Info-Topia: Computers get smarter.Can we?
Schank, Roger C.
"Info-Topia" COMPUTERS KEEP GETTING SMARTER. CAN WE? BY ROGER C. SCHANK intelligence an absolute? Does mankind I get smarter as time goes...
...The same is true of our view of the Greeks, of course...
...To Fadiman's remark quoted above, I responded that minds would not be less well educated, just differently educated...
...In a world where this is possible, what does it mean to be educated...
...Will we collectively be smarter as a society because of all these innovations...
...New technologies will change all this...
...In 50 years, there will still be Harvard, but the value of its imprimatur will have been altered tremendously...
...Knowing a good question makes you ready to enter into a discussion with other live humans interested in similar questions.You tell that to the walls, and suddenly the people interested in such questions—those who have gone beyond the software in the same way that you have—are all there in your living room (virtually...
...These games are so real to the participants that the virtual objects they employ are for sale (for hefty prices) on eBay...
...Knowing offhand what Freud had to say about the superego won't mean much when you can turn to the nearest appliance and ask what Freud had to say and and hear Freud (or someone who looks and sounds a lot like him) saying it and finding five opposing thought leaders from throughout time ready to propose alternative ideas if you want to hear them and discuss them together...
...Certainly we are getting more knowledgeable...
...I do and I understand") to Einstein ("The only source of knowledge is experience...
...As a result, math tests began to focus on more substantive issues than long division...
...It depends on what you mean by intelligence, of course...
...our schools will have been replaced by them...
...business-es want solutions...
...Increasingly, the chief concern of our schools is testing...
...I responded that they would be out of business in 10 years if that was their belief...
...When I asked the board if they would be happy to put out an encyclopedia 10 times the size of the current one if the costs involved remained the same, they replied that, no, the current encyclopedia had just the right amount of information...
...This essay was written for The Next Fifty Years, a collection edited by John Brockman and published in July by Vintage Books...
...fifty years from now, knowledge will be so easy to acquire that one will be Fable simply to say aloud whatever one wants to know and hear, an instantaneous response from the walls—enhanced by a great deal of technology inside those walls, of course...
...The school was teaching doing by having students do.While this is not a radical idea in technical colleges, it seems to be radical in our other institutions of higher learning...
...He may have understood the nature of humans and their institutions as well as the Greeks who followed him...
...Governments will have to give up even imagining that they are in the education business, an area they dominate today, and will be unable to control the broad distribution of virtual experiences in much the way that they are failing to control television and computer access in country after country today...
...Computers can only take you so far, we will hear people say...
...In the future, these worlds will become much more sophisticated and even more intertwined with the real world...
...But a brilliant cave dweller, who had available to him limited knowledge of the world and limited wisdom from the ages, could work only within the parameters of the tools he knew...
...You turn to the wall for a response...
...The important intellectual issues will revolve around questions arising from the nature of students' interactions in the virtual educational world...
...We really will be able to go wherever we want to go on any given day, and all anyone will ask of us is where we have been and whatexperiences we have had there...
...i* 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002...
...What will be valued will be good questions...
...The governmental control of information—still popular in some countries, and still possible in those countries without computer access—will become an archaic notion.Too much experience will be available too readily and too cheaply to prevent anyone from experiencing anything...
...As machines become omnipresent and able to answer questions about whatever concerns us, the values we place on each individual's being a repository of factual knowledge will diminish...
...At Carnegie Mellon, where I work, new students must put together their own computer as soon as they arrive on campus and use that computer for the next four years.You can be sure that they understand how computers work once they have built one themselves...
...Education will mean—even from the age of two—exploring worlds of interest with intelligent guides available to answer your questions and pose new ones...
...All I could say was that I had nothing of interest to add...
...World upon world will open to the child who is curious...
...Success in various virtual experiences will encourage us to encounter new ones, much as video games do today...
...our homes will be dominated by virtual experiences...
...This, then, is an exciting question...
...Of course, this last idea is well understood in universities today, but it is not really appreciated in business or government...
...you exclaim...
...Who was right...
...While the average child has access to a wealth of information, considerably more than was available to children 50 years ago, there are people who claim that our children are not as well educated as they were 50 years ago and that our schools have failed us...
