I think Beane makes a reasonable case for his central premise – that new technologies are disrupting the traditional pattern of expert / novice apprenticeships. For most of human history, the way people learned new skills (especially job skills) was to start as an apprentice watching a mentor or master, gradually be given more opportunities to practice increasingly-complicated skills, and eventually pass into a master or mentor role themselves. Recently, however, new technologies have allowed experts to do more work by themselves, thus leaving the novices with only grunt work or observation, preventing them from learning the skills that will allow them to become the next generation of experts. (In Beane’s terminology, the three elements that compose the “skill code” are challenge, complexity, and connection, all of which are being disrupted by new technological innovations.) Where I think Beane is weaker is on his proposed solutions to fixing this problem (using AI and similar technologies to forge new global apprenticeships for new types of expert / novice collaboration), which seems very “rose-colored glasses” to me and also hypes new GPT-style technology in the same way I remember YouTube being hyped 15 years ago and the World Wide Web being hyped 30 years ago. Will it come to pass? I guess we’ll find out in another 15 years.