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From this morning’s MACTA keynote address: Co-constructing Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century

Career and Technical Education is poised at the inflection point of a technological and social change process identified as the “J” Curve. Just like the letter J, the “J” Curve describes a sharp upward turn in the exponentially accelerating rate of change. The effects of the “J” Curve will be felt -indeed, are already being felt- by every institution, company, government, and school in all societies. This presentation centers on the leadership that can be exerted by Career and Technical Education in the context of the “J” Curve’s increasing impacts.

To view the slides in a larger format, click here.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, on the SIAI blog, posted his observations of the emergence of three “logically distinct” schools of thought related to the Singularity:

1. Accelerating change (Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler, John Smart): “technological change feeds on itself, and therefore accelerates” along a predictable curve.
2. Event Horizon (Vernor Vinge): “Shortly, technology will advance to the point of improving on human intelligence (brain-computer interfaces, Artificial Intelligence). This will create a future that is weirder by far than most science fiction, a difference-in-kind that goes beyond amazing shiny gadgets.”
3. Intelligence explosion (I.J. Good, Eliezer Yudkowsky [and, I'm sure, many others]): “the smarter you get, the more intelligence you can apply to making yourself even smarter.”

All three interpretations of the Singularity, Yudkowsky argues, require specific delineation to avoid being mashed into –and interpreted as– a single, apocalyptic metanarrative in popular discourse. Perhaps to better prepare educators for seemingly more absurd, ambiguous, and chaotic futures, we ought to build Singularity awareness, acceptance and preparedness by serializing our conversations:

First, change is accelerating. The good news is that we can plot out, reasonably predict, and prepare for much of it. What changes are our schools prepared for?

Second, a smarter society will start to build smarter things. Human intelligence hasn’t increased, but distributed knowledge across society will help us build improved humans, successor species and machines that will outsmart us. Students enrolled in schools today will likely face a future where “natural” humans are no longer the most intelligent species on the planet. How can we prepare them?

Third, our future could be very, very weird. Period. Are we doing anything to prepare students for futures beyond anyone’s imagination?

Two articles related to the Singularity Summit have appeared on preparing for the Technological Singularity:

First, Jamais Cascio writes on a Metaverse Roadmap Overview:

In this work, along with my colleagues John Smart and Jerry Paffendorf, I sketch out four scenarios of how a combination of forces driving the development of immersive, richly connected information technologies may play out over the next decade. But what has struck me more recently about the Roadmap scenarios is that the four worlds could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. Not just in terms of the technologies, but — more importantly — in terms of the social and cultural choices we make while building those technologies.

The scenarios explored are:

1. Virtual Worlds: the combination of simulation and intimate (highly personalized) technologie
2. Mirror Worlds: the intersection of simulation and externally-focused technologies
3. Augmented Reality: the collision of augmentation and external technologies
4. Lifelogging: brings together augmentation and intimate technologies to record the experiences and histories of objects and users (what Cascio refers to as “participatory panopticon“)

Read more at Open the Future…

Second, Bryan Gardiner writes on the Wired blog that Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, multi-millionaire Facebook backer, and the president of Clarium Capital Management, a global macro hedge fund, is devising a Singularity-aware investment strategy based on two, polarized scenarios in a near-future world where machines will become smarter than humans:

1. Negative scenario: where machines won’t need us and humans become expendable
2. Positive scenario: where humans would still have a positive outlook

Regardless of the two scenarios, Gardiner points out that the volatile booms and busts over recent years are indicative of the market’s attempts to align itself with near-Singularity transformations:

In essence, he argues that each of these booms represent different bets on the singularity, or at least on various things that are proxies for it, like globalization. What’s more, we’ve been seeing them now for over 30 years.

The markets are catching on to accelerating change. Why not bet on the Singularity in our schools as well?

In an interview with Silicon.com, William Gibson declares that he’s given up on envisioning futures:

We hit a point somewhere in the mid-18th century where we started doing what we think of technology today and it started changing things for us, changing society. Since World War II it’s going literally exponential and what we are experiencing now is the real vertigo of that - we have no idea at all now where we are going.

[...]

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it - it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.

This helps to explain why recent “science fiction” has shifted toward “science fantasy.” It must be said, however, that the corporate futurism that he refers to is a really bad way of looking at the future. Rather than picking out a preferred future scenario, we should look at multiple futures and prepare for each of them. There’s no reason why any given set of futures cannot co-exist.

That’s why this site is called “Education Futures” and not “Education Future.”

Maybe a new genre of literature and thought will develop, with multiple futures, presents and pasts. More on this later…

Presented at the JTET conference this morning:

Arthur M. Harkins, Ph.D. (USA)
John Moravec, Ph.D. (USA)
University of Minnesota

Abstract

This presentation is concerned with complex subjects, but presents them in ways that audiences can understand and professionally contemplate. The core concept of the paper is “sustainable innovation,” which presumes the necessity for continuous innovation to cope with changes wrought by technology, socioeconomic trends, global climate transformations, celestial changes, and by change itself.