...Fields of endeavor will create experiences in those fields...
...We will seek out those who are more experienced than we in the virtual worlds they have entered...
...But in any absolute sense he wasn't too smart, because there was so much that he hadn't experienced...
...But is intelligence simply the ability to be informed of answers to your questions, or is it the ability to know what questions to ask...
...To think about the education part of that question, we have to ask what a child's life would be like in that world...
...The old idea that the smartest people were those who received the best grades from schools that tested them to see how well they had learned will morph into a notion that the smartest students are the ones who pose questions for the software that have to be sent to humans in order to be answered...
...The notion that education is about indoctrination by the state—an idea boldly stated in the 1700s and little acknowledged today—will seem scary...
...School has become a regimen for learning answers rather than learning to inquire...
...In terms of raw capacity for thought, people are as smart now as they ever were or ever will be...
...Fifty years from now, school as we know it will have atrophied from lack of interest...
...Eventually the limits of the computer's collective knowledge are reached...
...People will look back at us and ask why it took so long for us to change our notions of education, why we thought SAT scores mattered, or why we thought memorizing answers was a mark of intelligence in any way...
...But a leap of tremendous proportions is coming in the next generation...
...The virtual schools that will arise to take the place of current institutions will attract students less because of the credentials they bestow than for the experiences they offer...
...and most of all in school, where answers are king...
...Imagine the following:You are sitting in your living room, talking with your spouse, and an issue comes up between you...
...I see and I remember...
...Certifying agencies will worry more about what you can do—what virtu-al merit badges you have achieved—than what courses you have taken...
...I asked Adler whether there might be some new books that could be included, and he replied that most of the important thoughts had already been written down...
...In a class for future chefs, each student had his own cooking facilities and they were busy making food...
...The creation of virtual experience will become a major industry...
...Why go to school to learn facts, when virtual experiences are readily available and the world's best teachers are virtually available at any moment...
...Instead of Harvard or Columbia offering courses in physics, physicists from around the world will work with designers who will build software to create physics experiences.Those experiences will be avail-able to everyone...
...ducation in its deepest sense has always been about doing, rather than about knowing...
...Our minds will be differently educated, and our intellectual world will be dominated neither by humanists nor by scientists, but by experientialists, those who have been there and have become curious as a result...
...In such a supply-and-demand view of knowledge and intelligence, even Clifton Fah-man would have felt left out...
...Politicians want simplistic points of view...
...We will understand that it is the questions that remain unanswered and those who can think critically about them that are the factors in any true measure of intelligence...
...I was once asked to review some technical colleges to see how they were teaching...
...Intelligence will mean the ability to reach the limits of an educational experience...
...you demand...
...Does mankind I get smarter as time goes by...
...Today, games like Ever-quest attract hundreds of thousands of players who inhabit virtual worlds in an effort to gain status, form relationships and acquire various virtual objects...
...We will all be smarter—a great deal smarter—in the sense that we will not be afraid of new experiences.We will know how to find those experiences and we will grow from them...
...you can only help him discover it within him-self") to A. S. Neill ("I hear and I forget...
...But what happens when the facts are in the walls...
...Latine Authour ex ternporare, and make and speake true Latin verse and prose Suo (ut aiunt) Marte, and decline perfectly the paradigms of Nounes and verbes ine the Greeke tongue, then may lice bee admitted into the Colledge, nor shall any claim admission before such qualification...
...certifying agencies want scores...
...Today, questions about what it means to be intelligent and what it means to be educated are not at the center of our scientific inquiry, nor are they at the center of our popular discourse...
...JULY/AUGUST 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 Galileo ("You cannot teach a man anything...
...The wall points out that it has a number of virtual people available to join your conversation...
...What The Great Books series and Harvard of 1745 have in common is an underlying assumption that the study of man and his institutions had been sufficiently mastered in ancient times and therefore education required you to be well read and well versed in the thoughts of those who had preceded you...
...Or at least it seems that way...
...Because I was both a scientist and much younger than everyone else, most of what I said was met with odd stares...
...His idea of education did not include, for example, being able to program in JAVA, or understanding the basics of neuroscience...
