While the world provides any number of opportunities to learn in any field, area or specialisation or in many combinations but there is hardly any teaching, course or even a sermon to ‘Learn How To Learn.’ If you look at the world around a large number of tech visionaries, who propel today’s world and have also brought the world to this day and age belong to that category. As nebulous as it may sound, if the art, science and practice of learning is not brought to a near perfect stage, how do we use this tool to make sense of the ultimate transformation we will keep facing on a regular basis in days to come and make a success of ourselves.
AI is becoming primordial to our lives. There is a real chance that many careers we aspire today or craft may not even exist in the AI powered world. So what is the future of work and how students should prepare for the AI world. The leading light of the AI world for over one and half decades, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis has had a piece of advice to students; You must focus on learning how to learn. For students who would be navigating potential careers in the tech sector, the next five or ten years will witness an incredible amount of disruption and change due to technology, mainly AI.
How do you deal with all this? Demis Hassabis has the answer. The student should focus on learning how to deal with information and acquire new skills quickly. The undergraduate years have to wisely prioritize self-discovery and, critically, mastering the art of learning itself. In his own words. “It’s important to use the time you have as an undergraduate to understand yourself better and learn how to learn.” This is the skill he cracked very early in life and has been one of its best practitioners the world has of offer.
From picking up strategic thinking & pattern recognition through chess mastery, to systems thinking & creativity through video game development to interdisciplinary learning through cognitive neuroscience, Demis Hassabis’s capacity to learn, practice, research and deliver in a fast moving, dynamic real time world has been something unheard of so far. He co-led the invention of deep reinforcement learning, and learnt the art of scalable research management from a 3 person start up to a world leading research lab. He built multidisciplinary teams and his contributions through AlphaFold is way beyond even the best fairy tales can handle. Being bestowed with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2024 has been a gesture of symbolic respect for a man who embodies learning in its truest sense.
WHEN WILL THE WORLD AWAKEN TO THE DIRE NEED OF THE SKILL OF LEARNING?
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.