The opening of a Techcrunch article by Vinod Khosla about his extreme faith in the efficacy of algorithms, believing they can even supplant our most basic institutions:

“I was asked about a year ago at a talk about energy what I was doing about the other large social problems, namely health care and education. Surprised, I flippantly responded that the best solution was to get rid of doctors and teachers and let your computers do the work, 24/7 and with consistent quality.

Later, I got to cogitating about what I had said and why, and how embarrassingly wrong that might be. But the more I think about it the more I feel my gut reaction was probably right. The beginnings of ‘Doctor Algorithm’ or Dr. A for short, most likely (and that does not mean ‘certainly’ or ‘maybe’) will be much criticized. We’ll see all sorts of press wisdom decrying ‘they don’t work’ or ‘look at all the silly things they come up with.’ But Dr A. will get better and better and will go from providing ‘bionic assistance’ to second opinions to assisting doctors to providing first opinions and as referral computers (with complete and accurate synopses and all possible hypotheses of the hardest cases) to the best 20% of the human breed doctors. And who knows what will happen beyond that?” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Maybe the way to innovate schools is to eliminate schools”: