Where Is It All Going?

Summer book list:

Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

1776 by David McCullough

I’m about halfway done with 1776 – a book I picked up after reading a biography of George Washington.  Pygmy was pretty funny and interesting…until the end.  Usually Chuck Palahniuk books end with a splash, a surprise, a wow.  This one, not so much.

Age of Spiritual Machines.  I admit, I had heard of this book only because of the Our Lady Peace album (Spiritual Machines) which I love so much.  I knew it was based on this book, so I had to buy it when I saw it.  (Just an aside, I have a terrible habit of buying books and having them sit on my book shelf for many months or years before reading it.)  This book blew my mind.  Anybody interested in one man’s predictions on where our world is going should read this book.  Think of it as Terminator, but without the nuclear war.

2029: There is a growing discussion about the legal rights of computers and what constitutes being “human.”  Machines claim to be conscious.  These claims are largely accepted.

By the year 2099: There is a strong trend towards a merger of human thinking with the world of machine intelligence that the human species initially created.  There is no longer any clear distinction between humans and computers.  Most conscious entities do not have a permanent physical presence.  Because most information is published using standard assimilated knowledge protocols, information can be instantly understood.  The goal of education, and of intelligent beings, is discovering new knowledge to learn. [emphasis mine]

That’s some pretty heavy stuff.  Before we get all sci-fi horror movie, let’s consider some current technological trends.

• Computers can interact with our voices, almost well enough not to annoy us.  I know we all hate those customer service menus (I said SPEAK TO A REPRESENTATIVE!) but companies obviously think the computers do the job well enough to handle most calls.  Newer cars have lots of voice command.  Soon we should be interacting with computers all the time.  They now have phones that can instantly translate language.
• Body and brain implants present an interesting combination of human and machine, don’t they?  Right now, electrical implants can help with brains with deteriorating diseases, implants help deaf people hear, and artificial limbs are becoming an awful lot like Luke Skywalker’s new hand.  American’s place a ton of importance on physical enhancements (face-lifts, botox, boob jobs, etc.) how long until somebody wants to pay for a cochlear implant to improve their hearing.  Want contact lenses that give you hi-def vision?
• Right now you can swallow a camera that allows doctors to see into your body.  Scientists are working on tiny robots that not only detect abnormalities, but can fix them.  Two cancer cells?  Destroyed before you knew they existed.

We are continually meshing with machines.  They continually get smaller and smaller, and they are placed everywhere.  Look around you.  How many objects in your room have computer chips.  Right now I count my computer, my iPod, my digital camera, my alarm clock, my TV, my TV remote, my cell phone, my DVD player, my internet router and my exercise heart-rate monitor.  I’m sure I missed some.  My point is that, no very slowly, we are being surrounded by and are becoming dependent on computers.  The book makes a good point.  Ten to fifteen years ago, if all the computers went out, we could still function as a society.  Now?  Geez, look what happened when Twitter went out last week.  Imagine a day without using a computer system.  No internet, no phone, no car, no ATM, no TV, no lights, nothing.  What would you do?  Read?!

So where am I going with this?  I believe that I may be in the last age group of teachers who will be able to teach until retirement.  I believe that 30 years from now computers will take over education.  That isn’t to say that there won’t be humans involved, just that they won’t be teaching like you and I are used to.  Even this summer, had I kept the summer school job, I would have been moderating and assisting more than teaching.  The kids get the text book, the learning module and the problem sets.  I help them out with things they don’t understand and then grade their work.  If automated technology shows to be as effective as regular teachers, look for school systems to push this as much as possible.  Teachers are the most expensive part of education.  Think of all the cool stuff schools could buy with 30 teacher salaries.  In the near future, every desk will be an interactive station (kind of like your touch-screen cell phones, only larger and better).  I think in 20 years, students will be coming to school more for social interaction than learning.

This is my prediction.  Anybody have a prediction of their own?

(Note: all of the current and future technologies I touched on come from either my own reading or from Age of Spiritual Machines.  None of it was made up.)