(Replying to PARENT post)
I don't agree with this. One-off savants who can do some random task like remember the order of a deck of cards after seeing it once are just optimising all their energy towards something arbitrary but not actually that useful.
i.e. Feats of memory are a waste of effort when you can just write things down.
(Replying to PARENT post)
But on an more optimistic note I think the ability of technology to accommodate different learning styles will help unlock the potential of many people. I'm looking forward to seeing what innovations come from people who think in ways that are truly unconventional.
However, I think a very important underlying question is "what kind of intelligence are we actually going to need in the future?" I think it depends on who you ask.
Most Americans would probably say 'logical reasoning for working with computers so you won't have to worry about automation'.
But if Kai-Fu Lee was here I bet he would say 'creativity and artistic talent' since art is a human activity that is harder for a machine to grasp.
Either way, the capacity of the internet to proliferate bullshit means that everyone is going to have to learn epistemology whether they want to or not.
(Replying to PARENT post)
I wonder whether anyone in modern times has tried it, and how it turned out.
(Replying to PARENT post)
1) We know that our minds can do so much more. Why? Review the various well-documented feats of memory/computation that people have been capable of. This is like seeing a fellow human run a mile in less than two minutes.
2) Question is: Why cannot these levels be attained by more people? My hypothesis is the way our brains are trained in childhood. Baby Mozart, etc. toys aside, the way baby brains gather information and are trained are limited by their bodily abilities, which are puny.
3) The answer seems to be to devise a way to feed information-reach, highly non-normal stimulus to young brains, e.g. using heads up displays. This is the method described in Mimsy Were the Borogoves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimsy_Were_the_Borogoves)
This sounds nightmarish and we also don't have the technology currently. But in the intense competition for colleges/high-schools and even middle schools who knows what can happen?
P.S. Also wanted to mention Hinton's models/toys with which he claimed to have learned to intuitively think about 4th dimensional objects, they are described in his book https://publicdomainreview.org/2015/10/28/notes-on-the-fourt....