Mohammed,
Thank you for commenting on my essay. I have read yours, and I agree that there are similarities between our ideas. I will grade your essay and comment on it on your forum.
Marc
Mohammed,
Thank you for commenting on my essay. I have read yours, and I agree that there are similarities between our ideas. I will grade your essay and comment on it on your forum.
Marc
Marc,
Finally got to your essay and was pleasantly surprised. I am in complete agreement with your statements that "citizens will need to rise", "knowledge is a good thing", and "people around the world have lost faith in figures of authority and Big Government".
Our biggest agreement is on any action must "lead to positive outcomes for the greatest number of humans".
I also totally agree with every item on your '"futurecentric" curriculum.
Where I think we may have a bit of difference (my essay is here) is that:
- While you have 13 "Topics" I am not restricting the curriculum in any way and saying everything we know in science should be shared, especially the result-cause relationships and, not necessarily the 'why of cause-effect relationships' to hedge risk.
- I am not sure who decides what to do (who is responsible for action) in your case. In my view, every citizen is independently responsible for improving their individual future.
Please read my essay and let me know if you agree, or not, with how close our thoughts really are.
-- Ajay
As anyone who knows me will attest, I am essentially unteachable; I must learn my own way. So I read your essay as a total outsider, and then I did what any sensible outsider would do in 2014: I googled "future oriented education". You probably know all about the following initiatives already, but just in case, and as an opportunity to comment on how they might fit in with your own, here are a few things I found worthy of note:
- Marc Prensky is currently creating a Global Future Education Foundation and Institution (and writing two books about it, including one proposing "a new, future world curriculum") with goals which look similar to yours.
- New Zealand wins the search engine placement battle, with entries like Supporting future-oriented learning and teaching - a New Zealand perspective and Shifting to 21st Century Thinking in education and learning. Apparently the New Zealand Council for Educational Research has been thinking about this for more than a decade.
- Marco Rieckmann has thought about Future-Oriented Higher Education: Which Key Competencies Should Be Fostered Through University Teaching and Learning?, and Derek Hodson about Science education for an alternative future.
- 2014 is the last year of the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, proclaimed in December 2002 by the United Nations General Assembly. I had no idea. The issues emphasized by EDS seem to partially overlap with your curriculum, and UNESCO's International Implementation Scheme may contain some applicable wisdom. Or not. As I said, I had no idea...
Hello Marc,
Your essay is clearly written and makes a very good case for improving education by emphasizing critical, numerical, probabilistic and statistical thinking. I agree with most of your individual proposals, although I think you place too much faith in humans to execute your plan. After all, these options have been available to people for many decades, and people of generations past (at least in the U.S.) were probably better versed in these many areas than they are today. Education isn't the primary culprit; it is people's evolutionary baggage that makes them biased, or inattentive, or lazy, or distracted, or immersed in instant gratification, or more likely, all of the above.
To guide long-term decisions, your proposal places trust in current human priorities, and thus current levels of rationality. Substantial research by Kahneman and Tversky, Keith Stanovich, Tom Gilovich, Dan Ariely, and many others convince us that people are neither rational nor good forecasters, even when they are focused on the future.
People have great difficulties with large data sets and thinking about long-distance and long-term consequences of our actions, and as we and others in this competition (see Sabine Hossenfelder's essay) have pointed out, what limited understanding we have is prone to cognitive biases and statistical errors. We agree with you that a focus on the future is essential, but these intrinsic limits to our current thinking abilities present an impassable obstacle.
We think our proposal is the only truly efficient (albeit, long-term) approach and, while our proposed solution is not as specific as yours, we want people to engage in a serious conversation about the issues we raise and how to create better brains and other thinking machines - especially the best scientists and engineers who typically have little motivation to consider these issues because they are comfortable with their own intellects. The most rational and intelligent people only feel satisfied with their present mental status because human perceptions are selected to be relativistic about abilities, but the problems highlighted by both of our essays apply to everyone.
I hope your essay does well. I also hope that you read our essay and that we persuade you to some degree of the soundness of our proposal. Whatever the outcome, we wish you all the best,
Preston Estep (and Alex Hoekstra)
Hi Preston and Alex,
Thank you for commenting on my essay. I have read your essay and I agree with a lot of what you are saying, although, most of the time, my own views are a little less "pessimistic" about the current level of human minds. I will comment on your essay in your forum.
