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Artificial Intelligence Masterclass
Should you go to college in the age of AI? | Artificial Intelligence Masterclass
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expected to Destroy Many jobs. Most jobs we don't know. There's been different predictions out there, but one question that I get is should I go to college? I I get this question personally direct messages on LinkedIn, Discord, Patreon, but I also see it echoed a lot in YouTube comments and Reddit comments and pretty much everywhere. And so young people today are understandably a little bit worried about the future and how should prepare for it. So I am here to do the longcoming deep dive as to should you go to college? In the age of generative AI and the fourth Industrial Revolution, the answer is an unequivocal yes with an asterisk. So let's unpack this. And before we get started, I do need to say this is not financial advice. You should always consult a licensed professional for anything to do with with life, money, whatever. This is just my personal take. Were I 20 years old today, if I was 17 to 25 today, this is kind of the advice that I would give myself. So keep that in mind. You know, your mileage may vary, so for some context, there are a lot of big names out there, such as Goldman Sachs that are predicting that AI could destroy as many as 300 million jobs, starting with white collar work, which is kind of what people did not necessarily expect. At first it came for the artists. Now it's coming for the doctors and lawyers. Soon it'll be coming for the executives and then everyone who's left standing will be doing childcare and plumbing. I don't know. I don't think that's how it's going to play out, especially when you look at the recent news about the advances in robotics. My personal take is that we are heading for a post labor economic world. Basically human labor is not going to be the primary driver of the economy within probably five years. That's my personal prediction. I stand by that. And I haven't seen any news that makes me change my mind. So if this is the world we're heading towards, why should you go to college? Should you go at all? As I said My answer is an unequivocal yes. So let's unpack. Why? First and foremost, you need to understand the original purpose of universities. So Oxford University has been around for, oh, almost 1,000 years. There are some schools that are much older. But by and large the university system that we know today, particularly in the west, really came into fruition, really was kind of codified and solidified during the Renaissance period, so the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries in Europe. And the purpose of a university, the reason that it is called a university is because the purpose was to create universal men, which was basically members of the upper crust of society in order to, like, well, okay, so some context for the Renaissance. Renaissance is the rebirth, the rebirth of learning. And so what society did at the time was there was this hard pivot away from ecclesiastical learning and more towards, hey, let's show more interest in history, let's show more interest in the broader world, let's show more interest in the arts and philosophy and, and that sort of stuff. And the idea was to create a very well rounded person who would be a productive member of society. So these are the, the gentlemen and to a much lesser extent, at least until later, the ladies of society. And so the idea here was that if you go to university, one that is a class signifier that you are a member of, probably the landed gentry or nobility, but also it was so that you would have a common understanding when you joined society. This was not for the peasants, this was not for the proletariat. This was exclusively for the rich and wealthy. Now fast forward a couple hundred years and we have World War I, World War II, we have the Industrial Revolution and we have the rise of knowledge, work. Suddenly everyone needs an education. So only within the last 80 years or so did our relationship with universities really drastically fundamentally change. And let's unpack part of that change. So part of that change was a pivot from being a good member of society. Because remember, if you were landed gentry or nobility, you didn't need it to go to school for a job. That's not what you were training for. You were training to be a member of noble society or landed gentry or whatever, whatever cultural paradigms represented the upper crust of your society. Now with the Industrial Revolution, there was a rise of factory jobs, of urbanization and that sort of stuff. And it is not, not an accident that classrooms today look like factories that is 100% identical. And actually I asked midjourney to create a classroom slash factory from the Industrial Revolution. And you can see like, oh, these rows of Desks with, you know, this somewhat oppressive environment where you're just supposed to sit quietly and do your work without causing much disruption. The like everything from the way that classrooms are structured to the way that there is like one master at the front of the classroom who's lecturing to you to even the requirements of, and paradigms around discipline. Work quietly, don't talk back. You, you have to be subjected to arbitrary punishments and