The future of learning

[th!nkstyle]

Its question time:

How long are people going to going to have to go to school to get a PhD in 150 years from now? I guess a related (but pseudo off-topic) question is how long will we be living?

I still can't believe the actual mass of PhDs happening. I mean, I can understand in places like science (or at least try to comprehend), but its still going on at an equal rate in social science. I wonder when things will actually slow down because of a lack of things to do? Have we hit an inflection point as we have with population growth? How correlated are number of PhDs to total population?


I think that we will have an average life-span of 120 years, and a PhD will take an average of 15 years. Pure speculation of course:P

[Last Song]

I think it's going to going to be about the same as now. Except different. Not too different, just different enough to know it's not the same. Probably cause of time. And maybe wars or something. Possibly viruses, etc. Just watch movies, it's all there. The books will probably float, with strings obviously supporting them. We'll study from that. The books, not the strings. Yeh. Hope that helped.

[Biff_Loman]

Well, that was unexpected.

[Braggi]

a PhD is, and should be, for serious learners. getting it as resume filler and as required qualifications for jobs is retarded and useless.

i estimate that in the future, people will vear away from getting them at institutions though, as self paced learning outside is far better.

[coffeezombie]

a PhD is, and should be, for serious learners. getting it as resume filler and as required qualifications for jobs is retarded and useless.

So do you have a problem with a PhD being a requirement for being, say, a university professor?

[eyebyte_atWork]

I do not think he meant that at all - I have had this discussion many times with a friend of mind.

It always comes to the same conclusion. PHD's are for serious learner and not neccessarely for money making potential. In today's society there are many tech schools teaching programming and networking because it is practical and needed and as such pay well.

If one attempts getting a PHD for the sole purpose of making more money - he is working far too hard - for he can go to the tech schools for a year or maybe two and make far more money than getting a PHD in whatever. You get a PHD cause you love the field and would like to always work in it. Money is secondary.

I think thats what Braggi meant.

[Phenylethylene]

I think that we will have an average life-span of 120 years,

I read somewhere once that 120 years was the upper limit of possible human lifespan, I'm not entirely sure how that conclusion was drawn or what the parameters were. If the ratio of PhD time to lifespan stays the same, that would work out to about 10 years or so.

I'm personally more inclined to think that study will become more specialized faster than more years are added onto study. I think a side effect of this will be a reduction in our ability to problem solve because of a lowered capacity to make intuitve leaps between unrelated fields. For instance, I think that part of the reason we read about multi-talented geniuses like daVinci is because the depth of study for a given subject at the time was more shallow which made it was easier to gain a broad understanding of many things that could in turn be related to each other for fresh insights.

[Braggi]

yeah, sure, why not.