The future of intelligence

This is Part 3 in a series of blog posts on the future of learning and technology. In my previous blog post I examined the debate about whether we are becoming more intelligent or less intelligent as a result of our prolonged and habituated uses of technology. I believe that if we are to fully apprehend the many issues and nuances of our relationship with future technologies, we first need to begin to appreciate the complexity of human intelligence(s) and the problems associated with trying to model these digitally.

Many commentators express concern about the negative impact technology may have on our ability to think critically, construct knowledge and read/research more deeply. The argument is that we are becoming increasingly dependent on search engines and other tools, that trivialise knowledge and simplify what we learn. A secondary argument is that there is a large amount of content on the web that is spurious, deceiving or inaccurate, and that user generated sites such as Wikipedia and blogs undermine the authority of professionals and academics.

Futurologist Ray Kurzweil's argument looks beyond these issues, holding that the tools we have available to us as a result of networked social media and personal devices, actually enable us to increase our cognitive abilities. He argues that we are becoming more creative and have the potential for endless cognitive gain as a result of increased access to these technologies. His position is reminiscent of the work of American cognitive psychologist David Jonassen (1999) and his colleagues, who proposed that computers were mind tools, and that our cognitive abilities could be extended if we invested our memories into them. Others, such as George Siemens and Karen Stephenson hold that we store our knowledge with our friends, and that connected peer networks are where learning occurs in the digital age. British computer scientist and philosopher Andy Clark, is of the opinion that we are all naturally aligned to using technology. In his seminal work, Natural Born Cyborgs (2003), Clark sees a future that combines the best features of human and machine, where we literally wear or physically internalise our technologies.

There are examples of how such cyborg existence might come about. Recently, demonstrations of Google Glass, eyewear that connects you via augmented reality software and gestural control to information beyond your normal visual experience, and Muse, a brain-wave sensing headband, have veered us in the direction of cyborg experience. I predict that other devices, wearable, natural gesture based, and sensor rich, will appear in the next few years, and these will be affordable to many. And yet, as science fiction writer William Gibson intoned, the future may be here already, but it's just not evenly distributed. He is right. A persistent digital divide exists between the industrialised world and emerging countries. Mobile phones may be proliferating rapidly, but Divides are also evident within western digital society where some invest in new technology, and a whole spectrum of other responses, from mildly enthusiastic to outright rejection are present in the population. There are even divides between those who can use the technologies and those who can't. Technology remains unevenly distributed, and will be for some time to come. But the digital divide will not stop the march of technology. What might wearables and non-touch interfaces achieve for us?

It is debatable whether wearable and invasive technologies will increase our intelligence. What such tools might be able to do though, is free us up physically, enhancing our visual capabilities, and enabling us to control devices hands free. They will also enable us to free up cognitive resources, by distributing our thinking and memory, enabling us to focus on important things such as creativity, intuitive thinking, critical reflection and conducting personal relationships, while the wearable computer navigates, searches, discovers, stores, retrieves, organises and connects for us. It will not make us smarter, but technology will enable us to behave smarter, work smarter and learn smarter. That's if we accept that ultimately, the success or failure of such tools is really down to us and us alone.

References
Clark, A. J. (2003) Natural Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future of Human Intelligence. New York: Oxford University Press.
Jonassen, D. H., Peck, K. and Wilson, B. (1999) Learning with Technology: A Constructivist Perspective. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.

Photo by Jussi Mononen


The future of intelligence by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The future is the Web

I'm putting together my invited presentation for Learning Technologies 2010 later this month. I have been asked to talk about the new smart technologies that we will be using in the next year or two. These include touch screen technologies (iPhone, Touchtables, etc), augmented reality (AR) devices (6th Sense, Layar etc) and other emerging technologies such as QR tagging, GPS and wearable computers. I will talk about how I think these might be used to support, enhance and extend pedagogy in the future. It's quite a tall order, but if you know we well, you also know I relish a challenge.

