What the Future is Bringing Us (2018)



'''What the Future is Bringing Us entries are grouped by year. A clickable list of currently available years is given later in this section. '''


 * Click on http://iae-pedia.org/What_the_Future_is_Bringing_Us_(2018)#Looking_Forward if you want to skip all of the introductory material and jump directly to the new 2018 forecasts.


 * You may have noticed that the What the Future Is Bringing Us section of the Information Age Education website began in 2008. So, you can now look back over 10 years of entries. I find it fun to read forecasts and tidbits of news from the past, and think about what has happened in the ensuing years.


 * It seems to me that in terms of "pure" technology, the pace of change has increased. However, in efforts to improve our educational systems, the pace of change seems to have been slow. For example, see the first entry (the one at the bottom of the list of entries on this IAE-pedia page) in this 2018 series.


 * You are currently reading the 2018 entries.


 * (2017)


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 * (2004) Information and Communication Technology (ICT) planning document developed by David Moursund. The goal was to facilitate the development of a sequence of 1-credit (quarter hour system) graduate-level joint preservice and inservice courses to be taught at the University of Oregon.


 * (2000 to 2003) Golden Oldie News Oct-December 2000 up through Jan-March 2003. These materials were moved from an old Oregon Technology Education Council (OTEC) site developed by David Moursund. Most of the links in the referenced articles no longer work.


 * (1987 Futuristic Math Education Scenarios).


 * (1974 to 2001) All of David Moursund's editorials published in Learning and Leading with Technology from its inception in 1974 until he retired from ISTE in 2001.

BigDog is a rough-terrain robot built by Boston Dynamics that walks, runs, climbs and carries heavy loads. BigDog is powered by an engine that drives a hydraulic actuation system. BigDog has four legs that are articulated like an animal’s, with compliant elements to absorb shock and recycle energy from one step to the next. BigDog is the size of a large dog or small mule; about 3 feet long, 2.5 feet tall and weighs 240 lbs. See more pictures of social robots at http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=pictures+social+robots&qpvt=pictures+social+robots&qpvt=pictures+social+robots&FORM=IQFRML.



See MIT's Electric Cheetah Robot video at http://www.engadget.com/2014/09/15/mit-darpa-cheetah-robot/.



The Cray-2 supercomputer was the world's fastest supercomputer until 1990. But even with a performance of up to 1.9 GFLOPS (billions of floating point arithmetic calculations per second), the liquid-cooled, 200-kilowatt machine ranks behind a number of "modern" portable, battery-powered Smart phones when it comes to GFLOPS ratings.

Year 2018 Table of Contents



 * "All education springs from some image of the future. If the image of the future held by a society is grossly inaccurate, its education system will betray its youth." (Alvin Toffler; American writer and futurist; 1928-2016.)


 * "Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do. The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!" (Alan Kay; American computer scientist and educator; born May 17, 1940.)

Introduction
All of education is future oriented. Through informal and formal education, students are being prepared for their futures. Of course, a major goal of education is to preserve and pass on the culture, values, history, and so on from the past. Ideally, this is done in a manner that helps prepare students for their futures as members of local, regional, national, and world societies.

Technology Forecasting Quoting from Wikipedia:


 * Primarily, a technological forecast deals with the characteristics of technology, such as levels of technical performance, like speed of a military aircraft, the power in watts of a particular future engine, the accuracy or precision of a measuring instrument, the number of transistors in a chip in the year 2015, etc. The forecast does not have to state how these characteristics will be achieved.




 * If a decision maker has several alternatives open to him, he will choose among them on the basis of which provides him with the most desirable outcome. Thus his decision is inevitably based on a forecast. His only choice is whether the forecast is obtained by rational and explicit methods, or by intuitive means.

Forecasting is an important field of study and of human intellectual endeavor. Continuing to quote from the Wikipedia page cited above: "The virtue of the use of explicit methods is that they can be reviewed by others, and can be checked for consistency. Furthermore, the forecast can be reviewed at any subsequent time. Technology forecasting is not imagination."

