Luis Almeida

The only certainty about the future ahead is change.

The education of tomorrow won’t resemble the one we have today. Because of the threat of machine takeover, we now have to think about ways to trick perishable machinery in order to live a good life in the age of Siri.

It is obvious that creativity will be at the core of this evolution of thought and educational practice, simply because even an intelligent microchip will struggle with being creative over time. There is much discussion about the importance of students learning the new literacies of "humanics" in an attempt to work alongside the machine and have a chance to succeed over time.

The "humanics" curriculum is composed of courses in technological and human literacy along with data literacy topics where people are expected to apply these three areas to current problems.

Twelve-year-olds today better get used to thinking about a world where the jobs will often lie in one’s ability to manage the flow of big data and how the machine works in unpredictable ways, as a literal means of survival. Learning from now on will be ongoing and technical, which is both a blessing and a curse.

The good news is that the sciences-oriented people will profit from this transition. The humanities ones will struggle.

"How about the unfit?" you may be asking. I honestly don’t know what will happen, in the long run,  to those who may find themselves categorized this way. And this can be a scary thing. 

People are going to be expected to learn how to be human. What do I mean by that? Well, they will need to write well, communicate interpersonally and have a strong sense of aesthetics in order to survive the artificial intelligence economic- driven transition.

I have to say that all these major shifts in paradigm make me feel a bit concerned by what is about to come. Tell me how a regular human being can compete against  an intelligent machine that can be upgraded each year?

Sooner or later, our abilities to compete with the machine will end as human progress can only go so far. Good luck beating your nemesis counterpart head on in what the computer does best.

We better have the mental capacity to invent and discover. The future won’t be anything like the past. We are going to laugh about the way we used to educate our kids and work! Universities will eventually offer "humanics" as a major.

Have you ever thought about what would happen to your family if the computers take over? What do you think will happen to you and your family? Jobs are shrinking. Careers themselves are disappearing.

There will be no economic incentive that will change the fact that computers cut jobs, period. When was the last time you spoke with a librarian? Here in Cleveland, not even the garbageman is safe against the threats of automation, as a robot now collects our city trash. What kind of world are we living in today, where we choose to support machinery over man?

We are all citizens of the world’s largest and oldest technopoly! Change is imminent.

Education is no exception. For the first time in history, education will actually change because machines will start learning; human beings will keep texting and, as a consequence, a substantial number of people will be unemployed.

I wonder what Issac Assimov would have said today if he was alive. Our dependency on technology can be argued to have made us slaves to what is new and flashy. Unpredictability is now the norm.

Listen: America is an empire of ideas where the best fit tend to succeed, and where the unfit  are often left to their own devices in a search for guidance and direction.

In this upcoming new age of singularity, Siri won’t be able to help us navigate society. I am seeing major unemployment eventually becoming the norm in small towns, and millions in poverty due to their inability to create and predict.

"Humanics" will prove to be the university’s biggest major, which will fundamentally change the way universities operate. The Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm will prove false in the years to come, leaving space for a new era of unpredictability.