Technology of interruption, If you come

English as a Second Language English Vocabulary, Grammar and Idioms
1

Hello everyone,

From the book Thank You for Being Late by Thomas Friedman.

The Khan–College Board collaboration is really worth studying because it’s a microcosm of how we can beat the bots—how we can make the transition to a different education-to-work-to-lifelong-learning social contract in the age of accelerations. There are three basic ingredi-ents of the Khan–College Board revolution: (1) More will be on you, and you’d better take ownership of that fact and seek out intelligent assistants and assistance everywhere that you can; (2) precisely because more is on you, government and social organizations need to get serious about providing you not just any tools, but much better tools—informed by artificial intelligence tailored exactly for you and your needs and re-inforced by a caring adult or coach, wherever possible; and (3) technology can take you only so far. Concentration also matters. Coleman likes to say that today the “technology of interruption has outpaced the technology of concentration.” Students need to learn the discipline of sus-tained concentration more than ever and to immerse themselves in practice—without headphones on. No athlete, no scientist, no musician ever got better without focused practice, and there is no program you can download for that. It has to come from within.

If you come, they will build it—turning AI into IA is only going to get more efficient every year. “In the old days someone would publish a calculus textbook and get no data and no feedback on what is working for people and what is not,” explained Sal Khan. So they spent the next five years just changing page numbers. Today, he said, Khan Academy can put up a set of calculus tutorials and see within hours which ones are the most effective in helping students come up with the right an-swers, iterate immediately, and start scaling the best tutorials globally within a few more hours. The ability to refine content and make it better at scale is staggering.

I’m not sure I understand correctly the 2 highlighted phrases.
Does “technology of interruption” mply the use of those programs and tools mentioned based on the artificial intelligence?
And what does “if you come” mean in the context above?

Thank you.

3 Likes
2

I would suggest the writer is recommending that students should devote themselves wholeheartedly to their study and no be distracted (interrupted) by the latest devices in technology.

‘If you come …’ simply means - if you visit the College, they will build/construct whatever you want.

3 Likes
3

A side note, the “if you come, they will build it” is a play on a famous line from a movie, Field of Dreams. In the movie, a character hears a voice telling him to build a baseball diamond in the middle of his corn field. The voice says, “If you build it, he will come”, and later a narrator says “If you build it, they will come”.

3 Likes
4

Maybe instead of ‘technology of interruption’ it makes more sense to speak about Disruption is what happens when someone does something clever... - #4 by Torsten ‘technologies of disruption’ when it comes to using AI?

2 Likes