Marc
An educational initiative specifically--rather than incidentally--aimed at improving our long-run decision-making is a fantastic idea, Marc. I think you are right that important issues like these can be taught if put into context, even to students who have little interest in memorizing the order of the planets.
The development of such curriculum will not always go smoothly, as you say. In fact, I'm sure curriculum development would be very contentious. We still need to reach scientific consensus on many of these issues. And people whose fundamental beliefs are challenged by the science--or who have a stake in the path we're already on--will fight hard to shape the curriculum to their own liking. But as you say,just the conversation about the curriculum would be well worth having.
In my opinion, this is one of the best essays in the contest. I hope it does very well--it deserves to.
Best,
Robert
Ajay,
Thanks for your comments on my essay. Here are my thoughts on the two "differences" between our proposals that you have mentioned.
1) My list of 13 topics is only a rough draft for a futurocentric curriculum, so there is room for many things that I did not mention. However, if we want to teach anything concrete, it is important that we define and optimize the "core curriculum". What you propose is different: you want all potentially useful scientific knowledge to be accessible to anyone, so they can "play" with it and find local solutions to improve their lives. This can take place in parallel with a Futurocentric Education Initiative. In fact, one measure of a successful education initiative would be that the "average" citizen would have a good enough basic education to be able to successfully play with the scientific knowledge made available -- to have fun playing, you need some basic skills!
2) The questions "Who decides" and "Who acts" are, of course, particularly tricky. To determine the content of the futurocentric curriculum, we will need a potentially difficult worldwide conversation between all major actors - governments, educators, industry leaders, scientists, scholars, artists, spiritual "leaders", etc. To implement the education initiative, we will need the help of the teachers, the writers, the artists, in fact, of anyone who wants to help educate other people. And the "average" citizen needs to want to learn what is being proposed, so, in the end, every citizen is responsible for improving their individual future, like in your approach.
In conclusion, I think our ideas are quite complementary.
Marc
Marc,
Excellent points in your essay. With a rather varied background, including my education, I can testify to the need for a broad education and one that considers the long-term effects of our actions, not repeating the negative lessons of history. Your Futurocentric Education Initiative will help discount our world's fixation on short-term comfort and greed and toward a viable future we can reach and survive in.
My essay builds on the same concepts, but emphasizing the role of the human mind and scientific vision in steering toward a viable future. I would like to see your comments on my concepts as well.
Dear Marc
I really enjoyed your well written and well structured essay. I support your visionary initiative 100% and I especially like the idea of people becoming future-literate. What a great expression!
Extremely important, you write:
"To truly influence the course of humanity, an initiative will have to start by influencing the minds of the most people possible, and to do so, it must implicate them in the process. The time has come to have a well-informed, serious worldwide conversation about the future."
The first challenge will be to conduct an open conversation free of any political agenda. The second challenge is to get it started soon enough. Perhaps this FQXi contest is a precursor to getting such a conversation going.
I agree with your comments to my essay that the concept of Greater Earth meshes well with your futurocentric curriculum. If all humanity would have the necessary room, resources, information, education and technology to survive and thrive, there would be no limit to human aspirations. Everyone needs to be made aware of these possibilities and opportunities. Worldwide peace and prosperity could indeed be obtained if we all would become future-literate.
I hope to see you in the finals!
Arthur
Dear Marc,
interesting work. The potential risk of an essay centred on education is one of sounding a bit obvious, but I think you have sufficiently avoided this problem, by providing some non-trivial arguments, justifications, and implementation details for your proposal. The prose and the logic is fluent, and makes up for a pleasurable, effortless reading.
I certainly agree that education is likely to be more effective, in steering our future, than some global institutional efforts, whose results `are often disappointing`.
