What the Future is Bringing Us

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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:

Improving the quality of education that K-12 students are receiving.
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:

Helping you make and implement some ICT-related decisions that will likely prove very important to you during your professional career in education.
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.

Rapid Growth in Data to be Mined

Collett, Stacy (8/23/20100). Five indispensable IT skills of the future. Computerworld. Retrieved 8/27/2010 from http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/350908/5_Indispensable_IT_Skills_of_the_Future. Quoting from the article:

In the year 2020, technical expertise will no longer be the sole province of the IT department. Employees throughout the organization will understand how to use technology to do their jobs.

Yet futurists and IT experts say that the most sought-after IT-related skills will be those that involve the ability to mine overwhelming amounts of data, protect systems from security threats, manage the risks of growing complexity in new systems, and communicate how technology can increase productivity.

By 2020, the amount of data generated each year will reach 35 zettabytes, or about 35 million petabytes, according to market researcher IDC. That's enough data to fill a stack of DVDs reaching from the Earth to the moon and back, according to John Gantz, chief research officer at IDC.

A petabyte is 10^15 bytes. A zettabyte is 10^21 bytes. A medium length novel is about 10^6 bytes. The holdings of US Library of Congress are less than a petabyte. So, the prediction is that by ten years from now, we will be collecting data at the rate of 35 million Library of Congress' per year.

Thought-controlled Computers

Edwards, Lin (8/25/2010). Thought-controlled co0mputers on the way: Intel. Retrieved 8/27/2010 from http://www.physorg.com/news201939898.html. Quoting from the article:

Intel scientists are currently mapping out brain activity produced when people think of particular words, by measuring activity at about 20,000 locations in the brain. The devices being used to do the mapping at the moment are expensive and bulky MRI scanners, similar to those used in hospitals, but senior researcher at Intel, Dean Pomerlau, said smaller gadgets that could be worn on the head are being developed. Once the brain activity is mapped out the computer will be able to determine what words are being thought by identifying similar brain patterns and differences between them.

Progress in this area sounds somewhat like science fiction coming alive. The educational and communication implications are interesting. Also see the article about Decreasing Ability to Write in China and Japan.

Decreasing Ability to Write in China and Japan

Evans, Judith (8/26/2010). Wired youth forget how to write in China and Japan. Retrieved 8/27/2010 from http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100826/tc_afp/lifestylehongkongchinajapanculturetechnology. Quoting from the article:

Like every Chinese child, Li Hanwei spent her schooldays memorising thousands of the intricate characters that make up the Chinese writing system.

Yet aged just 21 and now a university student in Hong Kong, Li already finds that when she picks up a pen to write, the characters for words as simple as "embarrassed" have slipped from her mind.

"I can remember the shape, but I can't remember the strokes that you need to write it," she says. "It?s a bit of a problem."

Surveys indicate the phenomenon, dubbed "character amnesia", is widespread across China, causing young Chinese to fear for the future of their ancient writing system.

Young Japanese people also report the problem, which is caused by the constant use of computers and mobile phones with alphabet-based input systems.

Five Billionth Devices Plugged into the Web

Cox, John (8/16/2010). Five billionth device about to plug into Internet. NetWorkWorld. retrieved 8/24/2010 from http://www.networkworld.com/news/2010/081610-5billion-devices-internet.html.

Note that the earth's population is about 6.6 billion people. Quoting from the article:

Sometime this month, the 5 billionth device will plug into the Internet. And in 10 years, that number will grow by more than a factor of four, according to IMS Research, which tracks the installed base of equipment that can access the Internet.

On the surface, this second tidal wave of growth will be driven by cell phones and new classes of consumer electronics, according to an IMS statement. But an even bigger driver will be largely invisible: machine-to-machine communications in various kinds of smart grids for energy management, surveillance and public safety, traffic and parking control, and sensor networks.

Today, there are over 1 billion computers that regularly connect to the Internet. That class of devices, including PCs and laptops and their associated networking gear, continues to grow. But cellular devices, such as Internet-connected smartphones, have outstripped that total and are growing at a much faster rate. Then add in tablets, eBook readers, Internet TVs, cameras, digital picture frames, and a host of other networked consumer electronics devices, and the IMS forecast of 22 billion Internet devices by 2020 doesn’t seem far fetched.

