First Boxmind Debate
at the Royal Institution, Albemarle Street, London
11 October 2001
Will technology solve the problems of
education
in the 21st century?
A few million years ago our ancestors let loose a
new evolutionary process when they first discovered how to imitate
each other. Once they could copy habits, skills and ways of doing
things from person to person these memes began to compete and evolve -
leading ultimately to the creation of culture. And it is, after all,
because of culture that we need education. Cats and blackbirds do not
have "problems of education".
In the past few years we have let loose another
new evolutionary process - perhaps one that will prove as significant
as the previous one. By joining together all those computers (with
their staggering copying and storage capacities) with phone lines,
radio links and satellite systems we have created a vast space in
which digitally encoding texts and images can compete to get copied
and passed on. And the winners will determine the shape of the whole
system as it evolves.
Some people still seem to think that because we
built the hardware and designed the software for the world wide web,
it is there for our benefit and is under our control. Not true.
Certainly some of it benefits lots of people, but much of the material
is misleading or positively harmful, and cyberspace is awash with
viruses and junk. As for controlling it, no one alive today even knows
how big the www is, let alone where everything is stored, and it is
growing by the day, the hour and the second. And no one could destroy
every single computer and phone line. This genie is well and truly out
of its bottle for ever.
Now what is it going to mean to be a human being
growing up along with this new evolving system? Think about this for
example. At the moment you probably have a hard disk full of stuff you
have used, might want again, or have created for yourself. This stuff
is precious to you. Indeed in a sense it is part of who you are. Now
imagine that you could have such fast access to the web that you could
retrieve things as fast as you now can from your own hard disk. In
this case the whole of the web would seem as though it was right there
in your own computer.
That much is close to being available already,
but now imagine another development - not feasible at all at the
moment but perhaps not impossible - a technology such that if you
could think a question clearly enough in your own mind the answer
would be retrieved and fed straight to you. It would just mysteriously
pop into your mind in the way that answers from your own memory do
normally. Now the whole of the web would seem to be part of your own
mind. As it would also seem to be for everyone else. What would it
mean to educate someone in such a world?
On the darker side, what will be the role of
humans if the system becomes self repairing, and self maintaining? Today we are needed to maintain the hard ware and provide the
motivation for the whole system but this need not always be so. Or
what if software agents out there started doing history or science or
mathematics better and faster than human minds could do it, and there
was knowledge evolving without any person even knowing about it? In
any of these cases, what kinds of creatures would we become? How would
we educate our children emotionally and socially, as well as
intellectually in such a world?
My conclusion is that, far from solving the
problems of education in the twenty first century, technology will
utterly transform those problems - and in ways that no one can
predict.
