Education in the Era of Google, Wikipedia, and Deep Learning: Are We Humans Still Needed and If Yes for What?

One of the main purposes of education is to teach skills needed in future life and future jobs. What is important and what is useful changes with time. Before the industrial revolution, routine mechanical work was an important part of human activity – now machines can do it (and do it better). Before printing, copying was an important activity – now copy machines do it. Before computers, humans were needed for computing – now computer do it better. With Wikipedia and Google, there is not much need for scholars being erudite. Even extracting dependencies from data – one of the most creative human activities – is now often done automatically, by deep learning techniques, and these techniques are getting better every day. Students that we teach now will be in the workforce for many decades. What should we teach them that will remain useful to them in decades to come? Our answer: ability generalize from a few facts, this is where we are still better than computers