Hi,

After reading an article about braindance and prison, someone mentioned using the long period of VR to program a criminal with socially acceptable skills and/or behaviour.

So I was thinking...
...If you have a high technology society [such as any that have skill chips] or one with common magic, why would there still be schools ??

After all, as soon as you get a job, they'll pay not much money and give you a skillchip, or imbue you with a spell, that enables you to do whatever job they hire you for to a satisfactory degree.

When you consider the trade off of spending years in school and then college and then even further education to the cost and effort of skill chip handling systems, why would anyone do it ??

And for those in "fiscally reduced areas", why educate them if they're never going to get a job that requires taught skills...
...Reality being what it is, kids from slums almost never get jobs in nice areas.

Thoughts ???

This is an interesting idea. The trend over the last century has been towards more education; at least in part to allow industry to have better workers, and in part to satisfy a general, neo-liberal desire for upward mobility for one's children.

How this might be affected by a technological advance that precludes the necessity for educated workers is a difficult question to answer, but I think it boils down to costs. Is it cheaper to educate a worker, or to install the cyber-/bioware necessary to make him able to do the job?

Currently, we are advised that people will switch jobs several times during their productive lifetime. Would that be made easier by skillwires? Would technology be a better way out of the slums than basketball?

You're going to have to nail down some restrictions, otherwise the entire question is meaningless. What are the weaknesses of the skill-implantation? If there are some, those are your reasons for skoolin. If there aren't any, there's no reason for skoolin.

~J

While not strictly spelled out in canon, skillsofts, knowsofts, lingausofts, and so on, are just like maps of people's experiences. They provide a ridgid structure from which their can be no deviation, one cannot make intuitive leaps or innovate from them. The reliance on softs would be an end to creativity, invention, and progress. Worse, without the use of tutorsofts (the equivalent of actual education in time and effort) one cannot learn from the softs, and thus cannot add to them. Therefore, if something new did come along, no one would understand how to use it, as it would fall outside their maps. That's why corporations spend energy to educate, taking the promising students and further educating them, but taking each only to a certain level. Softs are taken from these educated people, without them, the whole structure would fall apart.

As to educating the poor: is the purpose of primary education to endow one with commercial value? I think not, rather it is to develop the brain and habits that allow one to function inside a society. Skillwires cannot be put into children, not yet anyway, and, even more so, you still have to do something with them all day while you work. Schools provide daycare, healthcare, and prepare a person to deal with other people. And they do all this rather cheaply. Primary education also builds their attributes up to average levels - magic is not cheap and ubiquitous enough to supply the entire population of children with basic attributes at the same efficiency as schools, nor can such cyber be used at that age.

That said, and paradigms aside, schools will use a single virtual classroom and teacher to educate whole schools. There's no need for a school to be more than a warehouse with rugs and a gym area. It's just a kennel.

I couldn't disagree more. Our entire economic system requires a steady influx of labour at the lowest level that is indoctrinated with the idea that it belongs where it is. If even one generation were to break out of this mold and actually live up to the ideals of our education system, the economy would collapse.

A somewhat dated but still valuable book to read is Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs by Paul Willis (Columbia University Press 1981[1977]).

Do your answers/thoughts if I define "skill chips" as "skill or information on an externally loaded storage medium" ??

It assumes that the relevant people have internal hardware or software capable of accessing and using skills and information on the skill chips...
...Which could also be implanted memories, spell implanted skills or information, machine intelligences that do the controlling, etc.

Even in games like SR or CP2020, would people goto college and/or university to get skills and experience when it could just be downloaded/implanted/accessed relatively cheaply from skill chips [price of course and time taken vs skill chip access system] ??

I think this might have been touched on by some posts that asked about being connected to the internet at all times, thus being able to access the sum of recorded knowledge.

Generally, skill chips or skillwire systems aren't considered to be "a rigid structure from which there can be no deviation, one cannot make intuitive leaps or innovate from them" because that would require the listing of specific things they can do [though I do remem something about Wired Reflexes being limited responses to external stimuli, which is why when someone creeps up on you you can end up blasting them to pieces with no conscious thought]...
...They are generally considered to just skills encoded to a chip or similar. Anything else would make them very limited in usefulness, and relies on "hand waving" to make them work the way they are portrayed in fiction.