requirements that are often not fair. And, and also deviance is not tolerated in public schools. All of this comes directly from the industrial revolution. And so what happened was in Europe, particularly in the German and Austrian system, because God bless them, I love them, they are great systemizers. What they did was they systematically restructured public education around preparing people to work in factories. This has stuck around for 120 years. And we have, when we, we people say oh well, we can't agree on what's the best for education. This is obviously the best way. We just want to create docile workers. But when. So just taking a step back, I'm going to get off my soapbox in a second. My first year of education, I went to Montessori school, which is a fundamentally different structure of education for early education. And it was, I still remember Montessori school as like my best experience at school. So we actually do have alternative paradigms of how to approach education. It's just we are locked in this hyperproductive, capitalistic, industrial revolution model of we need to, we need to spend 80,000 hours, or however long it is, 20,000 hours that children spend in public education preparing them for the economic world of basically subservience and obedience to arbitrary systems of power that shapes the modern education system. And this extends to the university system as well. So this is public education and university. Now obviously in some respects the education system is trying to min max. It's trying to optimize, say well, we don't want to pay teachers a lot of money, we don't want to have a lot of teachers. So let's have 30 students per classroom. But we know empirically that this is not an optimized model of education. The best model of education is to have one master or maestro for every four to five students. These master teaching methods have been well studied and well established. So anyone who says well we don't actually know the best way to educate that is absolute baloney. We, we, we know that one on one tutoring with experts is the best way to educate people. This is codified in what's called Bloom's Two sigma problem. So Bloom's two sigma problem shows that if you give someone expert one on one tutoring, they perform two standard deviations above how they would have performed with a public school education. That is how bad public schooling is. It is two standard deviations below optimal. So yeah, I used to be married to a teacher. So like, I'm not going to say that I'm a 100% authority on this, but I also spent some time earlier this year interviewing educators, both teachers and faculty all over the world. And this is actually like, yeah, so, oh boy. All right, off my soapbox. Moving on. Okay, so now that you have some historical context as to why public school systems and university systems are utterly broken and why also they are so heavily skewed towards education or, sorry, towards factory jobs, why would you go to university today? Well, let me tell you why. So first is experience. There's all kinds of things that happen when you go to university. When you stretch yourself. There's pressure, there's challenge, there's new ideas, there's social groups, there's adventures that you can go on. Some, some of my friends have gone on really cool like arctic expeditions to go like put sensor probes at the bottom of the ocean. But mostly it's about how you change yourself. You stretch yourself, you challenge yourself and you become a better version of yourself. But not just that, because it's like, okay, well why am I becoming a better version of myself? We'll unpack more of that in just a minute. But there's the like. When you overcome these challenges, when you learn these things, when you have these social experiences, you come out intrinsically different and it sets you up to be in a better shape the rest of your life. This is why people that go to college, even when you correct for things like income and, you know, underlying intelligence or whatever, people who go to university tend to be happier and they also tend to have better relationships in the rest of their life. Now obviously that is a, there is still some privilege there, there's still some class signifiers because there are plenty of great people who are more than intelligent enough that just don't have the family background or financial stability to be able to go to college. So it's really difficult to disentangle privilege from some of these other long term results. But, but that being said, there is still a lot of evidence that going to college, going to universities and getting particularly advanced degrees, it does something to your brain and your personality that pays dividends the rest of your life. Now one thing that I will Say is that the people that I know that. That have advanced degrees or just any degree, they tend to be more responsible citizens. And of course, I can. I can hear some people saying, well, responsible citizen according to whom? According to those that they, you know, indoctrinated at the university. It's like, well, okay. One thing though is that a lot of people who go to university actually have some of their worldview shaken up. I remember one of my friends, he was. He came from a rural background. His whole family was religious and like, he was still vaguely religious by the end