Note: this post is a part of the
series:
China v. The U.S.: The Battle Of Strategic Thinking
China v. The U.S.: The Battle Of Strategic Thinking
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It has become a common opinion that the country that “cracks” AI will dominate the world economic and technological development.
However, the road to an actual human-level
AI is still long; scientists do not know yet what intelligence is and how it is
developed and functions (for example, read “The New Stage of the Race for AI
domination”, more on the
page about AI).
But let us imagine that human-level AI has
been developed.
Immediately the Earth population will be divided
into two uneven groups.
The first group will represent a very
narrow layer of the population, and will be composed of people who will be able
to communicate with AI on its level – those are smart and well-educated people.
The vast majority will be composed of less
educated people inferior compared with AI.
For AI those people will be like children
who grew up physically, but have not grown up mentally or intellectually.
This situation may be seen as a new type
of a society where intellectual elite is composed of natural and artificial species, and that elite
rules over the rest of the population.
I do not make any judgment on if this
would be a good or a bad situation.
My point is that this separation will affect
all countries. And the country with the smallest percentage of uneducated
people will automatically be the country with the highest percentage of highly
intelligent species - human and artificial. If the number of human elite would become
much less than the number of AI species, the society would become too much dependent
on AI and unstable.
In
order to minimize the risk of this instability to happen, governments need to
apply strong efforts to ensure that the majority of people will be as smart and
educated as AI.
This brings us to the issues of the quality
of mass education.
The key word is – mass.
There is no problem for providing high
quality education to a select group of people. All is needed (1) a good principle, who (2) hires good teachers and other professionals, and (3) has good funding. Done.
But the mass “production” of highly
educated people is a serious issue for many countries with large populations.
I have described in numerous publications the
dire state of education reform in the U.S.A. Hundreds of millions of dollars
have been spent without making an impact. The publications are collected under title
“III.
Critical reviews of philanthropic and governmental approaches to reforming
education”.
Inventing gadgets, adopting merit pay, and
all other “innovations” will never make any impact unless the vast majority of teachers
will have adequate professional preparation.
Education
reform must begin from reforming the system of teacher professional
development.
Doing anything else is like treating just a
running knows of a patient who has cancer.
There are two major issues with the
current system of teacher professional development:
1. the absence of measurability; there are
no criteria to measure its effectiveness.
2. the invisibility of true innovations; among
numerous proposed innovations there are few that truly make difference, but in
the absence of measurable criteria, those effective innovations are being lost
in the ocean of pseudo-innovations.
To address the first issue, a government needs
to give to teachers the tools for assessing the quality of their professional
preparation (the specific approach is described in the following publication on
“Teacher Professional
Development”).
To address the second issue, a government needs
to give teachers the tools for communicating the best practices.
Of course, in both cases public needs to
have assurances that teachers remain accountable for the quality of their work.
There have been many approaches proposed to establish such accountability. None
of them worked. And none of them will work because they all are based on a
top-down control, i.e. require special agencies or agents that would control
teachers. But those agents also need to be accountable and controlled and professionally
developed. And that requires additional actions. And that road does not lead to
any significant improvement – if it did, we would not have serious issues within
mass education.
The new approach has become possible due
to recent leapfrogs in technologies.
They say (in different variations): we are
what we do when no one is watching.
If we flip this paradigm, we arrive at
another important rule: we do what we
need when everyone is watching.
Or at least, when we think that someone
may be watching.
The
most efficient way
to make teachers accountable for their work, to help them exchange their professional
experience, and to motivate them toward sustainable
professional development is to make their work visible – open for
observation and judgment.
The further motivation and specific details
of this approach are described in the following publications: “An Open Classroom
Initiative I” and “An Open Classroom
Initiative II”.
The
dominant position in the future world will not
be taken by the country that “cracks” AI; it will be taken by the country that “cracks” high-quality mass education. In the future, the most dominant country will not be the one that will figure out how to develop AI, but the one that will figure out how to develop HI - Human Intelligence - en masse.
Because citizens of that country will not be
dependent on the absence or presence, on the help and involvement of AI or
other technologies.
However, in order to propel “An Open
Classroom Initiative” a country needs to do major investments in education; but
most importantly, a government needs to manage those investments in a centralized
fashion. Giving away funds to different districts in a hope they will find out
the best way to use them is no different from just giving away money on a street
to random people. This approach has been used in the U.S.A. for many decades,
and has not led to a visible improvement in the quality of mass education.
Expecting from U.S. officials and
politicians to change their spending habits is no different from a wishful
thinking.
Hence, we cannot expect that U.S. will be
making significant gains in the quality of mass education.
What seems more possible is that the
countries with more centralized governmental management and less individualized
psychology – e.g. Russia, China, India – will be able to make a breakthrough in
reforming their education system sooner and faster than U.S..
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