Note: An article by Neil Savage in the August 2010 issue of the Communications of the ACM says:

Last year an executive from telecom giant Ericsson predicted that 50 billion devices will be connected by 2020, leading to an “Internet of things” in which everyday objects become part of the network, gathering new types of data and creating possibilities that didn’t previously exist.

Increased Hard Drive Capacity

Williams, Marty (8/18/2010). Toshiba claims data storage breakthrough. Retrieved 8/21/2010 from http://www.infoworld.com/d/storage/toshiba-claims-data-storage-breakthrough-278. Quoting from the article:

Toshiba's sample media is still in the prototype stage, but is built at a density equivalent to 2.5 terabits per square inch. Contrast that with Toshiba's current highest capacity drive today, which is based on existing technology and has a density of 541 gigabits per square inch or about one fifth that of the new technology.

Toshiba expects the first drives based on bit-patterned media to hit the market around 2013.

Quantum Computers

University of Pittsburgh News (8/3/2010). Pitt-Led Researchers to Build Foundation for Quantum Supercomputers With $7.5 Million Federal Grant. Retrieved 8/9/2010 from http://www.news.pitt.edu/news/LevyMURI2010_supercomputers.

The following quote from the article indicates that the UO Federal Government is investing heavily in the future of Quantum Computers.

PITTSBURGH—A research team based at the University of Pittsburgh has received a five-year, $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to tackle some of the most significant challenges preventing the development of quantum computers, powerful devices that could solve problems too complex for all of the world’s computers working together over the age of the Universe to crack. The project was one of 32 nationwide selected from 152 proposals to receive a grant from the Multi-University Research Initiative (MURI) program; a total of $227 million was distributed to institutions that include Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Pennsylvania.[Bold added for emphasis.]

An Inexpensive Headset That Reads Brainwaves

Le, Tan (July 2010). Tan Le: A headset that reads your brainwaves. TED. Retrieved 7/26/2010 from http://www.ted.com/talks/tan_le_a_headset_that_reads_your_brainwaves.html.

In this 10:37 video, we see "Tan Le's astonishing new computer interface reads its user's brainwaves, making it possible to control virtual objects, and even physical electronics, with mere thoughts (and a little concentration). She demos the headset, and talks about its far-reaching applications."

World's Least Expensive Laptop Computer

Doyle, Eric (7/26/2010).World’s cheapest laptop unveiled in India. IT Pro. Retrieved 7/26/2010 from http://www.itpro.co.uk/625486/world-s-cheapest-laptop-unveiled-in-india. Quoting from the article:

India has developed the world’s cheapest touch screen laptop, which is expected to cost under £20. [Under $30 U.S.]

In reality, the Sakshat has more in common with the Apple iPad than a laptop because it gives only basic features.

These include Web browsing, PDF viewing and videoconferencing, although it has been designed to allow for future customisation and development.

The computer has been developed as an affordable option for students and was, itself, designed by students at the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science.

Of course, it remains to be seen whether this device enters mass production and meets the needs of students and other people.

An Internet 100 Times as Fast

Hardesty, Larry (6/28/2010). An Internet 100 times as fast. A new network design that avoids the need to convert optical signals into electrical ones could boost capacity while reducing power consumption. MIT News. Retrieved 7/5/2010 from http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/100x-internet-0628.html. Quoting from the article:

The heart of the Internet is a network of high-capacity optical fibers that spans continents. But while optical signals transmit information much more efficiently than electrical signals, they’re harder to control. The routers that direct traffic on the Internet typically convert optical signals to electrical ones for processing, then convert them back for transmission, a process that consumes time and energy.

In recent years, however, a group of MIT researchers led by Vincent Chan, the Joan and Irwin Jacobs Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has demonstrated a new way of organizing optical networks that, in most cases, would eliminate this inefficient conversion process. As a result, it could make the Internet 100 or even 1,000 times faster while actually reducing the amount of energy it consumes.

Living Earth Simulator

AlphaGalileo (26 may 2010). Social Supercomputing is Now. Retrieved 6/3/2010 from http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=76919&CultureCode=en. Quoting from the article:

Supercomputers are already being used to explore complex social and economic problems that science can understand in no other way. For example, ETH Zurich's professor for transport engineering Kay Axhausen is simulating the travel activities of all 7.5 Million inhabitants of Switzerland to forecast and mitigate traffic congestion. Other researchers at the ETH -- all working within its Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS) -- are mining huge amounts of financial data to detect dangerous bubbles in stock and housing markets, potential bankruptcy cascades in networks of companies, or similar vulnerabilities in other complex networks such as communication networks or the Internet

Progress is occurring in simulating the activities of large populations of people. The more powerful the computer system, the more fine grained the simulation. Such work is helping to increase the use of computational thinking into the social sciences.

