DIGITAL REVOLUTION

Nobody could ever accuse me of being tech-savvy. While to my parents I may be a whizz-kid because I know how to operate their DVD player, to my friends I am nothing short of a Neanderthal, daubing on cave walls and trying to make fire. At my last school, there was nothing to challenge my cave-dweller ways. While some teachers would use the digital learning platform, the vast majority of us taught in the same way that we had been taught when we were students: whiteboards, marker pens and photocopied worksheets.

What are we educating our children for?

"Just in the past couple years, we've seen digital tools display skills and abilities that … eat deeply into what we human beings do for a living.” (Andrew McAfee)

"Are droids taking our jobs?" is a very powerful presentation by Andrew McAfee which looks at the great changes in civilisation. One change trumps them all: the technological advances that led to the industrial revolution. For the first time, humans were no longer restricted by the power of muscles, with machines replacing horses, and manufacturing on a mass scale replacing skilled craftspeople.

We are now experiencing another great revolution: the digital revolution that, if anything, will have a more profound effect on the world. We are seeing developments like the cognitive IBM computer Watson able to make decisions, and personal assistants like Apple’s Siri that can act as an interface between humans and machines. Linking these two would give us something capable of making better decisions than the vast majority of humans. This is not the future, this is the capability now; if Moore's Law is followed, in six years’ time, these are likely to be sixteen times as powerful. So we will no longer be restricted by the limitations of human brain power. This begs the question: what is the role of human beings going to be in the future and, more importantly, how will we equip our young people with the skills to cope with this new world where the only certainty is uncertainty?

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