It takes a great many years to bring a new technology to market and then to have it widely adopted. Consider the same two ideas of bringing to market and wide adoption for a change in education. There is a steady stream of ideas on how to improve education. Indeed, perhaps every person who is involved in or concerned about education has ideas on how to improve education. The pathway from an idea to widespread adoption and successful implementation of any one idea to improve education is very, very long.

Thus, forecasting improvements in education is fraught with difficulties quite different from forecasting improvements in technology.

Special Message for Teachers Consider establishing a "futures" time period each week, in which you engage your students in an exploration of possible futures they will live in and how the subject(s) you are teaching are helping to prepare them for these possible futures. One way to do this is to select a topic from this year's list, or other annual lists published on this website. Engage students in a discussion of what they know about the topic. Perhaps point them to some material to read. Engage them in a discussion of how the content you are teaching fits in with preparing them for life in a world in which the forecasts on this website may well come true.

Another approach is to encourage your students to bring in hard copy materials and Web links that contain forecasts of the future. Each week a different small team of students could assume responsibility for leading the weekly "futures" session.

Still another approach is to raise the following question with your students near the beginning of any new unit of study: "What changes are going on around the world that are having a major impact on this unit of study?" The idea is to emphasize change and the understanding that you are helping your students to get an education that prepares them for a changing world.

Teachers working with students may also be interested in having the students research and report on one or more "futures predictions" from 5 to 10 years ago, or perhaps when they were in first grade, or the year they were born, and so on. They can find out which predictions have become part of our world today and which ones failed to materialize, and why or why not in each case.

Looking Forward: Year 2018 Entries
IBM Research (2018). The Invisible Made Visible. Retrieved 2/8/2018 from http://www.ibm.com/watson/. Quoting from the article:
 * In 1609, Galileo invented the telescope and saw our cosmos in an entirely new way. He proved the theory that Earth and other planets in our solar system revolve around the Sun, which until then was impossible to observe. IBM Research continues this work through the pursuit of new scientific instruments - whether physical devices or advanced software tools - designed to make what's invisible in our world visible, from the macroscopic level down to the nanoscale.

The article lists five innovations that will change our lives within five years, as well as such forecasts made in the past.

Leslie, M.W. (January, 2018). The Physicist Who Almost Wasn't. Oregon Quarterly. Retrieved 1/17/2018 from http://www.oregonquarterly.com/the-physicist-who-almost-wasnt.

Benjamin Aleman is a University of Oregon Physics Professor and researcher who originally planned to be a doctor. His story provides a window into a small part of the future of science instruction, with a program that actively involves students his in futures-oriented research. It is also a heart-warming success story of a man whose parents were immigrants from Mexico and El Salvador, and who supported his dream to get a good education. Quoting from the article:


 * Step into 74 Willamette Hall [a U.O. Physics lab] and you'll have a front row seat at a veritable carnival of the infinitesimally small, where each day brings insight into the fascinating inner workings of nature.

[There] you'll see student researchers aiming laser beams at atom-sized drums that use pulses of light to weigh a single virus. Others are trapping electrons to create "electron in a box" quantum states that can be manipulated with laser light. An undergrad works on perfecting a solar water heater the size of a postage stamp, while another observes a fluorescing microscope capture a single neuron's worth of an electrical spark. A countertop furnace heats to 650 degrees, the ideal temperature for baking the proprietary materials for a device that may someday cure blindness caused by the degeneration of the eye's rods and cones.




 * For Benjamín Alemán, age 39, the science of the small, with its boundless potential to help humanity, is the grandest playground imaginable. He's an expert at bending 21st-century miracle materials to his will. Take graphene, which is to today's technology what plastic was to industry of the last century. Just one atom thick-a million times thinner than human hair-it's 200 times stronger than steel, yet extraordinarily flexible. Alemán's UO lab is the first in the world to control graphene's shape-and therefore, some of its superpowers. [Bold added for emphasis.]

Comment from David Moursund. I was particularly interested in this article because I did my undergraduate work at the University of Oregon, majored in Mathematics, and took four year-long courses in Physics and two year-long courses in Chemistry. I am amazed by the changes that have occurred in science since then, and the type of work that today's students are doing in their undergraduate and graduate work. Science education has come a very long way!

