How Might We Learn?

Presented at the UCSD Design Lab for Design@Large. May 8, 2024. When people talk about the most rewarding, high-growth periods of their lives, a pattern emerges: they learned a lot, but learning wasn’t the point. Instead, they were immersed in some purpose with real personal meaning—like a startup, a research project, or a burning question—and they learned whatever was important along the way. If these experiences are so rewarding, why are they so rare? Why can’t we learn everything by “just diving in”? Why does learning so often fail to work as we hope, leaving us with brittle, fragmentary understanding? In this talk, Andy Matuschak will propose some paths forward and suggest how AI could help us create powerful new kinds of enabling environments.