...We will begin to understand in the next 50 years that experience and one's ability to extend its range is the ultimate measure of intelligence and the ultimate expression of freedom...
...The old idea of school, based on the notion that the most knowledgeable per-son in town had information to impart and the rest of us were forced to sit and memorize that information, will give way to new ideas of knowledge acquisition...
...The walls know no more of relevance...
...Knowledge will no longer be seen as a commodity.Anything obtained easily is devalued in society, and it will be the same with knowledge...
...Each generation improves on the experiences it opens up to the next...
...Education has meant accumulating information, and intelligence has often meant little more in the popular imagination than the ability to show off what one has accumulated...
...A lively discussion ensues...
...As more tools for doing become available, it is doing that will matter...
...Many scholars throughout the years have pointed this out, from Aristotle ("For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them") to Roger C. Schank is Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon...
...Since these experiences will be there for the taking when a learner decides to learn, most students will start college long before the age of 18...
...The fact that we still have teachers and classrooms and textbooks will be almost laughable in 50 years...
...Still, we live our lives according to implicitly understood ideas about intelligence and about education.Those ideas will be seriously challenged in the next 50 years...
...As answers become devalued, questionsbecome more valued.We have lived for a very long time in an answer-based society...
...At a later meeting, after having heard me make similar assertions about the future, Clifton Fadiman, a literary hero of the 1940s, responded,"I guess we will all have to accept the fact that minds less well educated than our own will soon be in charge of institutions like the Encyclopaedia...
...This idea, that all the great thoughts have already been thought, has been prevalent in the American idea of education and intelligence for a long time...
...He was also responsible for a series called The Great Books of the Western World, which was (and is) sold as a set.These books represent all the great written works of the world's wisdom—according to Adler and his colleagues, anyhow—most of them books written prior to the 20th century...
...Being educated—and therefore being intelligent—has, for the last century and many centuries before that, been about the accumulation of facts, the ability to quote the ideas of others and a familiarity with certain ideas...
...Here are the admission requirements for Harvard College in 1745: When any Schollar is able to read Titliy or such like classical...
...You choose some characters whom you have heard about or conversed with before...
...When the pocket calculator was introduced, people asked whether calculators might as well be used in math tests, since from now on such devices would always be available...
...He may have been as intelligent as the Greeks who followed him...
...When educational environments demand questions, ask how questions were obtained, and demand to know the experiences that brought on those questions, then the profound change that computers offer will have been realized...
...Many players of these games have a social life entirely based upon them...
...In the world of Clifton Fadiman, an educated mind was one that had been trained at Harvard (or its equivalent) and was conversant with the major ideas in Western thought...
...the media want national soap operas...
...Signs of it are everywhere: in the television shows that people watch, such as Jeopardy and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire...
...About 10 years ago, I was asked to join the board of editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica.The other members were mostly octogenarians and mostly humanists...
...The introduction of artificial intelligence into everyday devices will have the same effect...
...What does it mean to be intelligent...
...in the games that people play, such as "Trivial Pursuit...
...An educated person in this view is one who is able to discuss with erudition a variety of historical, philosophical and literary topics...
...teachers want correct answers...
...Aristotle seems brilliant because he tackled issues we still tackle todayand had great insights into those issues.Yet Aristotle can also be almost funny in his naivete when he approaches subjects with which he had little experience and with which we have had so much more...
...BY R O G E R C . S C H A N K 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • JULY/AUGUST 2002 s intelligence an absolute...
...The chairman of the board of the Encyclopaedia Britannica at that time was the late Mortimer Adler...
...What we see today in video games and science fiction movies will become our reality...
...They had no idea what I meant—although I tried to explain the coming of what is now called the World Wide Web...
...Nevertheless, schools have ignored this and chosen—in the words ofJohn Dewey—to "teach by pouring in...
...INFO-TO I COMPUTERS KEEP GETTING SMARTER...
...It is what we can do, not what we know, that will matter in an educational system based on realistic performance environments...
...Those who are considered smart in a society like that are those who have succeeded in supplying it with what it wants...
...venture capitalists want prof-its...
...Education in such a society will be a matter of what virtual (and later real) worlds you have entered and how much you have learned to do in those worlds...
Vol. 35 • July 2002 • No. 4