Think about the challenge to today's teachers of science at the precollege level. They need to learn enough about current state-of-the-art science so they can introduce the basic ideas to their students in a meaningful manner. For example, even grade school students are apt to have heard about GMO foods - so what should these students be learning about GMO and genetic engineering, and what do their teachers need to know in order to participate effectively in this teaching and learning situation?

Knight, W. (1/17/2-18). Google's Self-Training AI Turns Coders into Machine-Learning Masters. MIT Technology Review. Retrieved 1/17/2018 from https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609996/googles-self-training-ai-turns-coders-into-machine-learning-masters/?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_content=2018_01_17&utm_campaign=the_algorithm.

Quoting from the article:


 * Google just made it a lot easier to build your very own custom AI system.


 * A new service, called Cloud AutoML, uses several machine-learning tricks to automatically build and train a deep-learning algorithm that can recognize things in images.


 * The technology is limited for now, but it could be the start of something big. Building and optimizing a deep neural network algorithm normally requires a detailed understanding of the underlying math and code, as well as extensive practice tweaking the parameters of algorithms to get things just right. The difficulty of developing AI systems has created a race to recruit talent, and it means that only big companies with deep pockets can usually afford to build their own bespoke AI algorithms.

Comment from David Moursund: At the current time, it takes a very high level of knowledge and skill to develop state-of-the-art AI programs. Quite a bit of the needed knowledge and skill is integrated into the software system that Google is making available. Thus, the learning curve to be able to produce useful AI software is being significantly reduced.

This is a key idea, and it applies to much of the content that is currently being taught in schools. One reason for a particular content area to be be required in schools is that we want students to gain the knowledge and skills to solve problems and accomplish tasks in that content area. As we develop software that can solve the problems and accomplish the tasks, our schools face the question of what to teach to students.

Graham,J. (1/17/2018. Apple to Hire 20,000, Open New Campus and Pay $38 billion tax bill on Overseas Profits. USA Today. Retrieved 1/17/2018 from https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/01/17/apple-pays-38-billion-trump-tax-bill-open-second-hq/1041261001/?csp=short_list.

Quoting from the article:


 * Apple … announced a sweeping set of moves partially tied to the recent tax bill, including paying $38 billion in taxes from profits made overseas and opening a second corporate campus.


 * The iPhone maker said it also will spend $30 billion in capital expenditures in the U.S. over the next five years, in part from opening data centers to feed growing demand for services like iCloud. And it will create over 20,000 new jobs at existing Apple campuses and a new one, initially for technical support, at an unnamed location, likely setting off a scramble among states and cities vying for bragging rights.




 * … it will focus its capital expansion on data centers - spending $10 billion on adding more like the kind it broke ground on in Reno, Nev. Thursday - and the second Apple campus. Apple already employs 84,000 people in all 50 states.



However, jobs at data centers and technical support may not represent the high-paid software and business jobs that have created wealthy hubs in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Data centers typically operate with minimal staff, and according to Glassdoor.com, the average yearly salary for tech support pros is just over $36,000. Comment from David Moursund: Pay special attention to the last paragraph. While there is a growing demand for well qualified computer programmers, many of the new "high tech" jobs are not particularly well paying and not particularly "high" tech.

Moursund, D. (1/3/2018). Larry Cuban: Retrospective Look at 2017. IAE Blog. Retrieved 1/7/2018 from http://i-a-e.org/iae-blog/entry/larry-cuban-settings-s-retrospective-look-at-2017.html.

Quoting from the article:


 * Larry Cuban is an emeritus professor at Stanford University. He is a prolific writer about our failures and successes in improving education. A recent article provides a few of his reminisces about the year 2017 (Cuban, 12/29/2017).


 * Our schools continue to buy more and more computers. But, for the most part these computers are used to teach the same curriculum content as we have taught in the past.

Comment from David Moursund. Many schools now have one computer per student. But for the most part, use of these computers is not well integrated into the content being taught, the processes used for teaching, and the assessment of students. We have not yet done a good job of addressing the question: "If a computer can solve or greatly help in solving a type of problem or accomplishing a type of task we want students to learn about in school, what should students be learning?"