Knowmad skills reflect a rich integration of humans, technologies, and new networks.
More? Read Knowmad Society.
Knowmad skills reflect a rich integration of humans, technologies, and new networks.
More? Read Knowmad Society.
Continuing a tradition started in years past, I list out my predictions for the key stories that will rock the education world in 2011. If I could put it into five words, 2011 will be all about mobile, mobile, change, change, and mobile. This next year, I’m looking more at the big picture:
What do you think?
Read my predictions from previous years:
The European Patent Office engaged in a two-year futuring project on futures for intellectual property rights in 2025, interviewing 50 key players – including critics – from the fields of science, business, politics, ethics, economics and law. Their opinions were sought opinions on how intellectual property and patenting might evolve over the next fifteen to twenty years.
Four primary scenarios were developed from the projects activities:
These scenarios are driven by five driving forces that create the most uncertainty:
More is available in the free “Scenarios for the Future” compendium, which is available from the EPO website.
Australia’s Computerworld jumps on the futures bandwagon, and provides insight into the 21st century (in stark contrast to what others are writing on the future). In an interview with British Telecom futurist Ian Pearson, a few daring predictions emerged:
1. “Thinking” is going to seem very alien to many people:
We will probably make conscious machines sometime between 2015 and 2020, I think. But it probably won’t be like you and I. It will be conscious and aware of itself and it will be conscious in pretty much the same way as you and I, but it will work in a very different way. It will be an alien. It will be a different way of thinking from us, but nonetheless still thinking. It doesn’t have to look like us in order to be able to think the same way.
2. Some machine intelligences will outsmart humans by 2020, and they will begin winning Nobel Prizes.
This raises an important concern. Our schools are not preparing students to thrive in an environment with a plurality of creative and intellectual modalities. Rather, through regimes such as No Child Left Behind, they are being transformed into cookie-cutter automatons. The irony is that as machines become much more intellectually-capable and creative, human capital is becoming more mechanistic. Which has the better potential to thrive through this century?
Eliezer Yudkowsky, on the SIAI blog, posted his observations of the emergence of three “logically distinct” schools of thought related to the Singularity:
All three interpretations of the Singularity, Yudkowsky argues, require specific delineation to avoid being mashed into –and interpreted as– a single, apocalyptic metanarrative in popular discourse. Perhaps to better prepare educators for seemingly more absurd, ambiguous, and chaotic futures, we ought to build Singularity awareness, acceptance and preparedness by serializing our conversations:
First, change is accelerating. The good news is that we can plot out, reasonably predict, and prepare for much of it. What changes are our schools prepared for?
Second, a smarter society will start to build smarter things. Human intelligence hasn’t increased, but distributed knowledge across society will help us build improved humans, successor species and machines that will outsmart us. Students enrolled in schools today will likely face a future where “natural” humans are no longer the most intelligent species on the planet. How can we prepare them?
Third, our future could be very, very weird. Period. Are we doing anything to prepare students for futures beyond anyone’s imagination?
Two articles related to the Singularity Summit have appeared on preparing for the Technological Singularity:
First, Jamais Cascio writes on a Metaverse Roadmap Overview:
In this work, along with my colleagues John Smart and Jerry Paffendorf, I sketch out four scenarios of how a combination of forces driving the development of immersive, richly connected information technologies may play out over the next decade. But what has struck me more recently about the Roadmap scenarios is that the four worlds could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. Not just in terms of the technologies, but — more importantly — in terms of the social and cultural choices we make while building those technologies.
The scenarios explored are:
Second, Bryan Gardiner writes on the Wired blog that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, multi-millionaire Facebook backer, and the president of Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund, is devising a Singularity-aware investment strategy based on two, polarized scenarios in a near-future world where machines will become smarter than humans:
Regardless of the two scenarios, Gardiner points out that the volatile booms and busts over recent years are indicative of the market’s attempts to align itself with near-Singularity transformations:
In essence, he argues that each of these booms represent different bets on the singularity, or at least on various things that are proxies for it, like globalization. What’s more, we’ve been seeing them now for over 30 years.
The markets are catching on to accelerating change. Why not bet on the Singularity in our schools as well?
Presented at the JTET conference this morning:
Arthur M. Harkins, Ph.D. (USA)
John Moravec, Ph.D. (USA)
University of Minnesota
Abstract
This presentation is concerned with complex subjects, but presents them in ways that audiences can understand and professionally contemplate. The core concept of the paper is “sustainable innovation,” which presumes the necessity for continuous innovation to cope with changes wrought by technology, socioeconomic trends, global climate transformations, celestial changes, and by change itself.
Background
Ray Kurzweil has written that machines and software are beginning to challenge the supremacy and hegemony of humans over other species. Kurzweil argues that ever-shortening ‘S-curves’ of electronic hardware and software development are creating pressures to bond humans and machines into various networks and systems. Some of these include self-flyable Airbus aircraft, early implants (such as pacemakers and hearing amplifiers), and the later prospect of artificial eyes and adjunct cybernetic brains.
Kurzweil’s projections include step-by-step ‘dovetailing’ of humans with artificial systems. This process is already creating ‘gray areas’ between humans and such devices as robot arms and artificial kidneys. These and many other aspects of Kurzweil’s thinking appear to justify assertions that Trans-Humanity (TH) is evolving, and very quickly, as a complex ecology of cyborgs. The long-term prospect of uploading human central nervous system contents into non-biological units would complete the transition to a radical new embodiment of intelligence, which may be called Post Humanity (PH).
Foreground
In all of this great change, why must schools stress sustainable innovation? With the help of education, how can young people retain and grow their individuality? How can they continuously reconfigure their collective memberships with others, including those within cyberspace? This paper will explore such questions and related ones by creating and discussing short sustainable innovation scenarios illustrating the roles of formal and informal educational systems. The paper will construct scenarios for two different types of sustainable innovation: those based on anticipating and creating the futures of TH, and those based on PH. The ethics and morality of both sustainable innovation types will be suggested by metrics associated with personal and collective choices.
Recognizing natural human evolution is likely over, Popular Mecanics is carrying a story on technological trends and advancements that will build better humans.