#BTColumn – Am I alone in my online vision?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados TODAY Inc.

As I sat eating lunch yesterday, physically distanced from a group of women my age, I realised I was alone in my view of time and what the future holds in education.

I was unique in my exposure to the writings of Theoretical Physicists like Michio Kaku. Therein lay my different perspective of how time evolves and will continue to change the human experience.

I felt like the time traveller, from the Outlander series, who in 1773, saw a book and remarked, ‘He has written in a ball point pen which will not be invented for another hundred and fifty years.’

I listened to this group of women who were saying that students will always need to be in a school, taught face-to-face by a teacher.

I told them that schools of the near future will all be online, creating opportunities for students, currently uneducated, who will be receiving degrees from Harvard or Cambridge before 2175.

Predictions are that by 2050, 65 per cent of the world’s universities will cease to exist physically. I explained that access to the internet will create a social equality in one way and a social gulf on the other.

That it is almost certain that only the exorbitantly wealthy will have the benefit of in person instruction at universities and with this, the college experience we value.

It was surreal. There I sat, feeling like a time-traveller myself. I could have been saying, ‘The day will come when a book could be read on a phone’, or ‘Algorithms will enable us to text those who have died and their replies will sound just like them.’

As we know, these already exist.

The first Homo Sapiens, arose alongside other hominid relatives, approximately 300,000 years ago. Yet it was not until 3500BCE that the wheel was invented. Do the Math. Similarly, there is evidence that it was only 12,000 years ago that dogs became pets. Consider those timelines when thinking about human development.

No one really likes adapting to change; swift change least of all. However, with the exponential growth of technology, human progress is predicted to advance the equivalent of a thousand years within the 21st Century.

Driverless cars already exist and the only reason we need pilots on aircraft is because we do not yet trust computers, as we trust humans.

So, as much as we want our children back in school, I think we are looking at things in the wrong way.

We cannot stop progress, but we can impact it decisively. We can choose to actively create our world as we want it to become or technology will create it. That is the only choice we have and we need to decide quickly which of the two will happen. We linger at our peril.

‘Mario Klingemann, a German artist who uses AI in his work, has radical views on creativity. “Humans are not original,” he says. “We only reinvent, make connections between things we have seen.” While humans can only build on what we have learned and what others have done before us, “machines can create from scratch”.’

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/04/can-machines-be-more-creative-than-humans

So, those who boast, or believe, that computers will never be as creative as humans, need to wake-up.

Several articles have been written, with consternation, about the Millennial’s disregard of objects we hold dear like tokens passed down through generations, the desire to own their home and their preference of spending money on experiences rather than ‘stuff’. This is just the beginning.

Our grandchildren will never need a Driver’s Licence. They will be able to design their offspring. They will have no need for laptops; their corneas will be computers.

Computer chips will be implanted at birth; there will be no physical money. They will live well over a hundred years. They will have no need to visit other countries in person; it is likely they will not even choose to live on planet Earth.

Aldous Huxley wrote ‘Brave New World’ in 1932 and predicted a world 600 years in the future. 80 per fect of his predictions have materialized in 80 years. Unfortunately, such novels are no longer on the Caribbean syllabus. George Orwell’s ‘1984’ is another discarded, thought-provoking gem.

Our students are allowed to choose subjects like History and Literature; neither are compulsory. So, they are enabled to neither learn from the past, nor think about the future.

With these reduced options, exactly what are we educating our children to understand, to feel, to realise, to action, or more relevantly, to create?

Right now, education in the Caribbean is equivalent to driving a car with wind-up windows and without power-steering. As far as I am concerned, we have failed the current generation of students.

They are learning the obsolete, to a large extent, and are doing so in blissful, trusting oblivion.

The truth is, our grandchildren will not miss what they never knew. Therefore, are we at least on the path to empowering them as we should be? Absolutely not!

We have not yet failed those entering Kindergarten. However, you can rely on one certainty: if we schmoose, we will lose.

Julia Hanschell can be contacted on smartstudying
@gmail.com.