of college, but he's like, yeah, like, going to university is a really good way to, like, change your mind. And even my wife, like, she had, my, My current wife, she had, you know, roommates in college that had some really interesting ideas about how the world work when they got there. And then their entire worldview was shaken up. And now you might say, well, that's just liberal indoctrination. It's no, that shaking up is what naturally happens when you are exposed to more of the world. Now, also, being a responsible citizen is. Is partly knowing history. People that are ignorant of history have a really hard time understanding why the world is the way that it is. It's like, okay, well, all I know is that there's something happening today that I don't like. And that's the long and short of it. Yeah, but understanding the historical context makes you a much better, more responsible citizen just by virtue of the fact that you understand why we got where we are and where we're going and what has happened in the past. So, for instance, I am ultra, ultra progressive, as is my wife. At the same time, we like our. We will talk about history from prehistoric times to Bronze Age to classical period, global history. And with that historical context, we understand geopolitical conflict and war and all the geopolitical game of chess. And because of that, because we have a more nuanced understanding as to why conflict happens. We understand policies that we don't necessarily agree with on principle. For instance, you know, un, NATO, us, America, like, you know, expeditionary military forces. It's not ideal, but we understand why it's there. So that's what, that's an example of what I mean by being a responsible citizen. An educated citizen is a responsible citizen. And also that idea goes back to ancient Athens. The idea was that part of that master student training that people like Socrates did, the idea was to create better, more informed citizens who could participate in the dialogue required to steer society. So I'm not going to Read the rest of it. But you get the idea that like, that expanding your knowledge of the world translates to being a better participant in civil society. Another thing is being a team player. So news from the front throughout my career. So for some background, I have exactly five weeks of college under my belt before I realized this isn't for me. But what I will say is that there are a lot of employers that require or strongly prefer college degrees. And one of the reasons that they do is that people with college degrees tend to be better team players. And part of the reason for that is that they have gone through and worked with people that maybe they didn't like, they didn't get along with, maybe that they had fundamental disagreements with. But through practice, they learned to still get the job done, to still get the project across the finish line, to tolerate those differences and to gain those social skills that lead to better outcomes in the workplace. And so this is something that I'm still learning. I'm almost 40 years old and because I didn't have that experience, I'm still learning the nuances of being a good team player, learning leadership skills, that sort of stuff. Some of my friends that went to Harvard, they're like the nicest people that I that I know. Why? Because they went to a top university in the world and they, they already had those experiences and kind of had some of the ego, not necessarily like ground out of them, but they were polished, let's put it that way. And so by going through those difficult experiences, those challenging experiences and learning that, hey, like, this is how I can relate to people, this is how we can get the job done, this is how I can be a kinder person, that sort of stuff. Again, there is some pre selection here going on because people that are intrinsically equipped to succeed in the university system, they might have an easier time of it. They might go further, they might have a different disposition, kind of like cats. So like, I like both cats and dogs. My wife says that I have a cat personality, which is very true. If I want attention, I want attention, and if I don't want attention, leave me alone. But I like cats and dogs. And for anyone who's, who's ever owned cats, you know that all cats have different personalities. Some cats, they are very tolerant and they will let you like play with them and roughhouse other cats. You look at them wrong and they will bite you. Some people are like this too. I'm not saying that they will literally bite you, but some people just have their more choleric in their Disposition. I'm a sanguine choleric disposition. Which means it's like that person's an idiot. I don't want to work with them. It's probably also because of my Jewish background. A lot of us Jews are very cranky. Could be now at McDonald's. A McDouble is 250. So you can get your gym gains on or just get lunch for only 250. Get more value on the under three dollar menu. Limited time only. Prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery.
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Bottom up.
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Okay, I accepted the offer. They're picking it up Tuesday from the driveway. I haven't even left my chair.
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It's done.
