He’s writing about Singapore in 1993 and the question is even more prescient here and now. We focus on STEM and software boot camps and “hour of code” and all the ways we are trying to force kids to be better inputs for the machine. We are making a trade for which the cost is as yet unclear.

Once upon a time, even in Singapore, schools taught children how to think. Now they mainly teach them how to programme. But what happens to a society that grows up like this, without learning to make distinctions, with only the computer’s logic of ‘yes’ and ‘no’? What happens in the heads of children who grow up with the impression that every problem has a solution, and that everything is at most a question of software?

From A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East by Tiziano Terzani