecise.
In all these years of talking and thinking on Tauchain [25] - I noticed - and this suspicion of mine incrementally turns into shear conviction - that Tau, the upscaler of humanity, inevitably also is the ultimate teaching machine. If education is facilitating of learning, Tau is the maximizer of learning. By its very construction, it comes out so.
People talk and listen whenever and whatever they want. Tau has unlimited capacity to listen and attend and remember, and answer. Only limited by the hardware capacity allocated. Tau extracts meaning. Purifies the stream, distills it down to the essence. Detects repetitions, contradictions and all other, ubiquitous nowadays conversation bugs. Remembers changes of opinions of the individual user. And points them out. Sounds like the best tool to know oneself. And the others to know you if you let them.
Your Tau account or profile is what you know. You say what you say and also ask. Say statements and questions. Tau pools you together with the others who state the same and, more importantly, who ask the same type of questions. Knowing what you know, and asking about what you don't know but want to know, maps not only your knowledge state but also maps your knowledge dynamics. Records and drives how your knowledge changes. You even have access to what you forget, and can recollect it. True real time knowledge state reporting. For first time in human history.
If consciousness [26] is - aside from the clinical state of being merely awake - the post-factum integration of senso-motoric experience [27], the Accountant of mind, the speaker of the narrative which is you, then Tau is your consciousness booster. That is - stronger than thought.
The ultimate teaching, the ultimate fair testing or exam, the ultimate real-time comprehensive diploma, or certificate, super-peer reviewed paper(s) of you as academic carrer.., the ultimate job interview AND the ultimate ... job of being working as yourself and anything useful you create to be instantly scarcifiable and monetizable - your Tau account is! And all the rest of accessible socoety - being your own workforce. And you to them. In the billions. In a move. In real time.
Including control over the pathways of increase of your skills towards the most productive personally for you learning directions, because it aids you to analyze the you-Tau history and to apply knowledge maximizer techniques and to participate profitably into creation of newer better ones. Maximizer of self. And maximizer of society making it to consist of max-selfs. Ever improving. Merger of education with work occupation. Work-as-you-live.
The literal Knowledge Economy, as described by 
And it is not only Humans and Tau lonely job. I foresee the other Machines to join the party [15]. Yes, I mean machines capable to have interests and to ask and seek answers of palatable questions.
This - the education amplification - to come down the technology way - has been, of course, anticipated by many. Few arbitrary examples:
- A distant rough-sketch hint for the inevitable tuition power of Tau is Neil Stephenson's [29] ''The Diamond age'' [30] , with the depicted: '' Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer '' [31], as an interactive networked teaching device.
- or if I'm right about the inevitable conquest of the natural languages territory [15] - UX [32] like in the 'Her' (2013) film [33].
- Thomas Frey [34] of the futurist DaVinci Institute [35] in his book ''Epiphany Z'' [36] paid special attention of this.: down the way of micro- and nano-education, an effective merger of the processes of education, diplomas issuing, job application, exam and actual execution of job obligations. Tom does not know about Tau. But I'll tell him.
With a big smile of irony and self-irony of course... these examples. Just to pick from here and there proofs of the giant anticipation of what's to come. And taken with a few big grains of salt. Cause the reality will be immensely more powerful.
Tutor [37], tuition [38], my emphasis via using exactly this wording, comes to denote the economic side of learning/teaching. It is about the cost of learning - the association of tuition with fees, about the placement of the acquired skills, about the business organization of those, about the protection of ownership and security of transaction of knowledge ... Let me introduce here a neologism [39] which to reflect the business side of it:
- Simply denoting the money-making power of a technology use by a business. The 'money suction power' of a business entity or organization of any kind coming from the application of a technology, if you want. Technology as socialized knowledge. Scaled up over multiple humans. Over a society. Of course the Scrooge Factor can pump in different directions. The Scrooge Factor of the traditional hierarchic education, governance and everything ... is apparently very often negative - hierarchies decapitalize, dissipate, waste. Orders of magnitude more wasteful than any PoW [41], but on this - some other time.
So aside from all the niceties of the abstractions of the full supply and value chains of a Knowledge economy, lets round up some numbers:
- We know that a true functional semantic search engine alone is worth $10t. Yeah. Tens of Trills. Trillions. As per the assessments of Davos WEF attendees of as far as I remember 2015 or 2016...
- Also, Bill Gates stated back in 2004 [42] that ''If you invent a breakthrough in artificial intelligence, so machines can learn,'' Mr. Gates responded, ''that is worth 10 Microsofts.''
- Tom Frey [34] also argued [43] that by 2030 the biggest corporation in the world will be an online school. Given the present day size and growth rate [44] of, say, Amazon [45] this 'online school' should be in the range of good deal of trillions of marcap if it is to be bigger than the biggest corporations. But we do not need such indirect analogies over analogies to access the scale. The shear size of the global education industry is the most eloquent indicator [46]. Note that Tom talks about 'corporation' i.e. for clumsy and inefficient hierarchic human collective. Not for a system which does this orders of magnitude more efficiently and powerfully due to being intrinsically P2P, i.e. geodesic [13]. Even the best futurologists can be forgiven for missing to predict Tau. :)
And this mind-boggling hail of trillions, does not even account for the Hanson Engine [16] factor.
Tau the Tutor ex Machina is just another unintended useful consequence outta the overall design.
It is nearly impossible to track and contemplate exactly what all these 'side-effects' would be and how they will synergetically boost each other.
With my articles I intend to only touch some lines of the immense phase space [47] of the possibilia, with neither any ambition to think it is possible to cover it all, nor this to represent any form of advice.
Future is incompressible. Compression is comprehension. Comprehensible only by living.
Failure to go to the geodesic way of learning, will turn these beautiful but trilling words into prophecy:
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age." H.P.Lovecraft [48] (1926 ).''
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Copyright © 2018 Georgi Karov. All rights reserved.
