#OEB_midsummit Andrew Keen on How to fix the future @ajkeen #AI

Andrew wears his casual black attire and looks energetic and ready to roll with seeming ease and humor. And right before taking the stage, Andrew put on his jacket (I like that personal touch).

Thinking is about talking, entering into dialogue and getting messages across and combined by people. It is not about the slides.

We have education, but in the end everyone says: the solution is education, everything can be fixed by education. But the education system is inseparable of the economic, social problems of society. A teacher alone cannot fix inequation and other difficulties of society.

Education can only do so much, but it cannot change rampant mass murder (history is full of that). Education is not magic, it is work.

The great transformations have always been part of revolutions in history. But this transformation is taking us into new realms, but transformations have always happened. But change brings along trauma in many cases.

Andrew Keen mentions groups for which the societal transformation did not work, dramatic inequality and revolution. (this is an ethical take based on moral right and wrong as perceived by Andrew). Equality only came gradually, and we are not really there yet.

Surveillance economy coming from innovations at Silicon Valley, similar to the industrialists during the industrial revolution. Unions, taxes… came later to right the wrongs of that transformation. The same might be coming now. Education was than instituted as a form of standardization for production reasons (same skills, same content, same books…).

Today the forces are similar, how are we supposed to educate people for this new world.

The ideology of Silicon valley is increasingly being applied to education (see NYTimes of 7 June 2017 – silicon valley billionaires and schools). Zuckerberg empowers the student, but undermines the teacher. Undermining truth (e.g. fake news). Hastings (Netflix) is a different type of influencing Education, in his term by using Artificial Intelligence that will improve the teaching by providing tools. Bennihof (?) importing the sillicon valley business approach into schools, treating education as a venture capitalist adventure. But it is important to realise that the state is being pushed aside, replaced by super-citizen billionaire vision. So, this is never about technology, it is always about who has the power, who has the money. Make AI the operating system for this new teaching/learning system.

[this is possibly – I think – when implementing policies based on future goals].

What jobs are we going to have in a world where AI dominate the classroom, the law firm, the university… the hole in the future is jobs. Be wary that the educational nirvana by AI will not be without a cost. We have not seen anything yet, when 50% of us no longer have jobs due to AI and automation. Let’s not go overboard. STEM is no longer interesting, as machines can do this much more efficiently. So tech education has no real value. So what should we be educating people for? That is the great challenge, and that is why education is in the middle of a transformation. As we create machines and AI, what are we going to do? Are we going to be poets, fighters, share thoughts from the coach… what is going to be our ‘value’ in this new economy? Machines can do many things, but they cannot think for themselves, and they do not have their own goals.

We should be focusing on human values and skills: empathy, intuition, creativity, … some experimental schools. If you want to escape the algorithm, you need to think and prepare, and be willing to take risks. In 100 years’ time, schools will be different.