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Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up fees may apply. Cultural. I don't know. Anyways, point being is that part of going to university is learning to be a better team player, which again, pays dividends in the long run. You might say like, well, I'm never going to use that. It's like, yeah, come back to me when you're trying to build a house and come back to me when you are trying to plan a wedding. Come back to me when you're trying to do any number of things that require a lot of people. Like I said, one of the things that I'm doing is I'm leading an open source project. And I guarantee you I would have been better equipped to run these projects if I had stayed the course at university. So being a team player that will serve you for the rest of your life, whether or not you are in a corporate environment, whether you're in a job. Cognitive development. So again, stretching yourself. University is a major catalyst to just change your brain. The struggle that you go through into, you know, to cram, to cram in knowledge, to gain new skills, new abilities. Even if you forget the the base material, your brain is still fundamentally changed. And there's not much more to say about this. But just like talk to people that have been to university versus those who haven't, and what you'll notice is that there's just a different kind of cognitive capacity and set of metacognitive skills that they have and that is going to again, Pay dividends for the rest of your life. Okay, so I've, I've told you, like, what universities were for and why, you know, I would recommend going to university. So then what do you study? So first and foremost, what I will say is study your passions. One thing that is going to change, I suspect, over the course of the 21st century is we are going to pivot away from utilitarian approaches to education. Like, you go to college to get a good job. Well, if good jobs are going away, then you go to college to engage with your passions. One thing that I learned a long time ago in the workplace, in my own life, is there is no substitute for passion. You know, like, I see people that just try and force themselves into jobs or careers or even startups that they're not passionate about, and that just doesn't work. So, yeah, there is something about indulging in your passions. And, you know, if your passions are video games, great. Lean in if your passions are archaeology. So the reason that I, that I made this image, I don't know if you can tell that it's not a photo. This is actually made by midjourney. But one of the stories that my wife tells is that, is that in her archeology class there were some elderly people that were returning to college after many, many years because they, you know, they had retired, they had, they had their career behind them. And they're like, well, you know, I really, what I really wanted to do all along was study archeology. And so then they went back to do that. And wouldn't it be great if we could all just do that from the outset? So, yeah, there is a lot to be said for indulging in your passions, but especially if there is not some utilitarian or instrumental goal that you're trying to reach, such as maximize your income or whatever. But also if you indulge in your passions, you'll go further. Anyways, another thing to do is to focus on becoming the right person. And so what I mean by that is you are an agent. You are an agentic entity moving through the world. And so when you go to university, if you go to university, what I would recommend is that you try and strive to make yourself into the right person for the rest of your life. And so here's some things that I mean when I say, like, make yourself into the right person. Engage in intentional growth, deliberately challenge yourself, step outside of your comfort zone. Join clubs that, like Toastmasters Club, take classes that you're weak at, that sort of stuff. Just Challenge yourself not to get the grade, but for the sake of challenging yourself, for the sake of becoming more well rounded. Focus on diversifying your skills, whether that's social skills, mathematical skills, scientific skills, physical skills. If you're not particularly athletic or physically coordinated, maybe take a sports class to try and not necessarily to become a better sports star, but to compensate and make up for any deficits that you have. Focusing on self improvement. Look at your rough spots. If there's something that you're not good at, then like deliberately challenge yourself. That's what I'm in the middle of doing right now. It's like, let me step outside of my comfort zone and just practice these things that I need to get better at, whether it's leadership or communication or whatever, and whether, you know, I'm not saying that you should say like, I'm going to be a universal man or I'm going to be a universal woman, but that is one model that you could pursue. You could say, you know what, maybe the Athenians had it right, maybe they had it right in Florence, in Italy, back in the Renaissance. Maybe I should try and be this well rounded person who is really just trying to be a good member of society and then finally focus on the skills and development that will improve your quality of life, namely those communication skills, those emotional skills, those, the self awareness, the metacognition and the team working skills. All of those are going to serve you the rest of your life, whether or not you're working. STEM education. So a lot of people say, like, I'm planning on getting my master's in computer science. Should I even bother when AI is going to take it over? And I will say yes, unequivocally. Foundational knowledge of the basic sciences, whether it's STEM or not, is going to serve you the rest of your life. Knowing how the world works at a basic level, that's never going to change. Whether or not AI is doing the job for you, it will give you a common lexicon so that you can communicate with the AIs. Even when the AIs take over all science and space exploration and whatever, whatever happens, it will give you the ability to communicate with other people and machines and whatever else. And so then there's the base reality aspect, which is AI and machines and humans, we all operate in the same physical plane of existence. So even if AI dislocates a lot of jobs, you're still like, you're still a human and you're still made of carbon and hydrocarbons and we're not silicon based, but the machines might be. So there's all kinds of stuff that is just gonna serve you in terms of understanding how the world works. Even if you get a STEM degree and even if you never use it, there are other kinds of irreplaceable skills and enriched perspectives that you can get. But I'm kind of reinventing the wheel here, so I'll move on. Civic responsibility. So civic responsibility is something that I would recommend that people focus on when they go to university today, which is understanding things like civil rights and human rights and understanding various governments around the world, monetary policy, fiscal policy, voting, understanding the ethics that go into things like why is freedom of speech and freedom of thought so important? Why is right to privacy so important? Understanding all of these kinds of things will make you a better, more well rounded citizen, a better voter, you know, better neighbor, whatever. And, but also the key thing that I want to point out is be human centric. Technology can change, but you know, and you know, transhumanism, post humanism, we might change eventually too, but, but we're still going to be fundamentally, I hope, human at the core. And so understanding humans, the human story, human history, the human mind and human societies, that is going to be a permanent set of skills that everyone could benefit some.
