A long, roaming article in The New Yorker on Anthony Levandowski's groundbreaking/questionably-ethical work on self driving cars. This is a guy that used to report to Sebastian Thrun, and it makes me wonder how much of this ethos is already pervasive in Silicon Valley Edtechâ„¢…
After bypassing restrictions on how to hire staff, purchase supplies (including hundreds of cars), and safely design and operate self-driving vehicles (resulting in serious injuries and property damage), this whopper gets laid:
"The only thing that matters is the future," he told me after the civil trial was settled. "I don't even know why we study history. It's entertaining, I guess—the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn't really matter. You don't need to know that history to build on what they made. In technology, all that matters is tomorrow."
Charles Ruhig (2018). Did Uber Steal Google's Intellectual Property?
Rules are for the weak. History is moderately entertaining but irrelevant. People are inefficient and unpredictable. Nothing matters.
Compare and contrast with Randy Bass's article in Change:
Technology can best improve education by helping us distinguish ourselves from machines and to make that distinction itself fundamental to the "project" of education.
As we look to the future, and as machines get better at being machines, the primary purpose of higher education must be helping humans get better at being human. Ultimately technology (machine intelligence) will have its greatest impact on human learning through the evolution in human capacity—the ‘complementarity'—that will be required to stay ahead of its advance.
Randy Bass (2018) The Impact of Technology on the Future of Human Learning, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 50:3-4, 34-39, DOI: 10.1080/00091383.2018.1507380
History is important. Humans are important. Pushing toward a techno-centric future with no consideration for history or how the human condition might be improved (not made more efficient. not monetized. not synergized.) seems like the kind of thing a devout libertarian with a Netflix queue full of "because you watched Terminator…" suggestions might want.