One of the societal areas most affected by cultural bias and economics over the last forty years has been the prejudice associated with having a college bachelor’s degree. In a period when US inflation rose 283%, college tuition rose 1,213%. Of a personal note, mariner paid $1,000 tuition plus the cost of books for one year back in 1964; today, that year would cost him an average of $14,000 plus several fees. Further, it is a common sociological opinion that citizens without college degrees have been devalued in the value of their participation in US society. It is a common opinion among sociology professors that this devaluation is the cause for MAGA to evolve. Atlantic magazine had a recent article about this college-related phenomenon:

“Nearly 60 percent of adults ages 25 to 29 do not have a bachelor’s degree. If they have the skills to do a certain job, why should they be denied the chance solely because they lack a somewhat arbitrary paper credential?

And yet, despite its popularity, skills-based hiring (degree not needed) is a dead-end policy. If every employer in America formally stopped requiring a four-year college degree for every available position as of tomorrow, nothing much would change. Indeed, companies such as Walmart, Apple, and many others have proudly touted their removal of degree requirements in job postings, but the net effect on hiring has been very small. A recent Harvard Business School study found that when companies remove degree requirements, the share of hires with a bachelor’s degree declines by only two percentage points. Employers may not insist on a college degree, but they still prefer it.”

Mariner has chosen the term ‘white collar class’ to identify the prejudice that excludes non-degree citizens and discounts their social value. At the end of the Second World War, the Federal government saw to it that everyone had a chance to go to college; cost was heavily cut. The democratic party was the primary beneficiary to this social shift but, over the years as the advantages of and the cost needed for college-based income continued to rise, labor income did not. Today, the ‘labor’ party is infected with white collar disease (Woke) – just ask any misguided MAGA individual.

This could be an issue resolved on a level playing field except for the introduction of GPT – Generative (self-producing) Pre-trained (copycat) Transformer (can change input into a different self-determined output)¹ – A human-like ability to translate, interpret and create information without human intervention.

One can imagine the impact on an education system rooted in behavioral and textbook communication. The saying “Who needs a teacher when we have GPT?” already is a common euphemism on social media. It is a simple extension to say “Who needs departments of education?” Will ‘education’ be simple training programs used by employers targeted on corporate/government efficiency? Already, liberal arts education is disappearing as colleges are faced with the automation dilemma.

It is still rare but there are pre-school educators who use tabletop robots to help with behavioral education.

Mariner has no crystal with which to interpret the future of education. It is important at the least to understand how integrated and influenced education is by society. Citizens today should clearly understand the cause and effect of white collar and GPT as imbalances in cultural unity.

Ancient Mariner

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FOOTNOTE

¹GPT2 – GPT-2 was designed specifically to predict and generate the next sequence of text to follow a given sentence without human interference or knowledge of sources.

GPT3 – a sizable step up from its predecessor. It includes texts such as Wikipedia entries as well as the open-source data set Common Crawl. Notably, GPT-3 can generate computer code and improve performance in niche areas of content creation such as storytelling, aka inventing its own reality.

GPT4 – a large multimodal model (LMM), meaning it’s capable of parsing image inputs as well as text. This iteration is the most advanced GPT model, exhibiting human-level performance across a variety of benchmarks in the professional and academic realm. For comparison, GPT-3.5 scored in the bottom 10 percent of test-takers in a simulated bar exam. GPT-4 scored in the top 10 percent.

Roughly speaking, the European era of colonialism existed from the 14th century until the 19th century. A weakening of colonialism began with the creation of the United States in the late 1700s. It was an era when the European nations played a role very similar to today’s venture capitalists. Europe didn’t want there to be too much war because war doesn’t necessarily generate profit. Instead, through political and especially religious domination, Europe invaded cultures rather than territory. Capitalism was the only political game.

It took two world wars to reorder the international relationship from economically constricted nations to an era of independent nations. The twentieth century, all 100 years of it, was a process of restructuring economic theory, redividing political authority and launching an unprecedented pursuit of technology from automobiles and interstates to landing on the moon.

As much as can be expected, democracy bloomed around the world. While wars continued, they were regional, e.g, Vietnam war. The economic reordering of the world economy based on independent nations increased gross domestic profit in all civilized nations, ergo, the richer nations could finance regional wars as a means of political influence.

The concept of power through financial support of war continues into the twenty-first century. Like an addiction, too much war can be bad for the planet. It is clear across all news platforms that war seems not to solve twenty-first century issues. Human society in general struggles with the last century’s version of venture capitalism, democratic concepts being stressed by instant global communication and a restructuring of political power based on stressed natural resources as common as drinking water.

The elephant in the room for the twenty-first century is global warming. Virtually everyone still would rather keep the twentieth century values than have to start over again with a new era. But at what price?

Corporations have moved on and are not controlled by twentieth century democracy. Governments around the world struggle to identify new international relationships. Wealth continues to grow despite the deepening economic crisis around the world. Dictators are leveraging public fear as the world shifts.

Unfortunately, no one knows how things will work out but there are indications that human strife cannot afford to continue paying for the twentieth century.

Ancient Mariner