One of my first jobs as a trainee reporter was to write a daily stock market report. It was the sort of task that wouldn’t trouble an experienced journalist, but for a novice like me, it was scary and hard.
I was lucky, though: after I filed my draft, my editor would have me stand behind his shoulder and watch his screen while he edited it. He would explain out loud what he was changing and why, which helped me learn how to do it a bit better the next day.
I thought of him when I read The Skill Code, a book published last year by the academic Matt Beane, which argues that the “working bond” between experts and learners has been “the bedrock of humanity’s transfer of skills and ingenuity for millennia”. But can it survive the age of artificial intelligence?