When we turn education into an extension of work all we’ve really done is taken a corporate cost and extenalized it to the public sector and we’ve devalued education so its no longer teaching people that they have essential dignity when they enter the room but they will have to learn something to be useful, valuable members of society. The principals of the schools meet with the CEOs of the companies to find out, “What do you want them to know? Do you want them to know Excel, Java, Python – we’ll deliver your the employee of the future.”
Vendor Lock-In
“Then I’m afraid were just going to have to cut our looses – for the moment anyway – before something truly awful happens and switch it off.”“Switch it off?”
“Yeah, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, very good.”
“What?”
Following an upgrade of the BBC’s cutting-edge Syncopatico in-house operating system its syncopaticaption intelligent live subtitling software is still doggedly refusing either to learn from its mistakes or to give up and switch itself off.
“As I say I’m not technical, but would it help if I put a hammer through some of this crap in here?”
“Yeah”
“I’m not being funny – I’m including you in that.”
“So one thing that’s really impressive about 2.0…”
“Impressive?”
“… is that, once it’s up and running, it’s design to be pretty much bomb-proof.”
“What does that mean?”
“You can literally pull the plug and it’ll keep going.”
“I don’t believe this.”
“So the thing with fail-safe protocols these days… I mean they’re brilliant, don’t get me wrong, they’re pretty much close to perfect as long as everything works fine.”
“Yeah.”
“But the second something starts to go wrong – which technically can’t happen, by the way – to be honest, you kind of miss the off button. Do you know what I mean?”
“Ah!”
“I know. Who’d have thought?”