Ready for the day the machines take over? Education system needs to be redesigned to promote creative thought over rigid process-based solutions
When
the first Industrial Revolution introduced the world to machines that were
capable of producing goods faster and with greater efficiency than human
muscles could hope to do, it destroyed forever, centuries worth of handcraft
traditions. Within a decade, whole cohorts of weavers, leather workers,
carpenters and the like were rendered jobless, forced, for their own survival,
to re-skill themselves as workers on the shop floors of the very factories that
had replaced them. The same story repeated itself during the second Industrial
Revolution which created new industries and redistributed economic power to
manufacturing facilities that hadn’t existed before. The third and most recent
Industrial Revolution introduced computers and digital technologies to the mix,
removing the political boundaries between marketplaces. For the first time,
companies were freed of geopolitical constraints and could procure services
from wherever they could be most efficiently delivered.
The
Austrian economist, Joseph Schumpeter, called this “creative destruction”, an
inherently paradoxical term that describes the impact that radical innovation
has on capitalist society. In almost every instance, the net benefit of radical
innovation outweighs the economic status quo that would have prevailed had
there been none —even though this process of disruptive change results in the
destruction of well established industries. Viewed from this perspective,
entrepreneurs do far more than just innovate.
They
introduce into the economy new means of production and distribution which,
while often painful at the time, are necessary in order to ensure that scarce
resources are continually being made more productive.
We
are currently on the threshold of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The
workforce is, once again, about to be radically disrupted by new technologies
like artificial intelligence, machine learning and cognitive automation—in ways
that we cannot, at this point in time, fully comprehend. If the past industrial
revolutions were transformational, this one promises to be seismic. It is
already anticipated that over 47% of all US jobs are at risk from automation.
And while technological transformations, in the past, have allowed displaced
workmen the opportunity to re-skill themselves to take up new roles within the
transformed workplace, it seems increasingly unlikely that the workmen
displaced by the Fourth Industrial Revolution will have any role to play in
their new technological reality.
The
fault, at least in part, lies with our schooling.
Our
current system of education was devised during the First Industrial Age to
skill a generation that needed to be reoriented to the new demands of the
industrial workplace. It was designed to ensure that the future industrial
employee followed instructions without question, adhering strictly to the
precise schedules and specifications that assembly line manufacturing demands.
In the process, we consciously suppressed our very human tendency to
extemporise, as any deviation from the mechanised production processes could be
disastrous.
What
we ended up with was our current system of age-based grades and standardized
testing that assumes that all students of a particular age are at the same
level of intellectual development and which incentivises memorisation over the
ability to solve problems. A system that requires students to perform well
across subjects but denies them the opportunity to develop specialized
expertise in those for which they have an aptitude and that is ultimately
designed to stifle creativity and innovative thinking. Today, a couple of
centuries after it was first conceptualised, these elements remain the key
characteristics of our education system.
The
trouble is that the requirements of today’s knowledge industry are
diametrically opposite to those of the initial Industrial Age. Business today
requires us to demonstrate innovative thinking and out-of-the-box solutions. In
this age of massive data storage and highly effective search, an education
system that emphasises memorisation and rote learning is completely
unnecessary. What we need, instead, is a way to train students to develop
advanced cognitive skills so that they can parse complex problems in different
ways in order to come up with unorthodox solutions that are not immediately
obvious.
The
Fourth Industrial Revolution is going to be defined by the way in which
cognitive machines take over our decision-making functions—something that we
have always believed can only be performed by humans. While each preceding
Industrial Revolution had allowed workers the opportunity to rise up the value
chain, this time it appears that the machines will finally breach the cerebral
bastion that we have always assumed will remain our sole preserve. Unless we
can redesign our education system to promote creative thought over rigid
process-based solutions, our next generation will be woefully ill-equipped to
deal with their own future.
After
all, when the machines do finally take over, we will need to stay one step
ahead at all times—or else run the risk of being overwhelmed.
Rahul
Matthan is a partner at Trilegal. Ex Machina is a column on technology, law and
everything in between.
Link | http://www.livemint.com/Science/e8aEHdREA3Q8alUZfEj59H/Ready-for-the-day-the-machines-take-over.html
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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