You May Not Recognize Tomorrow

                               You May Not Recognize Tomorrow

2040…just twenty two years away, but to hear Ray Kurzweil… talk about it, it sounds like a world other than the one we know. This visionary designer of artificial intelligence has a view of our future, and the relationship of the human mind to education(among other areas), that is way beyond thought provoking even to a cursory glance. The question for the folks who will travel those years with him is: how do we take advantage of the phenomenal developments he promises, and keep our education system moving forward, despite the adaptations we will almost certainly have to make? How will these developments affect our children and our schools? There are few certainties here, but the promise is compelling. There are also problems.

Imagine a child in 2040…should the parents sculpt his education carefully, as parents have traditionally done, or depend on the implantation of the Kurzweil-promised blood-cell sized computer, that is infinitely more intelligent than a human mind, to facilitate his mental growth and organization? Or is this even a sane question? I don’t know, and until I have read his new book How to Create a Mind, I don’t expect to.

I have brought up Mr. Kurzweil as a holiday surprise. He is part of that information revolution I can’t seem to escape. His ideas, and similar way-out ideas like them, will be coming our way for years, and I thought you might want to ponder them over the holidays. I intend to! Bear in mind that we have shortened our school year by weeks, and thus substantially cut the amount of knowledge students will absorb. The rest of the world is doing no such thing, and their children will, predictably, outshine ours in world markets for decades to come. The teachers unions seem unperturbed.

Maybe that cell-sized computer is our only hope!