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from so that's, this is another thing that I would recommend focusing on for anyone going to university today. Okay, so I did say that there was one gigantic asterisk at the beginning. So let's unpack some of those exceptions. The first and first and foremost is university is not for everyone. Me as a highly neurodivergent person. University systems today are just not for me. I would be bored in every class. Yeah. So that being said, there are alternative paths if, if university is not for you. There's vocational schools, there's online courses, that sort of stuff. One big problem with many universities is that there is still a need for conformity. And it's not necessarily a problem. It's. It's good for some people, bad for others. I need to be self directed. I need to be able to engage in my own curiosity. I have a really hard time following the structured course that someone else has laid out for me. But some people really thrive in a highly structured environment. They're like, give me the structure I need the opposite. I need no structure. There's also of course, financial considerations and other aspects. You might not have the personal or familial stability to do it. Which is one thing that I'm really hoping that we were able to fix as we move towards post labor economics where it's like, hey, you want to go to university, go for it. You know, like we'll make sure that all of your needs are taken care of so that you can go anyways. Yeah, so that's about it. You might have, you might have unique goals that don't necessarily align with that. Like if you're trying to go out on physical adventures, like there's all kinds of people that they want to travel the world. University might not be the right thing if you're a die hard artist. Now I will say that there are some really great art schools and conservatories out there. So anyways, point being is that there are going to be people for whom university is just not the right fit. So I don't want to, I don't want to promote a one size fits all approach because like I said, as much as I would have benefited from going to university, it just wasn't for me. Another reason that universities might not be for everyone is that they can be harmful environments. As I mentioned before, the current school system is very much geared towards a very singular view of reality which is that you need to go to, you know, basically get ready for your career. There are also plenty of social dynamics at play. There's pecking orders, there are, there's, you know, bullying, there's gender discrimination, there's racial discrimination, there is a lack of accommodation and awareness for disabilities. I've actually talked to several people about how universities approach DEI initiatives and basically it is incumbent upon you, the disabled person, to advocate for yourself. And many, in many cases, there's nothing the university can or will do. It's like, well, it would be great if we could, you know, tolerate disability and help you out, but the best we can do is give you 30 extra minutes on tests. We're not going to do anything about bullying or anything else. And to be fair, corporations are the same way, which is basically conform or get out out. There's also academic pressure which some people do not handle that kind of pressure well. I am a, I am a low pressure tolerant person, which is why I have engineered my life, career and all of my initiatives around that vulnerability that I have, which is like, that's why I delegate. I learned to delegate in order to keep the pressure off of myself so that I can spend more time thinking. And then of course, financial stress. But hopefully, as I mentioned, we can alleviate the financial stress with post labor economics. So this was like drinking from a fire hose. Here are some final thoughts and some observations. Most of my friends have degrees. Some of my best friends all have graduate degrees, whether it's master's or PhDs and. But I don't. So I'm like, I'm like the odd duck out. But I've also been to like cocktail parties and stuff and just like jump into conversation with people, talking with them about their area of expertise and they're like, how do you know so much about this? It's like, I'm just curious. I just, I love learning and. But at the same time, I've also learned to recognize those deficits that I mentioned throughout this video that I possibly could have overcome if college or university was right for me and if I had the right situation in order to be able to go there. Now, once we achieve post labor economic economics, it's entirely possible that I'll go back. I don't know. We'll see. So thanks for watching. I hope you got a lot out of this. Remember, not financial advice. Make the best decision for you. I just hope that this perspective will help you make a more informed decision for yourself. Have a good one.