Ramifications of APM

While Winner clearly sees many benefits in the Automatic Professor Machine, I for one am not totally sold on this idea. To me this takes a significant aspect out of education, and would enhance some problems already found in the education system. For one, a significant part of education is experience in your field, and oftentimes that experience, which frequently includes interactions with others in your field, can only be found in a campus environment. Especially for fields like IST and computer science that emphasize teamwork, the APM would take a significant component out of education. Addi tonally it would further specialize people so that they would only have to know facts for their field, and would have less interaction with other fields or general education. Finally, education would become even more based on factual memorization, as the significant part of education that comes from classroom discussions and exposure to alternate views and opinions would be lost with the APS. I do not think you can take the personal component out of education and automate it, at least successfully.