Human intelligence
We just haven't been using it as efficiently as we could be. Currently with activities such as design and engineering we have only relatively small groups of people collaborate in any meaningful way. The development of most things whether they be products, services, utilities or modern agricultural processes tend to be done behind closed doors. This means that compared to what is possible, progress is sporadic and slow. With the involvement of all interested parties and using open and transparent development processes, progress could be far quicker and more efficient. The entire aggregate of the intelligence of humanity could be brought to bear on a problem. This would also significantly reduce the huge duplication of effort that happens today.
As well as potentially increasing the effectiveness of our current intelligence, total intelligence is growing constantly:
- Worldwide education is becoming more pervasive and of better quality, meaning that a much larger percentage of the world's population can effectively participate in developing solutions. The bulk of the world's population has, up until now, been in a situation where the sophisticated information gathered by humanity was inaccessible to them. Now, if cheap computers and wireless Internet can be spread to the 85% of humanity living in these countries, we open up a massive goldmine of ideas, invention, and innovation to advance humanity.
- Time-binding is an idea championed by Alfred Korzybski which states that humans have the unique ability to compound their knowledge generation after generation. Each generation inherits the knowledge of the previous one, adds its own and passes it on. In this sense, each generation has more sophisticated ideas to operate on than the previous one. Buckminster Fuller had a similar idea, which he simply called "know-how".
- The world population is still expanding which increases the pool of intelligence and the rate of time-binding
- The proposed advanced automation will result in freeing a greater percentage of the population to work on solutions to significant problems if they so wish.
- Nootropic drugs and nutrients that increase intelligence are continually being researched and developed and popularized. These effect the brain, often facilitating the pathways by which it produces its juice, leading to an increase in mental performance measures such as memory, concentration and IQ. There are also plants (such as Bacopa Monnieri, Withania Somnifera and many others) that can increase intelligence, but these tend to be called adaptogens, with the name 'nootropics' being reserved for synthetic and semi-synthetic substances.
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Ignorance is a contributing factor in many of the problems we face today, such as AIDS, pollution and food production. A first-rate education for the citizenry synergizes
 with every other element of an advanced civilization: scientific discovery happens faster, open collaborative projects grow faster and at a better quality, public health improves, solutions to our problems come faster and ambitious projects like colonising space or curing cancer become more and more feasible.
It is no secret that the schooling system nowadays is in a crisis. Our schools are based on a factory-line model: a child goes in one end, is processed according to a standard procedure and comes out the other end with a certificate. No regard is paid to the person's interests, curiosity, creativity, passion. Students are taught outdated material from a peculiar selection of often irrelevant or downright boring subjects. Their flexibility and capacity to deal with unexpected, non-obvious solutions are not encouraged, and are often actively suppressed. They are not free to pursue their passions and talents. They are not given the chance to apply their skills in any practical way. And worst of all, most students simply hate school. (One study [1] found that only 10-33% of students report being satisfied with school. The same study found that most students feel their teachers are uninterested in supporting them.) How can we promote better education? The answer seems simple: make learning truly interesting, more relevant to the individual and make proper use of modern media. An inflexible curriculum only benefits the schools and assessment bodies. It is becoming ever easier to create interactive 3-D environments such as those found in advanced computer games. With the right scripting for interaction and behaviour, these can make a captivating experience where the student hardly realises they are learning. It is a crime for education not to be interesting! Luckily, for every module of every subject there are educators (and others) who are truly gifted at explaining and teaching key concepts. We must make better use of these people in conjunction with open collaboration and the latest technology to disseminate knowledge to all who wish to learn, wherever they might be in the world. Educational material can be created and edited collaboratively, constantly evolving and increasing in both quantity and quality, similar to the evolution of the famous wikipedia Such material is made available free for anyone — teachers or students — to use and customise for their own purposes. This project is in early days, but is very much under way already. Listed below are several sites
Stanford University are running an experimental new course from October-December 2011. It is an introductory college course in artificial intelligence, led by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun (a leading developer of self-driving cars). The course is available to all free of charge and combines video lectures with online quizzes and assessments. As of August 2011, over 130,000 people have signed up. In the coming years, courses like this are sure become become more interactive and multiply to cover a greater range of subjects.
