Understand what is already a reality and what to expect in education

*This article is an excerpt from Becoming Einstein’s Teacher: Awakening the Genius in Your Students, by Erika Twani.

In 1965, Dr. Gordon E. Moore published a historical article entitled “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.” He saw a pattern where the number of transistors fitting on a chip doubled every year. He then extrapolated it on a graphic for the following ten years and predicted computer chips would double in capacity every two years. This prediction became known as Moore’s Law, which is nothing like Newton’s Laws of Motion or the Law of Gravity, but a vital estimate that gives a good idea of what to expect from the speed of hardware, from machines to cell phones. In 1967, Moore co-founded Intel, a company that continues to lead innovation in computer chips.   

Data and processing capacity is the core of AI. The more data and the faster the ability to process it, the faster you have information at your disposal. Take Siri, for instance, a voice recognition technology that uses a natural language user interface to help you with everyday tasks, such as scheduling a meeting in your calendar, answering questions you may have, giving recommendations, providing directions to a restaurant, and so on. It takes a lot of data processing to identify your voice, interpret what you say, search the Internet, and organize the data to present it to you. Apple launched Siri in 2011, not long ago, and the year-over-year improvement is notable as Apple’s AI system “learns” how people use Siri, for what, different accents, and crosses all that data to make it more efficient every day.   

We can expect AI to evolve exponentially as data processing capacity improves, and its use expands. Can you navigate to a place you are unfamiliar without Waze or Google Maps? Imagine you are going to a meeting. While Google Maps instructs your self-driving car with the direction from point A to B, it suggests you stop at a natural juice shop for breakfast. You left home without eating, jogged five miles this morning, and your predicted mood is below the average as you forgot your wedding anniversary and your wife is mad at you. This shop’s ingredients combination is precisely what your DNA requires at this time to have the right amount of energy for the upcoming meeting, according to the data coming from your wearable watch. As you park, Google orders your juice and pays it with Google Pay before you even enter the store, making your stop less than one minute long. Google turns Play Music on with songs to improve your mood and get you ready for your meeting. Google knows you better than yourself and makes your life very efficient!  

The benefits of AI are beyond what our minds can conceive today. It is happening as we speak, besides all the use we already know. Take neural interfaces, for instance: devices that interact with our nervous system placed outside or inside our brains. It will bring a significant quality of life for many people. Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is already in use by patients with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and dystonia. Deaf patients use cochlear implants attached to the brain to restore hearing. Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is used to treat depression, and vagus nerve stimulation is used to treat epilepsy, depression, and addiction. Researchers are now exploring the same treatment for pain, anxiety, and autoimmune disorders.

Besides medical applications, researchers are also experimenting with high-density transcranial alternating current stimulation (HD-tACS). The first results on humans demonstrated it sharpens mental skills, alertness, and increases performance on endurance sports, such as cycling.  Imagine head-wearables that improve our cognitive abilities, make us learn faster and remember more, improve our emotional intelligence, motivate us to exercise and eat well, or allow us to download a new habit, all connected to one single source: the Internet. Brain to Internet interaction at the speed of thought will significantly improve our cognitive power and perhaps enable exponential creativity.

Do you think all of this is crazy? Think again. Entrepreneur Bryan Johnson founded Kernel.co in 2016 to build a “non-invasive mind/body/machine interface (MBMI) to improve, evolve and extend human cognition,” the next generation of technologies that can read and write directly from the brain. Elon Musk, on his turn, founded Neuralink in the same year with the sole purpose of developing “ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” In 2018, the University of California, Berkeley, presented the World’s smallest and most efficient brain implant called “neural dust,” a tiny 3mm sensor node that will sit below the cranial dura mater. While previous brain stimulation devices required wire connection even when implanted in the brain, neural dust is wireless, eliminating the exposure to infections. Its ultrasound connection to the external world will allow you to have live biometric data directly from your body, and stimulate nerves as needed. Watch UC Berkeley’s video here. Do you remember the time we had to schedule an appointment to have an MRI read our insides? It will be long gone soon!

These advancements in technology are fascinating. At the same time, it may lead us to overdependence on machines. It will raise questions such as what is to be human or if we still have natural cognitive capacities. Moreover, it will create several ethical issues related to our privacy and autonomy. As it brings benefits, it also brings challenges. Imagine the exposure of an entire population with implanted neural dust in their brains. In the past, marketers used subliminal messages to trick our subconscious mind and make us buy certain products, whereas now, a downloaded virus could reprogram the neural dust to store deep new beliefs in our brains. Today, hackers can see you through the camera of your computer or TV set. Why wouldn’t they read your mind when you use external or internal neural devices? How easy it would be for my husband to read my mind when he asks me what is wrong, and I say “nothing.” No good, no good!  

At the pace technology is evolving, the future may as well present us with a merge of BI and AI. Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests humans, as we know, will disappear in a century or two, giving room for a different being to emerge. That is if we manage to keep it all together and do not destroy the world beforehand with atomic bombs, climate change, or a fancy AI destruction device. Transistors perform billions of operations per second while connected to a limited number of others alike. The brain’s neurons connect to thousands of other neurons at the same time, performing 1,000 operations per second. We will have incredible brainpower once BI merges with AI, and it will be impossible to give it up.

Our brains are lazy by design, to conserve energy. In the automatic mode, we are trapped in the fast-thinking, on the “I already know this” statements, on the biases to reach conclusions as immediate as possible. That is why people hate changes or anything out of the status quo. Nevertheless, given what the future is reserving to us, it is of the essence to raise awareness and pay attention to these brain mechanics and, through cognitive control, make consistent decisions. Dr. Yuval Noah Harari recommends the current humankind to invest in continuous learning and the development of emotional intelligence, as those are the best skills to prepare ourselves for what is coming. 

Dr. Jeff Lichtman, a neuroscientist at Harvard University, calculated we need thousands of zettabytes of data storage to index the entire human brain. For comparison purposes, the Internet’s size is estimated to be 44 zettabytes by 2020. The Internet data so minor at this time compared to our brains. Thus, although BI and AI will eventually merge, we are still years away from it. We still lack on understanding our brains’ capacity, let alone understanding the power of our consciousness. Neural devices may work with the mechanics of the brain. Nevertheless, I ask, will it ever interact with our consciousness?

What does it mean for education? Well, the unexpected is the new normal. We must move from just in time to just in case. It means we must be prepared for the unknown. Moreover, the ones making decisions on the ethical issues that technology will bring us are sitting in your classrooms right now. We cannot stress enough the need to prepare learners to have the right state of mind and the proper cognitive awareness to make the right decisions. The future of humanity lies in their hands, and you and I are responsible for paving that way.