"Provocative, ambitious, and profound. The millennia-long quest to understand what makes us human has recently sharpened into computational terms, offering new perspectives--and possibly, even answers. In The Importance of Being Educable , Leslie Valiant shares a rigorous and thought-provoking vision that puts our striking capacity to learn at the heart of who we are." --Brian Christian, author of The Most Human Human and coauthor of Algorithms to Live By "How could one possibly argue with the premise: 'the importance of being educable'? What Valiant manages to do in this book is to lay out a convincing argument that being educable is fundamental to our ability to function in modern society. One must want to learn and like to learn because the consequences of ignorance are so hazardous. Knowing how to learn is even more important than wanting to learn. Start on page one." --Vint Cerf, internet pioneer, Turing Award winner "A significant contribution.

Through the medium of crisp notions from computer science and machine learning, Valiant gives readers the necessary footing to understand human educability more deeply and to explore the fascinating implications--for everything from AI to education--of taking it more seriously." --Peter Dayan, director of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen "Valiant cogently argues that the key attribute of humans is the ability to learn from one another. He addresses the issue of whether computers that learn from us will eventually learn from each other and surpass us in intelligence and power, and shows how the educability of humans has had dramatic consequences that need to be considered seriously when contemplating the future of artificial intelligence." --Richard J. Roberts, Nobel Prize-winning biochemist and molecular biologist "Written with conviction by a leading authority in the field, this is a unique and interesting read." --Robert Sedgewick, coauthor of Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach.