Indeed, if you look at basic schooling, there are not been much, if any, progress in pedagogy from Antiquity to our times (to pinpoint this compare your experience with e.g. 4th century St-Augustine account of his schooling experience in his “Confessions”).

Yet nowadays the amount of knowledge to grasp for making a positive (new) contribution is staggering and each new individual has to escalate this growing mountain again and again.

The top priority should be to find way to accelerate skills acquisition, e.g. by a more enactive pedagogy through intelligent use of multimodal interfaces coupled to more intelligent CBT in order to enhance individually tailored knowledge acquisition.

Yet, another shortcoming of our times is to mix information acquisition (mere facts) with knowledge. This is all the difference from an idiot savant to a wise (or to say it with more modesty, a truly knowledgeable) man.

To put in somewhat bluntly, without radical educational incentives and true breakthrough in pedagogy, we will have more and more unusable people eagerly replaced for their jobs by relentless machines.

The interesting thing about current trends in tech is that rather than mass producing cookie-cutter replicas of a product, we will see very soon mass production of individualized items. Thus items crafted for an individual will have the cost advantage of being mass produced. In addition, this automation will save resources in the long run so that they may be employed in meeting the needs of others.