Some criticism now. There are at least a couple of points in which the text, in my opinion, suffers from the `do the right thing` syndrome (in other words, is excessively generic), i.e. TOPICS 12 and 13 of your futurocentric curriculum. They sound to me too generic and obvious to capture a concrete implementation, and invite a (perhaps equally obvious) reaction that I am pretty sure you would agree with: the devil is in the details! Who can tell to really understand `the way the world works`? Which world? First, second, third? One thing is trying to come up with a futurocentric curriculum by having a `discussion` within, say, the United States. Another thing would be to involve (also) Europe, with its more marked diversity among countries. And yet another thing is to extend it to Middle East, Far East, Africa, etc. There are many worlds; and even it there were only one, it would still be a complex system endlessly open to unpredictable evolution steps (I`m being quick and generic too, but I guess you get the point).
You very correctly point out that inventions such as the cell phone have contributed to steering humanity (at least in life styles) beyond `the prognostications of professional futurists`, and, I would add, beyond the control and capacity of global `political` institutions. Who can predict what the next revolutionary invention would be, and what effects it will induce? These factors, largely unpredictable and un-steerable, are likely to play a stronger role than any other.
About the implementation of your plan, I appreciated your experienced concern for motivating high-school students to work on the topics of the envisaged curriculum. One may wonder, however, whether perspectives on the medium-long-term collective future of humanity would be more effective, in motivating high-school students, than the perspective of their short-term, individual, professional future. In this respect I find the essay by Hossenfelder as more realistic, when it assesses the laziness of human beings: we are not so good in interacting with scenarios that are far in space and time. (I guess that your proposal could nicely borrow some of her original ideas.)
Finally, a closing, semi-serious remark. I think your final quote of the Millenium Institute:
`These great conversations will be better informed if we realize that the world is improving better than most pessimists know and that future dangers are worse than most optimists indicate.`
is a good example of the weakness and genericity of these global endeavours. To me the quote is perfectly tautological: it directly follows from the definition of optimistic and pessimistic person!
Best regards
Tommaso
Tomamso,
Thank you for taking the time to read my essay, and for your very insightful comments.
I agree that my topic 12, "a future-literate citizen needs to be aware of the different factors that translate into a fulfilling life, and of the importance of taking into account the social, psychological, spiritual, artistic and cultural aspects of the lives of the citizens of the world", covers a lot of ground and is very generic. Being a physicist, I was much more explicit in other topics more related to the "hard sciences", but I wanted to emphasize that a futurocentric curriculum can be enriched by contributions from all aspects of life, including the artistic, the spiritual, etc. Obviously, this single topic needs to be expanded to be more detailed and specific.
My topic 13, "a future literate-citizen needs to have a wide and deep enough understanding of the way the world works so as to be able to evaluate the plausibility of a claim about the future in the news, or of a futuristic scenario in a work of fiction" has some kind of special status: it calls for the integration of knowledge about the other topics, as to acquire some sort of "gut feeling" about the plausibility or the implausibility of a claim about some future scenario or technology. For instance, a future literate citizen should be able to realize that injecting an adult organism with new DNA, no matter how advanced the technique, could never transform that organism into a new type of organism (like a human being into a man-animal chimera) in a few minutes or hours. Why is this important? I think some of the knee-jerk reactions that people have against some technologies (like genetic engineering) are influenced by what they see in science fiction stories (even though they are aware it is science fiction). I love science fiction, even when it is not realistic. But I think it is educational (and fun) to pick apart some science fiction scenarios in order to advance our understanding of how the real world works, and what is realistically feasible in the near future.
In the next part of your criticism, you write:
"Who can tell to really understand `the way the world works`? Which world? First, second, third? One thing is trying to come up with a futurocentric curriculum by having a `discussion` within, say, the United States. Another thing would be to involve (also) Europe, with its more marked diversity among countries. And yet another thing is to extend it to Middle East, Far East, Africa, etc. There are many worlds; and even it there were only one, it would still be a complex system endlessly open to unpredictable evolution steps."
I think you have nicely summarized the most difficult challenges that has to overcome any concrete proposition about "steering the future". I think it is only natural (and practical) to start by having local conversations about what should be on a futurocentric curriculum, before going "worldwide". It will certainly be very challenging to have a worldwide conversation about steering the future, because "the future is not evenly distributed" (in the words of William Gibson).
