In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
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In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
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Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#2tl;dr - I shop a lot on Amazon. Therefore we no longer need shops. We have the internet. Therefore we no longer need universities.
The nice thing about "in the future" kind of statements is that they are impossible to disprove - especially when it is not specified how far in the future we are talking about. However, I think we are a long way from having gasoline delivered to your door and I always need to pop out for eggs, bread and milk. I also might need a hair cut in the future. Clothes are unlikely to be optional. My wife and I like to go to the movies. The kids like all kinds of shops...
Sure, the internet is affecting retail sales and education. To what extent is very difficult to predict but it is unlikely to be as drastic as the OP suggests.
Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#3"Coffee shop" as in "gathering place".
We have GitHub (social coding!) and now MITx (social learning?) I like the idea. It's like the whole point of the Internet -- bringing people together -- has reached brick and mortar.
Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#4I'd love it if my office could be the coffee shop, or wherever I happen to be, but so far I've found that after a certain level of complexity and team size you pretty much have to be in the same room to make constant progress. I'm not sure if this is a problem with software development in general or just in the niche that I work within.
Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#5It's always been my belief that the massive overhead of a college is not needed to get the best quality education, and that, in fact, this overhead causes too many students to be able to get by with less-than-stellar learning.
Small group apprenticeships, 20-40 people, paying an expert full time to work 40 hours a week would completely immerse students in the material, allow them to pay less money than a traditional university, and allow the teacher to be paid more. It's a win for everyone, except the universities.
Obviously you would lose the campus feel and the college experience, which is no doubt a very important factor for a number of people. But for those who perhaps a little older, this system would allow them to get arguably a better, more complete, experience, for a lower price.
I'd love to get something like this started, but since I am but a mid-twenties man, I wouldn't know where to begin.
Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#6There are two candidates: one from the local state school with an appropriate college degree, a second with relevant MITx certificates of completion. Let’s say all other things between the candidates are equal. Which should be chosen? It’s true that an online education is not the same as the college experience. The candidate who went to college probably enjoyed his experience more, but how much is that experience worth to a potential employer? Unless he’s a member of the same fraternity, probably not as much as the college candidate would hope. And here’s the reality: the student debt of the college candidate controls, to some extent, his salary requirements. Since the MITx candidate appears to have the knowledge required, and has no student debt, he probably can be hired cheaper.
Actually it's the inverse. The student debt accumulated will make the college graduate more desperate to accept any wage offer, and more fearful of keeping the job once there.
People hiring love this kind of dependance.
Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#7tl;dr - I shop a lot on Amazon. Therefore we no longer need shops. We have the internet. Therefore we no longer need universities. The nice thing about "in the future" kind of statements is that they are impossible to disprove - especially when it is not specified how far in the future we are talking about. However, I think we are a long way from having gasoline delivered to your door and I always need to pop out for…
There's also the problem of what will you do with the millions of people working in retail economy, and with the assorted collapsed buying ability of the middle to lower class.
We don't just keep jobs because we need them. We also keep them because we need the distribution of wealth that they make possible --without a way to ensure that, everything collapses. There can't be a billionaire without millions of wage slaves.
Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#8Hopefully of the Amsterdam variety.
Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#9tl;dr - I shop a lot on Amazon. Therefore we no longer need shops. We have the internet. Therefore we no longer need universities. The nice thing about "in the future" kind of statements is that they are impossible to disprove - especially when it is not specified how far in the future we are talking about. However, I think we are a long way from having gasoline delivered to your door and I always need to pop out for…
There's also the problem of what will you do with the millions of people working in retail economy, and with the assorted collapsed buying ability of the middle to lower class. We don't just keep jobs because we need them. We also keep them because we need the distribution of wealth that they make possible --without a way to ensure that, everything collapses. There can't be a billionaire without millions of wage slav…
Guaranteed income. If the economy doesn't require everyone's labor, a bunch of people just shouldn't work, so make sure they can eat and you're done. I don't understand all this American obsession with jobs for everyone.
Re: In the Future Everything Will Be A Coffee Shop
#10This whole scenario is kind of silly. I can understand the simplification in order to debate the merits of a free mass scale online education. However it's not realistic. No two candidates will ever be the same. Everyone has different levels of communication, most will think a little differently. If they're programmers, there's probably different levels of understanding of language concepts, or OOP concepts. In the scenario of one entry level candiate from a brick and mortar institution vs the candidate from MITx. I'm going to choose the person answers my questions most coherently, and writes the better code on my sample problem.
I'm going to hire the employee who i believe will work with me better, and who will produce a higher quality product. I don't care which school he/she went to.