Some skills -- such as walking, riding a bicycle, putting a basketball in the hoop, and swimming -- are most rapidly learned by actually doing it, perhaps with someone who already knows how to do it putting your hands in the right place, etc. Other skills -- such as skyscraper design, aircraft engine-out recovery, parachuting, leading troops into battle, urban planning, etc. -- are generally considered not appropriate for beginners. These skills are today generally learned with a bunch of classroom lectures and simulation. For example, modern flight simulators have a combination of computer graphics (simulating the view out the front window) and robotics (moving the simulator round to simulate the "feel" of climbing, spiraling, rough landing, etc.). Improvements in computer graphics and robotics can improve education in several ways, including:
See also:
Free and open-source computer-aided design/Virtual environments for scenario modelling.
World Game Those responsible for educating the young must recognize that if a young person leaves school with a command of three languages, maths and science, but is overweight, unhappy and socially inept, then our educational system has grievously failed them. Inherent in the open source attitude is a practicality, a faith in the ability of an ordinary person to take on a task and complete it for themselves. But, as Alan Watts said, "Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don't learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character." This must be remedied. There is useful scientific knowledge now emerging from positive psychology (and from the scientific study of Buddhist practices) in how to create happiness. This is working its way into the school system, with the UK government recently making a course on Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning (SEAL) a standard feature in British schools. It seems reasonable to expect people to be educated in the fields of practical psychology (both for controlling their own emotions and behaviours and for optimally dealing with other people), engineering (including the use of a Fab Lab), cookery, computer programming, agriculture (growing their own food), exercise and sport science, music, dance, art and social entrepreneurship as well as the intellectual subjects ordinarily taught. The time saved by more efficient teaching of the abstract subjects will more than make room for such an expansion of the curriculum. Some rare people have an exceptional talent at explaining difficult concepts clearly and interestingly. Masters of verbal explanation include Alan Watts, Carl Sagan Alan Kay, the founder of the Viewpoints research Institute, in his TED talk gave some remarkable examples of the power of good explanations, including a method of teaching differentiation to six-year-olds. For the first time in human history, we have the means to pull all of these educational materials together in one place, covering every level of education and every subject, and make it freely available to the world's youth. That means is open collaboration. It is a matter of finding the best teachers in the world and encouraging them to contribute to the common educational resources for humanity (like those linked to above). It may be necessary at first to incentivize contributions from these people, and it is vital to publicize open-source education as much as possible, to generate the greatest possible collaboration. Occasionally particularly talented teachers spring up such as Sudhir Karandikar who got 91 of 104 high-school students to pass a college-level course. Wouldn't it make sense to videotape these people and make their lessons available to the world? Academicearth.org is making an organized effort to find great educators and film their lessons, but there is another, complimentary approach — to allow online communities to upload lessons and allow the best teachers to organically rise to the top. As with all open collaborations, plenty of bad material is submitted (have a look around Connexions for examples). But with the help of ratings, recommendations and dynamic testing, the cream will soon rise to the top. One exciting possibility of a large-scale online learning system is dynamically testing different lessons so that the most effective can be found. Imagine three different videos have been created explaining how molecules come together in a chemical reaction. If these are put into an open-source learning hub, they can each be shown to thousands of users. After seeing one of the three videos, each user is tested on their understanding of the chemical equation. From the results of these tests, the software will be able to know which of the three videos is most effective at explaining the chemical reaction. Anki is an open-source software program that has used this method to calculate the optimal time intervals for repeating facts in order to facilitate memorization. It is even possible in to program software to dynamically model the student's mastery of the material and adjust the difficulty level accordingly. This ensures that the difficulty is always at a level that challenges the student to the full of their ability without being either so easy as to bore them, nor so difficult as to baffle them. Such dynamic difficulty balancing Teachers if they wish could then use any of this material where appropriate, and use their own skills to check it has been understood by their students and elaborate further where necessary. The current education system necessitates the same thing to be explained again and again by millions of teachers around the world - a massive reduplication of effort. It would be a better use of teachers' time to have just a few top-quality explanations of each idea available on-demand, so that teachers can spend time giving students personalized attention. With open collaboration, we have the opportunity to create a global educational curriculum for all levels of education and all disciplines, built from nothing but the most engaging, most colorful, most entertaining and effective explanations, as determined by statistical data gathered from thousands of samples. |
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