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You also raise the important issue of whether or not "perspectives on the medium-long-term collective future of humanity would be more effective, in motivating high-school students, than the perspective of their short-term, individual, professional future". I think it could be, in some cases. For instance, future math majors sometimes do not see why they should know any biology, and students who want to pursue careers in the health sciences sometimes wonder why they need to learn about physics. If we can tie knowledge to its universal relevance for steering the future of humanity, I believe we can raise the motivation of, at least, some of the demotivated students. (Students who already love learning for learning's sake will do well no matter what.)
You mentioned Sabine Hossenfelder's essay, that suggests that we use "priority maps" to build a more-or-less automatic system that tells people how much their priorities match with the decisions they take, in an "intuitive and emotional way" that counteracts our laziness and lack of time to research the consequences of our actions. I found her approach very interesting, and it would certainly complement the education initiative I propose. It is useful to have automated helpers (like pocket calculators), but in order to use them at their full potential, I believe it is important to have internalized some basic knowledge about the way they work (you must know some basic things about numbers and math before being able to use a calculator). So even if one day we fully implement Sabine's system so that our decisions are guided in an effortless and intuitive way via a brain implant, I think the system will work better in conjunction with widespread future-literacy in the population.
As for the Millenium's Institute quote, "these great conversations will be better informed if we realize that the world is improving better than most pessimists know and that future dangers are worse than most optimists indicate", I know it sounds generic and somewhat vacuous, but I think it actually states something important. I know too many people who are concerned about the future of humanity, but who have so thoroughly internalized all the most extreme prophecies of doom that they fully believe that civilisation will collapse (never to rise again because of depleted resources), even if we outlawed all cars tomorrow and became all vegans. I think we need to keep a nuanced and balanced outlook, especially when we teach to young people who are just beginning to learn how the world works. (But we must also avoid to be overly optimistic and to believe that everything will turn out fine no matter what we do.)
Thank you again Tommaso for all the interesting issues you raised!
Marc
P.S. Your essay was one of the first I read, and I really enjoyed it, but I didn't take the time back then to comment on it and rate it. I will do that soon: see you in your forum!
Dear Marc,
Yes indeed , when you want to move on you need an "organised" way to realize that but....
Humanity is so different in its specific units that these units are forming "groups" with each one also different viewpoints, in politics these groups are trying to cooperate but have to "concede" with others (so there fine ideals have to be rubbed of) so the further we go in cooperation the more is rubbed of and the lesser is realized, that is my problem with mondial governments.
My perception is that humanity has to change its idealistic goals from egoistic short term profit making to an achievement of higher consciousness. Perhaps when the average age of a human being was 200 years and not about 80 years we should already be more cautious because we were more involved ourselves on the long term....
I hope that you can find some time to read my essay : "STEERING THE FUTURE OF CONSCIOUSNESS, and leave acomment on my thread I would be obliged if you would leave a rating that is in accordance with your appreciation.
best regards
Wilhelmus
Dear Marc,
I enjoyed reading your essay, which I think is very well written, deep and fun. I think the worldwide Futurocentric Education Initiative is an excellent idea. I completely agree that "the key word here is understanding", and that "knowledge is a good thing, and that the more numerous are the citizens of the world who have a sound basic understanding of the way the world is and evolves, the more happy, prosperous and secure the future of humanity will be".
Best regards,
Cristi
Tommy,
Thank you for the links. I was aware of some of these initiatives, but some were new to me. I will certainly look into it!
Marc
Marc,
Nobel's rationalism was not future-literate but logically consequent.
I reiterate the unwelcome question I addressed to Flavio Mercati :"What do you mean? How many people does the Earth need?"
Future-literate, as you described it, refers to symptoms rather than to truly basic moral perspectives.
Eckard
Dear Marc,
I loved many of your quotes (we both stole them from the same authors :-) ), e.g. "The future is where we are going to spend the rest of our lives." You even included ideas that I had to cut (e.g. explain why negative predictions are so popular) because I was busy specifying Three Crucial Technologies in my essay.
> "we need a worldwide Futurocentric Education Initiative."
I agree with you 100% that education is vitally important, and the future has always been in the hands of educators. Unfortunately, other than a few subgroups (some Asian and European immigrants to the United States, especially Ashkenazi Jews), people don't value education as much as is good for them. And as I wrote elsewhere, there are some problems with education.
