Monday, March 09, 2015

The De-Skilling of the Workforce: Taxi Drivers

NY Times reports that the exam for aspiring NY taxi drivers has been changed to deemphasize the importance of knowing the city's geography, recognizing that with GPS such knowledge in wetware is no longer that important.  It's just one more instance of humans outsourcing skills to machines, devaluing the worth of the old time-tested knowledge and the importance of the people who know it. 

In other words, it's part of the march of progress, of being better today than we were yesterday, of freeing humans from mindless routine in order to be better people.


Do you think I'm ambivalent on the subject? :-)

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