Seven Atom transistor

BBC News (5/24/2010). Seven atom transistor sets the pace for future PCs. Retrieved 5/24/2010 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10146704.stm. Quoting from the Website:

The Australian creators of the transistor hope it is also a step towards a solid-state quantum computer.

The transistor is not the smallest ever created as two research groups have previously managed to produce working single-atom transistors.

However, the device is many times smaller than the components found in chips in contemporary computers. On chips where components are 22 nanometres in size, transistor gates are about 42 atoms across.

The researchers are a long way from a commercial process because the tiny transistor they created was handmade. The team used a scanning tunnelling microscope to move the phosphorus atoms into place.

Total Worldwide Digital Information

KurzweilAI.net (5/5/2010). Digital information will grow to 1.2 zettabytes this year: IDC study. Quoting from the article:

Last year, the Digital Universe (the amount of digital information created and replicated in the world) grew by 62% to nearly 800,000 petabytes (a petabyte is a million gigabytes, or a quintillion bytes), and this year, the Digital Universe will grow almost as fast to 1.2 million petabytes, or 1.2 zettabytes, according to IDC's annual report, "The Digital Universe Decade - Are You Ready?" May 2010, which monitors the amount of digital information created and replicated in a year.

"Between now and 2020, the amount of digital information created and replicated in the world will grow to an almost inconceivable 35 trillion gigabytes, as all major forms of media -- voice, TV, radio, print -- complete the journey from analog to digital.... This explosive growth means that by 2020, our Digital Universe will be 44 times as big as it was in 2009."

Reasons Why Advanced Technology Classrooms Fail

Leiboff, Michael David (4/18/2010). 11 reasons advance technology classrooms fail. Campus Technology. Retrieved 4/28/2010 from http://campustechnology.com/articles/2010/04/28/11-reasons-advanced-technology-classrooms-fail.aspx. Quoting from the article:

Unfortunately and all too frequently, however, there have been stories of disaster as well. "We spent all this money, and nobody uses the equipment." "Nobody can figure out how to work the controls." "Somebody changed all the settings." "The technology is too complicated, and I don't have the time to figure it out." "The equipment just doesn't work." … Unfortunately, many of the seeds of future problems are inadvertently planted during the early planning stages of the classroom design process and in large measure could have been avoided. Here is a list of planning pitfalls to watch out for.

Memory Resistors and a CPU

Johnson, R. Colin (4/9/2010). End of the CPU? HP demos configurable memristor. 'Stateful logic' paradigm could extend Moore's Law, HP says. Retrieved 4/17/2010 from http://eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=224202453. Quoting from the article:

Hewlett-Packard has demonstrated memristors ("memory resistors") cast in an architecture that can be dynamically changed between logic operations and memory storage. The configurable architecture demonstrates "stateful logic" that HP claims could someday obsolete the dedicated central-processing unit (CPU) by enabling dynamically changing circuits to maintain a constant memory of their state. That would let them be powered down at any time without the need to reboot at startup.

The architecture makes memristors a candidate for extending Moore's Law beyond the end of the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, circa 2020, according to HP. The ITRS has called for a new state variable besides charge or voltage to represent bits, and HP claims that the variable "resistance" employed by its stateful logic circuitry fills the bill.

Forbes Forecasts for 2020

Five short videos from Forbes retrieved 4/13/2010. Topics are home, job, diet, health, and reputation. For each, you must first view an ad.

Memristor

Markoff, John (5/7/2010). H.P. sees a revolution in memory chip. Retrieved 5/8/2010 from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/08/science/08chips.html?ref=technology. Quoting from the article:

In an interview at the H.P. research lab, Stan Williams, a company physicist, said that in the two years since announcing working devices, his team had increased their switching speed to match today’s conventional silicon transistors. The researchers had tested them in the laboratory, he added, proving they could reliably make hundreds of thousands of reads and writes. …

Dr. Williams said that H.P. now has working 3-nanometer meristors that can switch on and off in about a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second.

He said the company could have a competitor to flash memory in three years that would have a capacity of 20 gigabytes a square centimeter.

“We believe that that is at least a factor of two better storage than flash memory will be able to have in that time frame,” he said

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.