What the Future is Bringing Us

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 A Free Book on Future of ICT in Education 3 Some Forecasts 3.1 Next 20 Years of Microchips 3.2 Seven Forecasts 3.3 Lower Voltage Computer Circuitry 3.4 Artificial Intelligence: Peter Norvig 3.5 Outlook 2010 3.6 Creating a Living Mind

"All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth." (Alvin Toffler; American writer and futurist; born October 3, 1928.)

"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" (Alan Kay; American computer scientist and educator; born May 17, 1940.)

Introduction

All of education is future oriented. Through informal and formal education, students are being prepared for their futures. Of course, a major goal of education is to preserve and pass on the culture, values, history, and so on from the past. Ideally, this is done in a manner that helps prepare students for their futures as members of local, regional, national, and world societies.

Special Message for Teachers. Consider establishing a "futures" time period each week, in which you engage your students in an exploration of possible futures they will live in and how the subject(s) you are teaching are helping to prepare them for these possible futures. One way to do this is to select a topic from the (growing) list given below. Engage students in a discussion of what they know about the topic. Perhaps point them to some material to read. Engage them in a discussion of how the content you are teaching fits in with preparing them for life in a world in which the forecasts may well come true.

Another approach is to encourage your students to bring in hard copy materials and Web links that contain forecasts of the future. Each week a different small team of students could assume responsibility for leading the weekly "futures" session.

Still another approach is to raise the following question with your students near the beginning of any new unit of study: What changes are going on around the world that are having a major impact on this unit of study? The idea is to emphasize change and that you are helping your students get an education that prepares them for a changing world.

A Free Book on Future of ICT in Education

The following book is available free on the Web in both PDF and Microsoft Word formats.

Moursund, D.G. (2005). Planning, Forecasting, and Inventing Your Computers-in-Education Future. Eugene, OR: Information Age Education. Retrieved 12/1/07: http://i-a-e.org/eBooks/cat_view/37-free-ebooks-by-dave-moursund.html.

Quoting from the Preface:

I strongly believe that our education system can be a lot better than it currently is. Indeed, I predict that during the next two decades we will substantially improve our educational system. In this book, I enlist your help in making this prediction come true.

The focus in this book is on two aspects of improving our educational system:

1. Improving the quality of education that K-12 students are receiving.
2. Improving the professional lives of teachers and other educators.

This book is mainly designed for preservice and inservice teachers and other educators. If you fall into this category, you will find that this book focuses on your possible futures of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in education. It will do this by:

1. Helping you make and implement some ICT-related decisions that will likely prove very important to you during your professional career in education.
2. Helping you to increase your productivity and effectiveness as you work to improve the quality of education being received by your students.

Some Forecasts

This section contains relatively recent forecasts of future technology that are important to our current and future educational systems. For the most part, the newest entries are at the top of this section.

Next 20 Years of Microchips

Scientific American Magazine (January 2010). The Next 20 Years of Microchips: Pushing Performance Boundaries. Retrieved 2/27/2010 from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-next-20-years-of-microchips. Quoting from the article:

It may soon be impossible to make transistors on integrated-circuit chips even smaller. Alternative materials and designs will be needed for chips to continue to improve.

Nanowires, graphene, quantum particles and biological molecules could all spawn new generations of chips that are more powerful than today’s best.

Seven Forecasts

Lazowska, Ed (12/24/09). Exponentials R Us: Seven Computer Science Game-Changers from the 2000’s, and Seven More to Come. Retrieved 2/27/2010 from http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2009/12/24/exponentials-r-us-seven-computer-science-game-changers-from-the-2000%E2%80%99s-and-seven-more-to-come/. Quoting from the Wewbsite:

Ed Lazowska holds the Bill & Melinda Gates Chair in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington. His research and teaching concern the design, implementation, and analysis of high performance computing and communication systems.

“Exponentials R Us.” That’s the magic of computer science. It’s what differentiates us from all other fields. (To the extent that other fields are experiencing exponentials, it’s because of computer science – for example, the sensor technology and computational power that are driving biotech.) “Exponentials R Us” is the past, the present, and the future of computer science. If you think you can have greater impact doing something else, you’ve got your head wedged.

Forecasts are given in seven areas: smart homes, smart cars, smart bodies, Smart robots, the data deluge, virtual and augmented reality, and smart crowds and human-computer systems.

Lower Voltage Computer Circuitry

Zyga, Lisa(2/17/2010). Near-threshold computing could enable up to 100x reduction in power consumption. Retrieved 2/24/2010 from http://www.physorg.com/news185621560.html. Quoting from the report:

In a recent study, a team of researchers, Ronald Dreslinski, et al., from the University of Michigan, have investigated a solution to the power problem by using a method called near-threshold computing (NTC). In the NTC method, electronic devices operate at lower voltages than normal, which reduces energy consumption. The researchers predict that NTC could enable future computer systems to reduce energy requirements by 10 to 100 times or more, by optimizing them for low-voltage operation. Unfortunately, low-voltage operation also involves performance trade-offs: specifically, performance loss, performance variation, and memory and logic failures.

The educational implications of such a breakthrough are quite interesting. A gain in battery life by a factor of 10 makes a considerable difference in the infrastructure needed to support laptop computers in a school environment.