Background

Ray Kurzweil has written that machines and software are beginning to challenge the supremacy and hegemony of humans over other species. Kurzweil argues that ever-shortening ‘S-curves’ of electronic hardware and software development are creating pressures to bond humans and machines into various networks and systems. Some of these include self-flyable Airbus aircraft, early implants (such as pacemakers and hearing amplifiers), and the later prospect of artificial eyes and adjunct cybernetic brains.

Kurzweil’s projections include step-by-step ‘dovetailing’ of humans with artificial systems. This process is already creating ‘gray areas’ between humans and such devices as robot arms and artificial kidneys. These and many other aspects of Kurzweil’s thinking appear to justify assertions that Trans-Humanity (TH) is evolving, and very quickly, as a complex ecology of cyborgs. The long-term prospect of uploading human central nervous system contents into non-biological units would complete the transition to a radical new embodiment of intelligence, which may be called Post Humanity (PH).

Foreground

In all of this great change, why must schools stress sustainable innovation? With the help of education, how can young people retain and grow their individuality? How can they continuously reconfigure their collective memberships with others, including those within cyberspace? This paper will explore such questions and related ones by creating and discussing short sustainable innovation scenarios illustrating the roles of formal and informal educational systems. The paper will construct scenarios for two different types of sustainable innovation: those based on anticipating and creating the futures of TH, and those based on PH. The ethics and morality of both sustainable innovation types will be suggested by metrics associated with personal and collective choices.

Contact us to learn more!

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) has launched a blog covering research and outreach updates, videos, articles, papers, events, goals, and relevant science and technology news.

SIAI is a not-for-profit research institute in Palo Alto, California, with three major goals: furthering the nascent science of safe, beneficial advanced artificial intelligence (self-improving systems) through research and development, research fellowships, research grants, and science education; furthering the understanding of its implications to society through the AI Impact Initiative and annual Singularity Summit; and furthering education among students to foster scientific research.

The folks at the Technology Evangelist blog did a remarkable job in recording Ray Kurzweil’s talk at the Killer App Expo and feeding video to the net. Benjamin J. Higginbotham writes:

Ray Kurzweil is a pioneer in the fields of optical character recognition, health, artificial intelligence, transhumanism, technological singularity and futurism. At the Killer App Expo in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Ray gave the evening Keynote speech. We were fortunate enough to have two HD cameras at the conference and grabbed the entire keynote with house audio. Whereas we would normally cut this 80 minute presentation into a 10 to 15 minute chunk, Ray’s material was so good, so inspiring that we have decided to leave it complete. If you’re an Apple TV user, this is a great bit to watch in full 720p. I hope you enjoy this as much as we did.

Speaking on innovations in education, Kurzweil stated: “Telepresence is really on the cutting edge of this sharing of information. It is form of virtual reality and it is really a harventure of what’s to come. I think it is a tremendously powerful thing to be able to have a world renowned medical expert to be really present with you if the patient is may be in Africa or something. Education to really feel like you are with an educator and just the ability to meet with each other, human communication is one of things that makes us unique, but Telepresence is on the cutting edge of our being able to meet without being limited by geographical limitations and as broadband gets higher and higher quality all these other display technologies get higher and higher resolution to the reality of Telepresence in a virtual reality is getting more and more compelling. Ultimately you will all compete very well with real reality, so in the case in the universities that students not necessarily got a class they can watch it using video conferencing on the Internet archived, it is perhaps looks crude compared to real reality today, it is actually quite satisfactory, but ultimately it will be just as realistic as being there and the ability to really meet including all of the senses without the people using Telepresence, I think it is quite revolutionary, things like Second Life as a whole another virtual reality environment, now looks crude today, but think how crude video games were when they started pong with stimulation of tennis, but it is was pretty crude, these games have become quite realistic. Things like Second Life will be a whole virtual reality environment that’s ultimately be as competing with real reality with many advantages.”

Reason Magazine published a rather interesting interview with Vernor Vinge, touching on issues that interest libertarians. In regard to government control, or efforts to slow the Technological Singularity, he states:

There is a national interest, and not just in America, in providing the illusion of freedom for the millions of people who need to be happy and creative to make the economy go. Those people are more diverse and distributed and resourceful and even coordinated than any government.

That’s a power we already have in free markets. Computer networks, supporting data and social networks, give this trend an enormous boost. In the end that illusion of freedom may have to be more like the real thing than any society has ever achieved in the past, something that could satisfy a new kind of populism, a populism powered by deep knowledge, self-interest so broad as to reasonably be called tolerance, and an automatic, preternatural vigilance.

Short of physical disasters or failures in technology, Vinge believes the Singularity is inevitable. Barry Mahfood argues that it’s happening gradually…