Just as modern research is taking a new shape, so are the importance of different intellectual skills.

Library and online searches

Modern day research and education is just a few buttons away via online searches. A modern witty or factually rigorous person does not necessarily frequent to the library, but rather to online searches. Want to know how many pianos are made in the US per year? Search it online! Want to build a rocket in your backyard? Search it online! University libraries do have quite a lot of books that never made it online but the internet should suffice 99% of your queries.

Storage and memorization

As society grapple and process with a much bigger amount of information than before, our brains are no longer the best place to store everything. Storage space and memory leak really trouble us. The challenge of a modern person is rather memory management. How do we make space for and retain the most important piece of information. And before that, how do we decide what is important? When a student records a lecture, s/he also want the professor’s slide; they believe those slides contain the essence. In contrast, the type of game that awards the wrong type of of intellectual skill is jeopardy. It tests your knowledge of random facts.

Broad-Problem Solving / Thinking outside the box

When thinking about problem solving and creativity, it’s interesting to first see the kind of activity that is about to be replaced by a machine. The Economists has a really great quote on AI regarding this, “The pattern-recognising abilities of deep-learning algorithms are impressive, but computers still lack many of the mental tools that humans take for granted. A big one is “transfer learning”, which is what AI researchers call reasoning by analogy. This is the ability to take lessons learned in one domain and apply them to another. And machines like AlphaGo have no goals, and no more awareness of their own existence than does a word processor or a piece of accounting software.” As machines take on a bigger analytical role, especially anything that can be clearly defined, a person’s ability derive new vision or type of solutions based on different ways of thinking or experience will become more valuable.

Advanced tools

I don’t think the days of widely accessible machine learning tools is far off, and just as excel skill and data science is valued today, the ability to use advanced analytical tools will be even more pronounced in the future.

Conclusion

So what does this all mean? It means a modern ‘smart’ person is someone who is eager to search online questions rather than postpone, someone who strategize learning (ie: Zuckerberg made a forum for Harvard students to share notes and interpretations of text because he wasn’t studying at all), someone who is good at thinking outside the box, and someone who really knows how to use their tools.