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“The End of Humanity”- Hawking’s Curriculum Challenge! by Mervyn Benford
“If Artificial Intelligence and robotisation reach levels predicted possible, it will be the end of humanity!” In 2017 so said no less than Stephen Hawking - a man of significant ability who had a lot of time to sit and reflect.
This journal has powerfully portrayed Neil Hawkes’ Values based Education (VbE) while also exposing Burt’s fraudulent conclusions on intelligence as entirely inherited (the claim later justifying 11+ selection.) Such worthy NAPE contributions come when human intellect itself is under attack from AI. In 2017 The Financial Times ran an article - “Technology toils to make our intellect obsolete.” The educational implications of that very reasonable observation need attention beyond the financial media! Perhaps we are too focussed on short-term issues but this threat is coming faster than we think. Teachers today face radical and rapid changes not only in their tools of trade but also in some fundamental values as to their purpose. In my critique (2015) of half a century of national practice, provision and principles(“What they don’t tell you about Education”mervynbenford@gmail.com) I detailed the then growing threat of technology to human survival. I cited predictions of electronic brain enhancement as ultimately necessary to cope with the sheer speed and power of mid-century computers and related machines. I reported some office workers in Sweden having ricesized implants in their arms to switch lights and machines on while still on the way to work. I reported a BT consultant in 1988 predicting we would talk to our fridges. Today smart technology can tell us recipes available for what it knows is in the fridge. 2019 has seen an intense description from the personal security company Malwarebytes of what is now called Brain/Machine Interface (BMI) including the news that Elon Musk’s company, Neurolink’expects to be testing a system feeding thousands of electrical probes into the human brain in 2020. At a basic level the concept has already been tested on animals.
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