Poor people without formal education do quite well, thank you very much...
...They learn the skills they need to survive [illiterate people do amazingly well without being able to read or write].

Their "lack of skills" only become an issue when they "enter" the world of jobs that require those skills...
...There are people who can perform skills very well, with no formal education.

For instance, approx 20% of USA are deemed as functionally illiterate and 50% have trouble reading well, which affects their ability to get jobs and function in society - but it doesn't affect their ability to function in their local society.

As evidenced by the fact that if all the immigrants stopped work/were deported, most companies would not function and economies would nosedive.

Someone has to make the skillsofts and someone has to cast the spells. In a magic heavy environment you're going to have a great many magic schools. In a skillsoft heavy environment you're going to have a great many of programing schools.

Skillwires and the use of softs in general is considered easy to spot, meaning they must be rather rigid. Consider a Garmin, it will give everyone using it the same directions to a place. If a shortcut is built, it won't take people down it until updated. If everyone is using softs, then no shortcuts are created. And if we consider ficiton, then there must be an advantage to school, neh?


Are you defining function as survive? Surely. But this only reinforces my point that education allows progress, not just survival. Self-education is perfectly possible.

I still think the topic in general is too vague to usefully discuss, but I'm going to share with you a revelation I had regarding trigonometric identities and such beasts.

There's a lot of stuff related to trigonometry, like identities and all of those nasty integrals in which a whole bunch of crap turns out to end up being one nasty inverse trigonometric function with some other stuff tacked on, that I once cried out against the idea of memorizing. "I'll just look it up!" I said. The argument made all the more sense because at the time, the questions I'd get were of the form "use trigonometric identities to solve…" or "solve [the integral of the derivative of a simple inverse trigonometric function]". I could just look all that crap up. I managed to somehow squeak out a passing grade, and promptly proceeded to forget the little I ever did learn of it.

And then, one day, I started coming on problems that would eat my brain. They'd be drilling some unrelated in differential or integral calculus, but I simply couldn't find anywhere to go with them. Eventually the question would get gone over, and there'd be a trigonometric identity that could make large quantities of nastiness go away, or an inverse trigonometric function that would provide a nice, relatively neat antiderivative.

But wait, couldn't I just look this stuff up?

Well, the thing is, we'd moved on from learning that. All of a sudden, there was no longer a big sign in the road saying "hey! That thing you can just look up is coming!" It can be argued that full memorization wasn't necessary, but without that extra assistance that doesn't exist in any real problem, recognizing when to use the reference material became impossible.

Which is why I think the "the internet is my external brain" idea, while not totally off-base, overlooks major advantages to the meat brain: if we see something, we don't go looking for it in our brain; aside from edge cases like partial forgetfulness, the act of perceiving brings the relevant knowledge to our attention automatically. This is not currently the case with the internet; the knowledge of humanity may be at my fingertips, but it's a long path from, say, my optic nerve to the internet.

So that's some thoughts, take them as you will.

~J

i think one need to separate a knowsoft from a activesoft

also, there have been more then one time where cross-discipline knowledge have lead to leaps in understanding.

activesofts and similar will be perfect for day laborers, assembly line workers and others that perform the same task over and over. but even there, at least at the start, problems that require creativity shows up.

i recently watched a program about the hubble space telescope repairs. at least two times they had to improvise, as problems that was not thought of showed up. one was a door that didnt close, and another was a solar panel that didnt fold up as expected.

each time, the astronauts came up with ideas, relayed them back to control and got the go ahead.

now consider what could happen if the astronauts had their missions chipped rather then trained?

remember, chipped skills do not allow for things like edge. edge can potentially represent ones ability to think on ones feet, coming up with solutions on the spot.

a soldier with chipped drills will be like the trench wars of WW1...