I'm going to use Web 2.0 (and the emergence of Web 3.0) as my starting point. I know a lot of people don't like these terms, but as I have previously commented (see Lost in Translation), even if it isn't the right one, the name evokes meaning and makes the concept comprehensible. At least most of us will know what I mean by Web 2.0 (the read/write Web - connecting with others) and Web 3.0 (The semantic Web - connecting with knowledge content through 'intelligent' search/filtering). I'm starting with them because whatever technology we will use in the future for teaching and learning, we can be assured it will have a social element and that we will increasingly rely upon intelligent (agent) systems to get us from where we are to where we want to be. The future is digital, and the future is the Web.

The future will be interactive. The way we interact with the Web will be different from the way we interact now. We are already seeing signs of shifts in use, moves away from mouse and keyboard toward natural hand and finger movements, such as multi- and pinch-gestures. The iPhone was one of the first handheld devices to capture this, but we already had interactive whiteboards in classrooms that could operate on a touch basis. It's now one small step away from that to interaction in 3-D, where we move around in physical space, and the computer tracks and responds to our hands, eyes and voice. AR tools will recognise what we are doing and then enhance it by adding information to the world around us.

The future will also be mobile. I have already elaborated on why we need to be more mobile and agile in a previous post, but I will emphasise here that learning and working on the move is going to increase exponentially in the coming years. It will increase because we are more mobile as a society than ever before and we need to maximise the limited time we have each day. The demands on an individual's time are increasing to the point that many people now need to learn how to work smarter not harder, by doing more in the down-time that is otherwise wasted waiting or travelling. Increasingly we will see people using handheld smart devices to augment personal reality, access information, communicate, navigate their way through physical space and create and share content while on the move. Many of us are already starting to do this.

Finally the future will be sensory. One of the words we will increasingly hear in 2010 is the word 'haptic.' Haptic - pertaining to the sense of touch - describes the manner by which some new technologies are providing tactile feedback to users through handheld controllers. When it's your turn on Wii sports, your handset makes a small sound, a blue light flashes, and it vibrates. The handset alerts several of your senses simultaneously. Mobile phones also have a built in vibration alert when you want to go silent but still want to know a call or text is incoming. We are witnessing the early stage of haptic consumer technology. It will get better as it becomes more widely available, and more control will become possible using haptic tools. Humans have more than the 5 traditional senses Artistotle talked about. At least three - equilibrioception (balance), proprioception (sense of limb juxtapositions) and kinaesthesia (motion) - are there waiting to be tapped into, to make our interaction with digital media more natural, responsive and effective.

I'm going to try to make some sense of all this for my audience. Together, we will discuss ways in which new smart technologies can enhance education and training, and make learning more exciting and relevant for our students.

Learning Technologies 2010 will be held at Olympia 2, London, on January 27-28.

Image source

Our cyborg future?

Last Thursday I dragged the family off to see a new interactive exhibition at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle entitled ‘Our Cyborg Future’. It’s on until 27 October, with free entry into the show and it’s well worth a visit if you are in the area. The blurb for the show reads: ‘Where does the me end and the machine begin? This exciting exhibition features body parts, smart textiles, wearable computing and much more. Come and see, come and think, come and discuss: is this the future we want?’

Well, there was plenty to think about, but no-one to discuss my ideas with, as the only people in attendance were the security guards who made sure you didn’t walk off with the exhibits. It would have been nice to talk to a computer scientist or a cybernetics expert, because many of the ideas on show demanded a dialogue of some kind. Perhaps the most significant exhibit for me was the computer-brain interface device, which is worn over the head Petr Cech style, as rubber helmet, replete with EEG sensors that are patched into the computer (pictured). All you do is ‘think’ your cursor around the screen and it follows your every command. Sounds neat and very useful (particularly for quadriplegic users) but also just a little bit scary. It’s not that new an idea either, but it was nice to see it in action, even if only on a video. Bio-clothing was also on show, where fabric changed shape and colour (or even disappeared!) on wearer command. There were numerous computer controlled protheses, some of which appalled my young son, until I told him you didn’t actually have to have your leg amputated to wear a bionic leg – but you could wear one if you were unlucky to lose your leg in an accident.

I also enjoyed getting the remote sensor robot angry – the closer you get to him the more animated he becomes, and I got close enough to get him thrashing around on his pistons like a demented Johnny Rotton. He came within a hair’s breadth of braining me at one point (the robot, not Johnny Rotten).

Oh….and to answer the question in the exhibition blurb – is this the future we want? Well it’s the future we will get, whether we want it or not.