“I’m afraid. I’m afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m a…fraid. Good afternoon, gentlemen. I am HAL 9000 computer.” A New Year’s Eve day Wall Street Journal article titled “The Tech to Rock Your 2015” caused me to have a flashback to the above quote from 2001: A Space Odyssey because of how much computers are expected to learn this coming year. A section of the article describes how virtual assistants such as Google Now and Microsoft’s Cortana will become more intelligent and useful to us in 2015 by acquiring more information from you and me about what we like to do (via calendars), what we seek to study and learn (via Web searches), what music we enjoy listening to when we drive (via cars), where we go (via GPS location) and how we feel (via monitoring our bodies). Such learning about our likes, desires and feelings is called predictive intelligence and … in the words of HAL, “I’m afraid.” I’m not afraid that computers are learning predictive intelligence but I am afraid that our technology will spend more time learning about social and emotional well being than our children will in 2015. Our technology will be better but will we say the same for our schools and communities?
We need a Moore’s Law for humanity as there is for technology, especially with respect to social emotional learning (SEL). Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a computer doubles every two years, thereby doubling a computer’s processing speed/power every two years. Instead of having a Moore’s Law in social, emotional and cognitive development, we seem to be following (with some exceptions) a Less Law. While we devote less and less time in school to creative arts, recess, phys-ed and other activities that strengthen SEL as well as cognitive development (see the previous blog entry titled Playing for Academic Success), we have seen a 66% increase in ADHD diagnoses since 2000 according to Northwestern University and a 20.7% increase in reported bullying since 2003 (first year that bullying was statistically tracked) by the National Center for Education Statistics. While America has increased ADHD diagnoses and school bullying incidents, our test scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) have flat-lined during the same time period. If we can build technological systems that continually improve upon themselves, we can build an education system that does the same for ourselves.
Technology, despite flashbacks to HAL, can help. As Jeremy Howard discusses in his TEDxBrussels talk (“The Wonderful & Terrifying Implications of Computers that Can Learn”) and Nicholas Carr writes in The Wall Street Journal (“Automation Makes Us Dumb”), computers and humans have and can continue to work together to better humanity. However, we have used technology more to silo and weaken than to interconnect and strengthen ourselves. How many times have you seen a group of people face first into their smart technology when they could be face-to-face with smart people right around them? We have focused, in Carr’s terminology, too much on “technology-centered automation,” which “emphasizes the needs of technology over those of humans,” instead of on “human-centered automation,” which “guides progress onto a more humanistic path.” We are even coining words for when technology interferes with human interactions such as “textruption,” which is “an interruption of a conversation caused by a text message.” When technology is human-centered, however, the results can be life saving (i.e., nanotechnology is being used to help cancer and burn patients) and mind altering (i.e., read any neuroscience article on neuroplasticity). More simply, in classrooms where technology is gamified for learning, I’ve seen students who rarely participate in class use technology as a conduit for generating the courage needed to engage their peers in debates and discussions about difficult concepts.
We may know more about each other because of technology but we are not yet using it to better understand or care for each other in ways that make our communities stronger. In 2014, Harvard’s Graduate School of Education released a study finding that nearly 80% of middle and high school students rank their own achievement and happiness over caring for others. On a more local note, a regional paper in the Newtown, CT area reported on a district-wide school climate survey showing that “Despite the counseling and mental health resources made available after the Sandy Hook tragedy…concerns about physical, social and emotional security were still acute.” Meanwhile, one of the country’s leading newspapers reports that technology is becoming more advanced by learning about our social and emotional well being. If anyone or anything is keeping score of the social emotional learning tally between technology and humanity, we should probably keep the answer behind HAL’s closed “pod-bay doors” until we walk a more humanistic path with technology.
“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use,” stated HAL (a Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer created on 12 January 1992 in the movie), “which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.” Can we say the same about ourselves in 2015? Maybe this is the year we learn something human from the technology we created.
Carr, Nicholas, “Automation Makes Us Dumb,” The Wall Street Journal (November 21, 2014).
Fowler, Geoffrey A. and Joanna Stern, “The Tech to Rock Your 2015,” The Wall Street Journal (December 30, 2014).
Howard, Jeremy, “The Wonderful and Terrifying Implications of Computers that Can Learn,” TEDxBrussels (December 2014).
Hutson, Nanci, “Newtown School Survey Suggests Concern for Social/Emotion Security” NewsTimes (September 24, 2014).
National Center for Education Statistics, “Student Reports of Bullying and Cyber-Bullying,” (August 2013).
Weissbound, Rick, Stephanie Jones, Trisha Ross Anderson, Jennifer Kahn and Mark Russell, “The Children We Mean to Raise: The Real Messages Adults are Sending about Values,” Making Caring Common Project (Cambridge, MA: The President and Fellows of Harvard College, 2014).
White, Erin, “Diagnosis of ADHD on the Rise,” Northwestern University News Center (March 19, 2012).
Zimmer, Ben, “You Heard ‘Em Here First: Words of 2015,” The Wall Street Journal (January 2, 2015).
Chris is Professor of Political Science at Western Connecticut State University, a Fulbright Scholar, Director of the Kathwari Honors Program, and founding Director of the Center for Compassion, Creativity & Innovation. He is also the author of "The Compassionate Achiever: How Helping Others Fuels Success" (HarperOne, 2017).
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