Education and alternatives for the future: Part one

In 1984, James Cameron would direct a motion picture destined to become a sci-fi classic. Called The Terminator, and based on a screenplay written by Cameron in collaboration with executive producer Gale Anne Hurd, the movie seemed at the time to be nothing more than a dark, crazy fantasy, an unprecedented tale with no link whatsoever to reality. It was about a future in which artificial intelligence becomes self-aware and decides to eliminate the humans that invented it from the face of the earth. However, with what we know today about technological development, that supposed fantasy has become, in the three decades since the picture was made, visionary and prophetic.

More and more futurologists and scientists are predicting that advanced technology will eventually escape from our grasp and begin to govern itself. Linked to that vision of the future is a key idea to the effect that our future destiny will depend in large measure on how we develop and manage advanced technology right now.

The clearest difference between the story of The Terminator and views of the technological future imagined within the realm of current reality is that the struggle between Humankind and machines will not play out on battlefields with heroic soldiers of the Resistance battling cybernetic robots, but through academia and education of excellence. An education capable of preparing human beings to manage that future better and to determine whether advanced technology ends up being at the service of the development of our species or if we will permit artificial intelligence to self-govern and exterminate us, to later become the next link in the evolutionary chain, in which we humans will cease to exist altogether.
The main rule of evolution is adapt or perish. And the secret to adapting may be found in the division between winners and losers. An education of excellence serves to prepare the leaders of tomorrow, the humans that will find themselves on the cusp of tomorrow’s trends and staying ahead of the future. And this type of preparation should be the main mission of educational institutions of excellence.

What I’ve described is precisely the scenario set out by Ray Kurzweil in his book entitled The Singularity Is Near. Written over a decade ago, this essay remains visionary today in terms of a possible future within the framework of technological advances—although the author makes it clear that trying to predict the future beyond 2045 is a fool’s errand.
Kurzweil’s basic premise is that the future must be described within the context of a technology whose pace continues to increase, now at an exponential rate. There have been more technological advances in the last 50 years than in the previous 5,000 years. And as technological development continues, it won’t be long before the potential power of technology might increase a hundred, five hundred or a thousand times practically overnight. Kurzweil calls this Accelerating Returns.

The “singularity” to which Kurzweil refers is the theoretical point in time at which, according to his vision, biology and technology will become indistinct. The idea is that, when this happens, the human species will no longer exist, opening the way to a technological, or at least cybernetic, species that will dominate the world. If this concept seems fantastic, or perhaps horrifying to you, Kurzweil sympathizes with you. He is of the opinion, even though it might seem like an oxymoron, that if our brain were simple enough to understand this, it would be too simple to understand it.

But let’s attempt, at least, to look at what this means. For example, the grandparents of people my age witnessed the first telephone networks, the first viable airplanes, the first mass-produced automobiles, the first movies with sound and the first ones printed in color. But they also witnessed, later in life, the first television, the first commercial jet airliners, the first human conquests of space and the first walk that a human being took on the surface of the moon, etc.

Although this might seem like an incredible array of advances to experience in a single lifetime, the people of my own generation have seen even more incredible advances. And the pace of these changes has been dizzying, to such an extent that the computers that we carry in our pockets today are many times more powerful than the military mainframes that filled entire buildings and managed the defense systems of the world’s principal powers when we were teen-agers. In just the last two or three decades, the world has become completely interconnected by means of electronic networks, cars have begun to drive themselves, when one of our joints breaks down, doctors replace it with a titanium one, outer space is becoming more and more the realm of private business and pleasure voyages into space are no longer the stuff of science fiction.

But all of this is nothing compared with what’s coming, and it’s coming at a speed that defies comprehension for the vast majority of human beings. Between now and the coming of the “singularity” it is probable that changes will occur beyond the scope of comprehension of any human being whatsoever. It is also probable that, by that time, an artificial superintelligence will exist that will be well on its way to self-awareness and self-governance—or in other words, it will either exist to serve the human race, or it will simply serve itself.
An example of this last is the nanobot. Although they still do not exist except in theory, nanobots are miniscule robots (the size of a blood cell) equipped with applications designed to detect and cure illnesses. Once perfected, it is likely that they will be injected directly into the patient’s bloodstream. Some experts say that, in the future, nanobots might well replace doctors and that they will be more effective in their ability to cure any and all diseases. Experiments are already being carried out using miniature robots to cure cancer in laboratory mice and research is underway to apply nanobot technology to illnesses such as Alzheimer’s. Currently, however, it is still a very incipient technology.

That said, we should already be thinking about how to limit the possible pernicious effects of such technology before we start applying it broadly to our benefit. What would happen, for example if such technology were to reach a level of superintelligence that would permit nanobots to replicate themselves, like a kind of technological virus? According to some researchers, a device that could be so apparently beneficial to Humankind, might start self-reproducing exponentially and, with replication completely out of control, end up causing the extinction of every living thing on earth.

To be continued…