Will digital revolution kill learning?

A few years ago I thought that mobile app developers would soon rule the communication business and investors would push all their money into app startups. It happened for a while, indeed, but today investments seem to move  from app creation to development tools creation. I will now deal with only one of the reasons, the most important one in my view.

Improvement of digital technology has a controversial consequence on human know-how. On one hand, numerous new professions emerge, but on the other, many positions become redundant. If there is big enough demand in the market for a certain skill, companies will try to automatize it. And thanks to the internet, you do not have to buy a robot and have it shipped to your home or office anymore, just sign in and create your website, your mobile application, anything you need. See this DIY smartphone app builder:

 

Another example is Mailchimp and similar email marketing solutions that, in recent years, have made it totally unnecessary to assign a company with the technical job of sending out e-dm messages to a list. And as you know, the crisis first hit marketing budgets, so not only SMEs think about using more and more of the abundant automatized resources of the web.

The main question this trend has brought us is: does it make sense to learn anything anymore? If your skill is valuable and sought after, it will be automatized soon. And the other way around, if it is not automatized, it won't take you far because people don't need it that much.

Well, I think it does make sense to learn one very important subject. The way to learn. There will always be new skills that you need to make existing technology work. And some, even more important skills, to improve it. Those who can learn and apply those skills swiftly can have a great advantage, let them be individuals or organizations.

But if the most important skill that you must teach kids is the ability to learn, it will have consequences on the educational system. Instead of coding, business management, geography or law, we might get back to ancient Greek subjects like rhetoric (to manage words), geometry (to manage space) and logic (to manage reasons). Anyway, that's another story.