All knowledge cannot be reduced to pure information–not yet anyway.

Machines may eventually rise to knowledge, or perhaps humans will be reduced to mere information. The first outcome poses challenges, while the second is the triumph of a new sort of fascism.

In a NYRB piece that argues specifically against MOOCs and more broadly against humans being replaced by machines or encouraged to be more machine-like, David Bromwich is convinced that virtual education is a scary step toward the mechanization of people. 

I’m not so dour about MOOCs, especially since everyone doesn’t have the privilege of a high-quality classroom situation. Their offerings seem an extension to me of the mission of public libraries: Make the tools of knowledge available to everyone. The presence of both online education and physical colleges simultaneously is the best-case scenario. Having one without the other is far less good. Bromwich’s fear, a realistic one, is that traditional higher education will be seriously disrupted by the new order.

From Bromwich:

American society is still on the near side of robotification. People who can’t conjure up the relevant sympathy in the presence of other people are still felt to need various kinds of remedial help: they are autistic or sociopathic, it may be said—those are two of a range of clinical terms. Less clinically we may say that such people lack a certain affective range. However efficiently they perform their tasks, we don’t yet think well of those who in their everyday lives maximize efficiency and minimize considerate, responsive, and unrehearsed interaction, whether they neglect such things from physiological incapacity or a prudential fear of squandering their energy on emotions that are not formally necessary.

This prejudice continues to be widely shared. But the consensus is visibly weaker than it was a decade ago. As people are replaced by machines—in Britain, they call such people “redundant”—the survivors who remain in prosperous employment are being asked to become more machinelike. This fits with the idea that all the valuable human skills and varieties of knowledge are things that can be assimilated in a machinelike way. We can know the quantity of information involved, and we can program it to be poured into the receiving persons as a kind of “input” that eventually yields the desired “product.” Even in this short summary, however, I have introduced an assumption that you may want to stand back and question. Is it really the case that all knowledge is a form of information? Are there some kinds of learning or mental activity that are not connected with, or properly describable as, knowledge?•