First, education does not always convey correct ideas. Many Nazis learned their eugenics at University of California, Berkeley. Even worse, it is often difficult to determine which novel ideas will lead to disaster.
Second, some people do not want to be educated at all; others just are not interested in being educated in virtues or wisdom, or future studies --i.e anything that may require them to make a change in the way they live (because change is painful, plus change is a reminder of impending death). Future Studies has been taught at universities for decades, and on-line courses are available (e.g. http://www.csudh.edu/global_options/introfs.html).
Third, learning about complex knowledge is often difficult. It's so much easier to zone out in front of the TV, or play video games on the Xbox, or watch YouTube videos.
We need help to solve these three problems. Hopefully the Descriptive Logics of the Semantic Web will help with the first problem somewhat (and some systems are available now), but we need to take the next step, if it is possible--we need smart AI that we can trust to help with our weak willpower. In any case, we need to diversify off this planet--we simply can't afford to put all our eggs into one basket.
> "We also need to foster a balanced and constructive attitude toward the future: we must counter the arguments of the fatalistic pessimists who exaggerate the problems we face, but also of the techno-optimists who believe that future technologies will save us no matter how careless we are."
How can we balance the two correctly? This is much more difficult than it looks. For example, Steve Jobs was humorously reputed to carry around a portable reality distortion generator. It is very important to understand reality as it is (i.e. have your feet on the ground), but I wager that it is even more important to have visions of what can be (ie. have your head in the clouds). If you can connect the two (as Jobs did), then you can make a difference. Your thirteen item in Table 1 addressed the issue, but you didn't really solve the problem. Just to take one example (with huge consequences), how can we tell if Eric Drexler's view of nanotechnology is accurate? There are many intelligent people on both sides of the issue. Similarly with the capabilities of Artificial Intelligence.
What do you teach in such situations? As you pointed out, we should teach the debate (if you ask me, Drexler and his associates adequately answered all of Smalley's criticism). But that still doesn't tell us what to do in public policy.
Your description of the "deficit of meaning" is *wonderful* and vitally important. Dr. O'Neill stumbled on the idea of Space Colonies while trying to answer that question, and I ask it of all my students whenever I teach.
I loved your quote from Einstein: "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious: it is the source of all true art and science." But I think that it means that we need more than just 21st century skills like critical thinking and Internet collaboration; it means having the correct 21st century attitude--realistic optimism and a willingness to work smart to make it happen.
-Tee
Dear Tihamer,
Thank you for taking the time to read my essay, and for your comments. You certainly raise a lot of valid issues with the idea of education helping humanity steer the future: the challenge of making people value education (especially about "difficult" topics that deal with the issues we will have to face in the future), and the challenge of making sure that we teach the "right thing". I agree with you on both counts.
Your solutions are interesting: working towards a semantic "intelligent" web that can help us make the right decisions against our weak willpower, and the need to diversify off planet. I also agree that the optimal "21st century attitude" should be a blend of realistic optimism and a willingness to "work smart" to make things happen. Here's to the future!
Marc
One aspect of the future is not hard to predict. The technological systems provide goods and services to society by irreversibly using up limited natural material resources, producing immutable material waste and irrevocably devastating aspects of the environment. These systems are aging as friction does negative work on them. The service they provide is unsustainable.The challenge is on for humanity to steer the future usage of this infrastructure using the knowledge that has been acquired.
Dear Marc,
I totally agree with your ideas and conclusions. Need to make a revolution in Education, especially in school. Need to educate primarily creators thinking about the future of Humanity. The system «Futurocentric Education» must necessarily widely introduce Philosophy and Ethics. Right you mark the need for change in mathematics education. Basis of mathematical education should be the principle of historicity and visibility. "Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world." (Albert Einstein) «The truth should be drawn with the help of the cognitive computer visualization technology and should be presented to" an unlimited circle "of spectators in the form of color-musical cognitive images of its immanent essence.» (Alexander Zenkin «Scientific Counter-Revolution in Mathematics»). Information Era is "The era of people with mathematical mind"(Yuri Milner). "Shut up and calculate" any more won't pass, it is necessary to pass to "Understand and quickly calculate ". The Future requires an understanding and accurate calculation. I invite you to comment on and appreciate my essay.
High regard,
Vladimir