In the same TED talk by Nicholas Negroponte referred to elsewhere in this column we can get a glimpse of how much time we can save by making learning (if that's the word) almost instantaneous. Negroponte explains:
My prediction is that we are going to ingest information-we're going to swallow a pill and know English and swallow a pill and know Shakespeare.... It will go through the bloodstream and it will know when it's in the brain and, in the right places, it deposits the information.If I understand correctly (and chances are good that I don't) what Negroponte is telling us here is that "studying" will soon be a thing of the past. This definitely goes beyond the wonders of Google Translate which makes knowing, or learning, another language unnecessary. In this particular case we don't have to rely on an app that instantly translates for us since we'll simply "know" another language from ingesting the right pill.