Posts Tagged → future

3-2-1 For 9-11-16

Three readings worth your time this week.

NASA launched a mission this week that sounds really cool. The spacecraft will make a seven year round trip to an asteroid and “return a substantial amount” of it’s material to Earth. Of course, that’s no trival process but the story of the collection device that will be used is fascinating and a build that would be right at home at any Maker Faire. (about 4 minutes)

In a short piece on their UK site, Wired reviews some ongoing research that asks if virtual reality can make people more emphathetic. The answer, of course, is that it’s far too early to arrive at any conclusions. But this part is certainly good to remember: “Anything that has to power to influence our behavior for the better also has the power to influence it for the worse.” (about 4 minutes)

On his blog, Nicholas Carr, one of the more intelligent critics of the internet and it’s impact on society, posted the introduction from his new book in which he reviews some of the early promise of the web as an “engine of liberation”. Instead, he concludes that it’s more The World Wide Cage. Even if his ideas lean more to the negative side than I like, Carr’s writing always is worth reading. (about 11 minutes)

Two audio tracks for your commute.

A recent segment of the Freaknomics podcast (hosted by the co-author of the book with the same title) is about why The Future (Probably) Isn’t as Scary as You Think. The program is a discussion with the author of a book called The Inevitable and he really is optimistic about what he sees not too far ahead. (34:58)

In case you missed it this week (which would only happen by staying completely off the web), Thursday was the 50th anniversary of the debut of Star Trek. Among the flood of memorial material posted, one of the better retrospectives was a segment from On The Media that was actually first recorded ten years ago. In it, one of the show’s hosts explores the concept of Trek through the “infinitely powerful engine behind it all: the fan”. (15:00)

One video to watch when you have a few minutes.

When it comes to conspiracy theories, the idea that the government has been hiding evidence of space aliens for 60 years is at the top of the dumb list. In a short video essay, Bill Nye offers some facts and rationality to explain why the government is not hiding extraterrestrials from us. He is, however, optimistic enough to believe we will eventually find alien life, although probably not like in the movies. (6:18)

The Not-So-Exciting Future of College

A prominent Silicon Valley investor offers Eleven Reasons To Be Excited About The Future of Technology, ones that “will continue to transform the world and improve human welfare”.

Some of his choices, like self-driving cars and virtual reality are pretty obvious. Others like artificial intelligence and computerized medicine are slow progressions that have potential to go on the very bad side of exciting. Clean energy is pretty much essential to the continuation of life on this planet.crystal ball future

Then we arrive at his number 8, High-Quality Online Education, and his crystal ball clouds over.

While college tuition skyrockets, anyone with a smartphone can study almost any topic online, accessing educational content that is mostly free and increasingly high-quality.

Encyclopedia Britannica used to cost $1,400. Now anyone with a smartphone can instantly access Wikipedia. You used to have to go to school or buy programming books to learn computer programming. Now you can learn from a community of over 40 million programmers at Stack Overflow. YouTube has millions of hours of free tutorials and lectures, many of which are produced by top professors and universities.

The quality of online education is getting better all the time. For the last 15 years, MIT has been recording lectures and compiling materials that cover over 2000 courses.

This writer1 is working from a warped, very traditional vision of school and teaching that is firmly rooted of the past and not at all something to be excited about for the future.

A view that the process of learning is simply the transmission of information from one source to another. That teaching at the college level should be nothing more than lectures and assigning chapters from expensive textbooks. That human teachers make no difference in the process of learning and can easily be replaced with smartphones, Wikipedia, and YouTube. Making college cheaper with, he assumes, at least, similar results.

This not at all exciting and should not be part of anyone’s future.

Now about those flying cars I’ve been promised since childhood…

And, despite help from Audrey Watters, I wonder, is blockchain really something to be excited about?

Working For The Future

An article in Fast Company, a business magazine, offers the “hottest job sectors” for the year 2025 2 and the skills our current high school students will need to work in them.

With the healthy measure of skepticism required when reading any forecast based on humans and society, here are “six skill areas that the experts recommend”, as narrowed down by the editors.

Technology and computational thinking, the later of which they define as “the ability to manage the massive amounts of data we process individually each day, spot patterns, and make sense out of all of it”.

Caregiving, directly related to the fact that millions of us baby boomers are going to need a lot of help in our old age. Also, veterinarians will also be high demand.

Social Intelligence and new media literacy, to prepare people for the many sales, marketing, and customer service jobs.

Lifelong learning. Evidentally, the world will need a lot of teachers and trainers by the year 2025.

Adaptability and business acumen. Adaptability has always been a required skill for successful adults. Not so sure about business acumen.

So, how many of these skill sets are at the core of the curriculum in most American high schools?

Past and Future Performance

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

Read through financial materials and you’ll probably run across that line more than once. The company is warning that that all the previous successes they just bragged about may not translate into anything good once you give them your money.

We should apply the same caution to education.

The success of a superintendent in a previous job does not guarantee they will have similar results when they are hired in a new district.

The processes, programs, and personality of a star principal may not transfer well when they move to a new school.

If a student excels in one classroom, it doesn’t mean they can maintain the same level of achievement (however you measure that) when working with a different teacher in a different environment.

Just something to think about when the advocate for a particular school reform concept glorifies the personality responsible for the past performance of an implimentation of that concept.

It doesn’t mean their idea is bad, only that one example is not proof of it’s validity in all circumstances.

Observing the Future

Betteridge’s law of headlines states that “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”.

Take for example, a recent article on the Ars Technica website: “Is your smartphone making you dumb?”.

And despite the provocative question, the authors of the study being referenced don’t actually arrive at that conclusion.

“the results are purely correlational,” emphasize Golonka and Wilson. There’s no way to tell whether an over-reliance on smartphones decreases analytical thinking or whether lower analytical thinking ability results in a heavier reliance on smartphones, they explain.

Of course, this is one instance in a long line of “research” and “analysis” provocatively asking if Google, the internet, social networking, or technology in general is impacting human intellectual development in some way. For good or bad. Maybe both.

Did societal observers have the same questions in the aftermath the printing press, telegraph, telephone, radio or any other major change in the way people communicated information? I suspect they did. Did humans get dumber? Smarter? Weirder?

I’m pretty sure the honest answer to the question of what the use of smartphones/instant search/social networking/<insert your tech fear here is doing to our brains is “we don’t know”. All of these digital tools some say we are addicted to (another of those headline concerns) are very, very recent developments in human history. It takes more than a decade or two to sort through all the data.

Which is all the more reason to do our own research. Be introspective about ourselves and observant of others. Pay attention and we’ll watch the future of the human species develop.

I’m pretty optimistic about it.