Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma questioned the future of traditional medical courses in the country, given the overwhelming advent of AI that seems to be changing the entire dynamics of the education system. Varma’s long X post comes two days after Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned, prompted by nationwide student protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party over alleged NEET paper leaks and irregularities in other examinations.
Varma said parents and elderly people should guide their children to adopt AI, instead of clinging to the decade‑old education system.
Varma captioned the post: “EDUCATION SHOULD BE KILLED.”
Varma first described the traditional way of studying medicine in this country.
“Memorize. Write. Pass. Get degree. Get job. This was the formula paper thrust upon us, but now it is high time to tear it up.
“A medical student burns five years doing MBBS, two years in postgraduation, then two or three more for specialization — totalling 10 years to learn what the AI in his pocket already knows.
“The doctor conducts tests, sees data and makes a diagnosis from his accumulated knowledge to suggest treatment. Now AI is doing all that with far more precision and unimaginably faster, without fatigue or preoccupation.
“Asking about the future of doctors with AI overtaking their roles, Varma wrote, ‘Geoffrey Hinton, the man who built the foundations of modern AI, is shouting from the rooftops that AI will do everything far better. All experts agree that AI will take over what doctors are currently doing in the next one or two years. So why exactly are students still preparing for NEET or joining medical courses?
“When diagnosis is algorithmic and surgery is robotic, the human doctor slowly starts becoming a middleman for which he doesn’t need to do a course for 10 years.’”
Varma said the conventional education system is already in the mortuary.
“The youngster who dares to ask ‘Why am I memorizing what my phone already knows?’ is treated like a radical instead of the only sane person. This is not about demeaning parents or teachers. They either do not know or are living in denial.
“When the conventional education system is already in the mortuary, why are we refusing to bury it?
“Everyone needs to buckle up and kill the education system in its present form, before young people’s futures are killed by the elderly ignorant.
“The only hope is to steer them super fast towards AI and throw everything else into the dustbin,” he concluded.
Internet reaction
Varma’s observation drew mixed responses online.
One user wrote, “Surgery is not robotic! This is false information. Look into FDA approvals. People like this guy and @Cobratate think they can manipulate easily by saying 1–2 logics.”
Another user wrote, “Sir, no one will allow it, sir. It is a big scam. The biggest scam in India is education. Imagine people paying 4 lakh per student for LKG. Agree with you — parents are in denial; the job market should also move away from degrees.”
Another comment read, “It’s not mandatory to follow this path for everyone. But let me tell you, the majority of poor kids benefit from this path. So ‘do what interests you’ is a bullshit argument.”
Before the minister’s resignation, Salman Khan had described paper leaks as a “very serious issue” and said the movement should not be “hijacked politically.”
Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak Shah, Abhay Deol, Sonakshi Sinha and Riteish Deshmukh have also publicly supported the students’ cause in recent days.
