Artificial intelligence and the increasing sophistication of robotics will, according to Ray Kurzweil, the director of Google, a man whose predictions about the future seem to come true with consistent frequency, believes that by 2045, AI will increase the "human biological machine intelligence a billion-fold by 2045." ( "Ray Kurzweil: As Humans and Computers Merge ..." 2014. 22 Mar. 2016 <https://www.singularityweblog.com/ray-kurzweil-pbs-immortality/>).
What will this mean for school? For life? For happiness? For wealth? For inequality? Will life as we know it, matter?
These are questions that I feel all children need to grapple with in school. They need to toss such questions around not just in their science and math and coding classes, but also in their Language Arts and Social Studies and Art and Drama and Music classes.
Such provocative questions must drive the curricula we provide to our students for the complexities that are about to descend upon society will not be adequately dealt with if we sylo those questions into the arbitrarily determined disciplines. These questions will require responses and solutions that can only reflect the rich and varied human experience when all disciplines and all minds come together to design a new world.
In leaving, I feel that Oscar Schwartz, in his TEDxYouth@Sydney talk entitled Can a computer write poetry? really encapsulated the urgency and need for all humans to engage in "a species-wide existential reflections" on what is human. It is up to us, educators and experts to help our students make meaning of and then act upon, such difficult questions in a world enhanced and yes, controlled, by our advances in Artificial Intelligence. Together, let's revision our practice together. We need to find a way to ensure that being human remains a viable and productive option.
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