Revolutionizing education

@cregox Caue Rego
Thu, 18 Dec 2014 10:05:15 +0000
spoilers

@cregox wrote:

I just saw the following video which I found in fucking love science:

To me, Veritasium is this cool youtube channel like Vsauce, which greatly compiles their own skeptical research into well explained videos. Unlike Michael (on the few videos I saw from Derek) he takes sides. Very much like I do... Except it's usually a side I wouldn't take.

In this case, he says technology never revolutionized education, and still won't. From his point of view, I agree. But I think there's more to it.

For full disclosure, I recently started working in ways to make technology revolutionize education. Different from anything I did before, I feel it in my blood this is my goal in life. I know it's a far stretch goal and there's every chance I'll fail again, but as of today I think I'll have to keep trying.

Probably not today, but it's very easy to predict eventually there will come an artificial intelligence able to trigger that learning process in the mind of most. A personal teacher. That's not to say it will be needed like that, but that kind of intelligence will arise sooner or later as long as we keep advancing with computers.

And today technology have already revolutionized the way we socialize. Since telephones, which made it possible to talk at great distances and completely changed how diplomacy work, to smartphones, videogames and airplanes, which makes us interact with people we never would otherwise, in ways we would never be able to.

Computer technology (which by the way is just one kind of technology) already makes us interact socially in a completely different way. And who's to say that's not also a learning process? Who's to say we can't be educated in completely different ways with that alone?

Can't we learn how to read, hack google, conduct an orchestra, become a CEO or perform a brain surgery without going to a school? Without a single teacher?

Why not?

In my humble opinion technology can and eventually will be able to teach a born baby how to walk and speak, if needed. If needed. Yes to cyborgs. Like you've never seen one.

To see a revolution it may depend only on what you choose to look at, and at what time frame. What "revolution" even means, anyway? I rather not go into that etymological hole this time.

The main point is how to enable a new education system which can teach valid data to everyone? Or what would happen if everyone in the planet could be well educated enough to avoid wasting time in so much useless conflicts? Does everyone even want to get there? There is indeed no single technology we could come up with today which would do anything close to that.

But if we set that as a goal, we got to begin somewhere. Where?

Make a group. A small group. Make the goal crystal clear within it. Grow. Spread.

(to be continued)