38 Are the Androids Dreaming Yet?
practice. A number of people have wondered whether you can take this literally, and if you devote 10,000 hours to practicing something you can become world class. Dan McLaughlin from the USA used to be a professional photographer and decided he might like to become a professional golfer. He quit his job and is now 3,500 hours in. So far, he has achieved a 4 handicap. I also personally got bitten by this bug and am learning the piano. I am about 3,000 hours in and am making good progress.
Gladwell’s interpretation of Ericsson's results is not without controversy. Ericsson stresses ‘purposeful practice’ is the important element. Practicing the wrong thing for ten thousand hours will just make you good at doing something wrong. Practicing without concentration and attention will equally have little effect. One illustrative example is the story of Edward Sanford, a supreme court
Piano Practice
judge, who read the morning prayer aloud every day over a 25 year period. After he retired he was asked if he could recite it from memory. Despite reading it as many as 5000 times during his working life, he was unable to remember it. It seems you must purposefully practice the exact thing you want to do if you wish to learn it, in this case recall.
Computers don’t require practice to learn a skill. If their program is right they work correctly, and if it is wrong, they are always wrong. Computers can be programmed to learn but so far this learning has been limited to specific problem domains, such as face recognition. They do not have the general-purpose capability humans enjoy.
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