Some things I would not mind having downloaded instead of having had to learn it the old fashioned way.

By the way, I forgot to mention in my post below the significance of "learning day" that I mentioned. It was a concept in a sci fi short story that I once read, and I think "learning day" was actually the title. It cleverly addresses this issue in a particular way. In the story, every child looks forward to "learning day" when they will get their education in a few minutes uploaded to their brain. It's known that there are a tiny percentage of people whose brains are incompatible with the technology. The protagonist is horrified to learn that he's one of them.

But then he discovers that the Achilles heel of the method is that no one who receives this upload on learning day innovates or creates anything new. It is actually the kids in "special school" who still have to be taught the old-fashioned way, who actually move society forward. And they get all sorts of special perks for doing so. So, in the end, the kid is actually one of the lucky few.

While I doubt this would actually happen (innovation is just applying what you already know in new ways and it doesn't seem to me it would matter how you acquire your initial fund of knowledge) it does suggest one way in which "uploading" could be limited and how society might work around it.

My thoughts about this great question are, whether a person goes through some sort of download or comes into the world as, like some sort of gifted prodigy, life will have a way of offering a variety of "hot burners". I do agree that experience is,... huge! but an idiot dumb ass? from my experience can be undereducated and experienced as well as educated and inexperienced.

There are valid questions to be pondered here, and I think a clue comes from the concept of "embodied consciousness" which suggests that consciousness is not explicable as just am emergent property of certain electrochemical reactions in a biological substrate, but also are a product of the interactions of our total bodies with the environment.

On the one hand, pointing out that some youngster who went from illiteracy to a PhD in 10 seconds on Learning Day is lacking something for not having that knowledge be hard-won via personal discipline, could just be sour grapes that YOU didn't have it so easy. On the other hand, being able to effectively use that PhD might be missing an important experiential context.

In my salad days there was a big debate about whether students should be allowed to have electronic calculators when learning basic math, or if it was somehow superior or virtuous for them to have to work it out manually and master it that way first.

Today grade and middle schools routinely distribute tablet devices to students that are far more powerful than hand calculators ever were, and influence learning in a variety of areas.

I think "downloaded" knowledge would be similar, it has strengths and weaknesses, we'll figure them out and adjust accordingly. But one thing the debate from my formative years did not take into account is that hand calculators would get much cheaper and become more general purpose computing devices that we couldn't even imagine back then, such that not being able to use these devices would itself be a form of ignorance. Once everyone can download knowledge and possibly even experience, it will be personal malpractice not to. Yes it will make us different as individuals and as societies, just as media and computing have already transformed us. That doesn't automatically make it bad.

The way I suspect it will shake out is that there WILL be some irreducible and necessary experiential or pedagogical components that will always be required, in just the same way that minds don't develop or function properly outside the context of a physical body and physical interactions. There will be some combination of uploaded and applied learning.

A final point: if you're referring to a recent article making the rounds that someone succeeded in uploading data to a brain, that's not what the article actually claimed and in fact we are probably a lot further from "uploaded knowledge" than some people want to suggest.

depends on the knowledge, I think. things which require muscle memory would still need to be practiced, that whole "download judo" thing isn't actually possible, part of the discipline is in training the muscles and nerves to react correctly.

but things like mathematics are purely intellectual, so I can't see a problem with instant/accelerated learning techniques.