Artificial Intelligence: Peter Norvig

Solomon, Howard (2/10/2010). Robots will replace all workers in 25 years: Futurist. itWorldCanada. Retrieved 2/17/2010 from http://www.itworldcanada.com/news/robots-will-replace-all-workers-in-25-years-futurist/139969. Quoting fromthe article:

If you believe Cisco Systems Inc. futurist Dave Evan, in five years we’ll be creating the equivalent of 92 million Libraries of Congress worth of data a year, in 20 years artificial brain implants will be available and in 25 years robots will replace all workers.

…

Not surprisingly, perhaps, considering the way organizations and individuals are reluctant to purge their hard drives, Evans foresees the world’s data will increase six times in each of the next two years – including corporate data multiplying 50 times a year. So by 2029 we’ll pay a mere US$100 for 11 petabytes of storage.

Educational Implication. There are four main ideas in this article. Three are the growing capabilities of computers, networking, and storage. The fourth is that robots will eventually (withing 25 year, perhaps) be able to do most jobs. Suppose that this last forecast is not very accurate, but that starting 15–20 years from now we begin to see a significant decrease in human-done jobs, year after year. It need not be a very large percentage decrease each year. Just try to imagine the worldwide unemployment growing one or two percent a year, year after year. Meanwhile, worldwide production of food, clothing, shelter, and so on grows fast enough, so that whether people are employed or not, they are provided with a decent and perhaps slowly improving standard of living.

Of course, this sounds like science fiction. In terms of educational implications, what constitutes a good education for adult life in a world in which relatively few people have jobs? Here is another way of looking at this question. Think of a child starting kindergarten this coming fall. This person may well spend 13 years in the K-12 education system, and perhaps 2–4 years or more in higher education. By the time s/her finishes all of these years of education, the worldwide unemployment level will already have begun a steady rise due to robots and other computerized machines. Now, with this type of forecast, what should the K-12 and higher education for this person be?

And, think about the information growth that is projected in the article. Before our hypothetical young student completes elementary school, the totality of stored data will be growing yearly by and amount that is equivalent to 92 million Libraries of Congress. Wow! Talk about information overload…

Kennedy, John. (January 14, 2010). Interview of Peter Norvig, head of research at Google. Retrieved 1/20/2010 from http://www.siliconrepublic.com/news/article/14862/randd/artificial-intelligence-is-more-than-just-talk-googles-top-inventor. Quoting from the interview:

You wrote a book on artificial intelligence and are currently looking at the future of search. Do you think we’ll soon be talking to our computers?

Yep, that is happening to a degree now, but we’re not using the same language. We’re talking to a search engine in keywords rather than in whole sentences and it doesn’t quite understand us as well as a person would.

But on the other hand it is giving us answers that a person wouldn’t, so it has its strengths and weaknesses.

Outlook 2010

Marsan, Carolyn Duffy (1/4/2010). 10 fool-proof predictions for the Internet in 2020. Retrieved 1/4/2010 from http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/010410-outlook-vision-predictions.html. Quoting from the article:

Forty years after it was invented, the Internet is straining under the weight of cyber attacks, multimedia content and new mobile applications. In response, U.S. computer scientists are re-thinking every aspect of the Internet's architecture, from IP addresses to routing tables (see main story: 2020 Vision: Why you won't recognize the 'Net in 10 years) to overall Internet security. There are many views about how to fix the Internet's architecture, but there's widespread agreement about many aspects of the future Internet. Here's our list of 11 surefire bets for what the Internet will look like in a decade.

Today's Internet has 1.7 billion users, according to Internet World Stats. This compares with a world population of 6.7 billion people. There's no doubt more people will have Internet access by 2020. Indeed, the National Science Foundation predicts that the Internet will have nearly 5 billion users by then.

Most of the Internet's growth over the next 10 years will come from developing countries. The regions with the lowest penetration rates are Africa (6.8%), Asia (19.4%) and the Middle East (28.3%), according to Internet World Stats. In contrast, North America has a penetration rate of 74.2%. This trend means the Internet in 2020 will not only reach more remote locations around the globe but also will support more languages and non-ASCII scripts.

Creating a Living Mind

Hanlon, Michael (1/4/2010). The real Frankenstein experiment: One man's mission to create a living mind inside a machine. Mail Online.Retrieved 1/4/2010 from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1240410/The-real-Frankenstein-experiment-One-mans-mission-create-living-mind-inside-machine.html. Quoting from the article:

Professor Henry Markram, a doctor-turned-computer engineer, announced that his team would create the world's first artificial conscious and intelligent mind by 2018.

So far, Markram's supercomputer - an IBM Blue Gene - is able, using the information gleaned from the slivers of real brain tissue, to simulate the workings of about 10,000 neurones, amounting to a single rat's 'neocortical column' - the part of a brain believed to be the centre of conscious thought.

Of course, consciousness is one of the deepest scientific mysteries. How do millions of tiny electrical impulses in our heads give rise to the feeling of self, of pain, of love? No one knows.

But if Markram is right, this doesn't matter. He believes that consciousness is probably something that simply 'emerges' given a sufficient degree of organised complexity.