Editor’s note: Besides following tech developments, our author is a musical composer (Juilliard-trained). He has provided a musical composition for you to listen to while reading this column. This piece is called “Forever Learning.”
People no longer need to stare into space when waiting in line at the bank, grocery store, or DMV. Now, they can text, chat, read, and increasingly, through e-learning and AI, get answers to almost any question. There is a hunger for knowledge and information. The e-learning market is growing incredibly quickly, and there is an avalanche of investment in AI, although experts do not yet know how to quantify this market.
The global e-learning market was valued at approximately $214.26 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.5 percent, reaching around $1,124.79 billion by 2030. This more than a trillion-dollar market probably deserves to be defined here. E-learning, or electronic learning, refers to using digital technologies and the internet to deliver educational content, facilitate learning experiences, and enable training programs. It allows learners to access educational resources remotely, often through devices like computers, tablets, and smartphones, without being physically present in a traditional classroom. This is a big deal, and it is revolutionary.
There are not too many things that grow annually at 20 percent! But this is one of them.
Seriously, this is revolutionary. Twenty years ago, no one was online while walking around, and now, 5 billion people are, even when they are not sitting in front of computers. Howard Lieberman created this image with ChatGPT 4o, an AI software program.
The internet has done to the cost of learning what online shopping did to Black Friday crowds—made it cheaper, easier, and way less chaotic. The web has turned education into a budget-friendly buffet. Don’t want to pay for pricey dorms and ivy-covered campuses? Your classroom is now your couch, and your tuition doesn’t include maintaining century-old walls. Forget battling stadium-sized lecture halls or coughing up $200 for a textbook when free PDFs exist. The internet flips the script at overpriced learning and gives us open-source materials, free online libraries, and enough chapter summaries to make any professor weep. Udemy and Coursera are slashing prices with deals that make Black Friday look tame. You can pay-as-you-learn. DIY degrees are here to save your wallet and your sanity.
E-learning doesn’t just save you money—it saves time, patience, gas money, commuting, parking tickets, and overpriced lattes. Your “commute” is the ten seconds it takes to boot up your laptop, and study abroad dreams can now involve Wi-Fi, not visa applications. You can learn astrophysics for free on NASA’s website and sourdough baking on YouTube. Pay for an online course once, and it’s yours forever, whenever curiosity strikes. Want to master Excel or brush up on your French? E-learning makes global, lifelong education as accessible as your kitchen coffee pot.
Right now, I am learning as much as I was learning in college, and I would have never believed that fifty years after I graduated, this would be the case. It is truly an incredible time to be curious and alive. E-learning is flexible, affordable, and always there. There is no need to sell a kidney to afford tuition; budget-friendly and free options exist. For the curious and connected, e-learning is a total game-changer.
Pardon me while I nerd out for a minute. During my lifetime, computers have gotten more than a trillion times better! Just a few details to show this. Today’s Apple’s M4 processor boasts an impressive 38 TOPS (Trillions of Operations Per Second), more than double the 18 TOPS of last year’s predecessor, the M3. To put this into perspective, the PDP-1, introduced in 1960, managed just 187 KOPS (thousands of operations per second).
Modern commercial processors are over 200 million times faster than the PDP-1, the groundbreaking machine that laid the foundation for hacker culture at MIT, Bolt Beranek and Newman, and beyond. In February 1963, a PDP-1 would set you back $120,000—about $1.2 million today. By contrast, a base-model MacBook, priced around $1,200, delivers astronomically higher performance. In just 60 years, we’ve achieved an incredible 200 billion times more operations per dollar, marking a revolution in computing power and accessibility. And what used to take up an entire room when I entered the workforce now fits in my pocket. I cannot think of anything else in history that got a trillion times better.