Do you know why school is mandatory in most democracies (in theory at least)? Not to teach people a job, nor to keep the childrens off the street but for two reasons.
First: school is one of the tools of national unity. School is where the children will learn your language, your history, your geography, your culture and so on.
Second: School will give them the basic knowledge they'll need to understand the world they live and will teach them to think by themselves and form their own opinion so that when they have the age to vote, they'll be able to "vote correctly".

Of course, that's just theory.

Any qualification has multiple functions, of which "learning to do something" is only one. Society may provide general training as a means of enforcing unity, like Blade says. (Larger practical troubles, unity of the downtrodden + unity of the well-off is a usual result.)

A more interesting (from a corper POV) function is signalling core competencies (say "attributes") to potential employers, and in the long run training those core competencies. You may be able to "inject" experience with a certain type of problem, but the brain connections that make use of that experience have to be trained. And slotting a skillsoft will stop you from doing just that.

The Aztecs had universal education. Learn a trade (plus: all boys- how to fight, all girls- how to take care of the household), learn your history and religion, learn how to behave properly.

Interestingly, all women learned how to weave, and one of the most common forms of money in the Aztec world was woven cloth. Men were not allowed to perform this function. So, women basically had the power and duty to 'print' money for the family. An industrious woman could cover the family cost of living all on her own. This economic power has not been studied to a great degree to determine what effect it had on the status of women in that society. My opinion is that it probably gave them a lot of 'pull' in the family and in the broader society, a role that was downplayed by the misogynist Spanish in their records about Aztec society. (The same guys who rewrote the Tzitzimine as male demons, rather than the original female healing and nature spirits - and possibly midwives/herbalists.)

In a market-driven economy, anything that leads to money leads to power. Education consistently has been shown to lead to money, even in changing times. Training (as opposed to education) leads to money, sometimes faster than education, but is more subject to obsolescence.

I would put skill chips into the training category, for reasons similar to some earlier posts.

No...The trend over the last century has been towards more time spent in public schools. If you go back and look at the education standards for high school admittance during the late 1800's compared with today you'll see that modern students leave high school with the same relative education as their counterparts in the 1800's entered high school with. If you look at the "higher" education you'll see a similar pattern. Even though the amount of knowledge available to mankind has drastically increased over the last 100 years, the actual amount of knowledge learned by students has fallen. Given what I've seen of universities of late it seems obvious to me that the drive to include ever more students in "higher" education has little to do with learning anything, and everything to do with indoctrinating young minds to accept certain political, economic, and religious ideas.


The introduction and continued expansion of automation will eventually do away with the unskilled laborer. At the rate of advance of computer science we will see in our lifetime the development of affordable computers with not just more computational power than the human brain, but more computational power than all of mankind combined. Fully autonomous robotic labor is an eventuality, an eventuality that will replace the minimum wage worker.

Even if the technology were developed why go to the expense of cyberizing human workers that have free will when you can just buy a robot that can do the same task and never uses sick days?

Ok in this discussion we're skirting the idea of a technological singularity. Which Shadowrun and CP2020 do as well. The idea being that the AIs will simply be smarter than we are in every respect and start designing themselves, along with drones. At that point pretty much anything people do could be argued as futile as school.

However SR isn't there yet. Real skills are still better than chipped skills in game terms. Hence a demand. And again the idea of cross inovation and such is in there

Also it is significantly harder to use magic to manipulate a whole organization compared with hacking peoples skillwire systems.

And drones still can't do a range of things people can. At least not well.

Hence in an SR or similar setting one would have people with real skills, people with chipped skills, drones working away, laborers doing what the drones can't or what people pay them to do.

And maybe in the bottom rung people working for less than it costs to operate drones.

When I was a kid, they used to argue this point, that unskilled labor would go first, then up the ladder. But reality has shown the reverse. Retail went first - the area people said would go last, because people like contact: easiest to automat because the customer does all the labor. Middle management is being super crunched out. Upper after that. Turns out it's often times cheaper to hire people than design machines (which breakdown, wear out, and have many of the same problems as people) to do complicated labor processes. And human workers have one advantage over machines, that's really hard to beat. They buy your product. Capitalism: making itself obsolete?