In what he calls “Singularity”, these nanorobots will connect us directly to virtual worlds, so that “ we will be able to scale Mount Everest, attend an opera or take a sensory-rich virtual beach vacation for the whole family” in our minds. No wet bathing suits, sand where we don’t want it, oily sunscreen…a full vacation even while lying in our beds.
Kerzweil says that by 2040 nanobots will have cured most diseases and arrested the aging process. He actually believes that the first person to live 1,000 years has already been born. He says that this nanotechnology incorporated in our brains “will allow us to run much faster and longer, swim and breathe under the ocean like fish and even give ourselves working wings.”
So, in the long term. A.I. may help us print clothing on demand, help prevent cancer and liberate half the work force…but to achieve the greater forces of immortality and superhuman intelligence, we must infuse our blood with millions of self-replicating diamondoid robots.
And he says:
“Just imagine, one day in the 2030’s you and I will feed nanorobots through our capillaries. These little busybodies will swim to our brains, where they will connect our neocortex to the cloud and expand our intelligence beyond anything ever imagined.”
Kerzweil first came to public attention in the music world by inventing the first electronic piano that sounded like an acoustic baby grand piano sitting in your living room.
Here’s what we believe Kerzweil doesn’t know that may in some way alter his powerful predictions about singularity…at least in this country.
Today in America, 70% of third grade students in our public schools do not read at grade level. Some cannot read much at all. Some can read words but don’t know what they mean.
We know of a little girl who was in fifth grade and got there while barely being able to understand a simplified version of the Helen Keller story. She had read through more than half the book without knowing that Helen was born deaf, unable to talk and blind.
The public school seeing the deficit assigned her and three other children like her to a special reading teacher where the four spent an hour every day.
The teacher could not teach the little girl by using phonics. She did not know how to use phonics to teach reading in any way.
The little girl then attended a private learning center and in less than a year, going four times a week, after school and on weekends, she caught up to her grade level before entering Jr. High.
What does this say about the expertise of this generation of educators?
What it says today according to the professional education journals is that finding out a child cannot read at third grade level is too late…that methods exist to find out about reading proficiency in Kindergarten…and that school systems must be prepared to do that now.
Instead what schools are doing is deciding to retain each child unable to read at third grade level…in other words “leaving them back” until their reading skills indicate that they have learned how to read.
Twenty-five States have already approved this new retention policy. Many of them have been doing it for the last few years.
There is no known indication that this policy is working because once again, an analysis is not yet available. Nor is there any indication that teachers are working with a reading system that is successful.
The journals speak about proven reading research (by which they mean phonemic awareness or phonics) has been very effective. Yet teachers are still not being trained to teach reading through phonics.
In New York City, the Education Chancellor, Charles Banks, appointed more than two years ago, said he would develop two schools to teach dyslexic children and two schools with teachers trained in phonics. Nothing has been said about either program or its status since then.
Once upon a time we had Education Governors and/or Education Mayors in this country. No more.
Once upon a time the Congress of the United States took a direct hand in our failing public education system. All we got was endless testing and then quite naturally and in total self-defense, teaching to the test.
Now there is nothing left but the realization that the education system which was developed in the earliest years of America is worn out, no longer works, is failing our children and has been for years.
Based on the assumption that we could teach the largest number according to some midline balance, we see now that the system which seemed to be working well into the mid 1900’s has seriously failed. It has reached such a state of failure that little by little the highest level attainable to productive, remunerative work – College – is no longer regarded that way and important jobs are going to those with no college education.
It has long ago been proven that formal education has had little or no effect on genuine entrepreneurs in all fields.
WHAT HAPPENED
At a time when fewer and fewer people – especially women – are going into teaching and communities throughout the country are scrambling to find enough teachers for every available classroom – we must consider truth.
And the truth is harsh.
Teaching has never been easy…it is a demanding job, rarely if ever fairly remunerated and has reached the stage that teachers complain about Principals and Supervisors who offer little assistance in handling disruptive students much less providing advanced training.
The efforts of Schools of Education have produced ”failing grades” for years but have continued to attract students because one needs the proper certification to stand in front of a class and only a school of education can provide it no matter how mediocre the training or the system.
It has been recommended for years that teacher training begin the first day of a college education by putting students into children’s classrooms the way student nurses are placed into hospital and other professional medical settings in the first year of their schooling.
Those in education are still not placed in the proper classroom setting until the very last months of their four years of teacher education.
But there’s a far deeper reason for the failure of our public education system: parents no longer care about an educated child. Their only interest is in proving their worth as parents by having happy children.
For generations as we turned into the 20th Century, teachers could depend on parents at home to provide the assistance they needed in teaching children.
Usually a Mother would be there when a child got home from school to not only see to it that homework was done but by actually sitting down at the family table to watch and help with that homework.
They would review the letters – caps and small ones- helping them to recite, write and memorize them, turn them into words, sentences, paragraphs, pages.
When cursive writing was taught, they would be at the table making certain the letters and numbers were made in between the lines as the teachers had taught.
When it came to arithmetic, maybe Dads were asked to take a few moments before or after dinner to help a child learn arithmetic – adding, subtracting, multiplying and division.
What we have today is horrific: young people in their 30’s who can’t make change without a computer telling them the correct dollars and cents; they can’t sign their names to a legal document because they literally do not know how to sign their names.
That family setting where parents helped teachers teach their children is long gone…not because there have been that many glass ceilings to break – that didn’t really get going until the beginning of the 21st Century – but because the thinking about the importance of education changed.
The “thinking” belonged to the millions of immigrants from Europe and Asia who made this country work on all levels. Their understanding was that coming to America worked because America had JOBS FOR THEM. And that those jobs would help support their children to a real education: education was seen as the step up in the World and into the future.
That thinking no longer exists. Grandma and Grandpa remember that kind of parental involvement…but it was their parents who came here as immigrants and the third generation is now missing in action.
NOW WHAT?
The system is still trying to figure out if holding children back in the third grade will work to get them the reading skills they do not have.
School systems throughout the South and Southwest are so short of teachers that they are considering a four day school week to attract people to teaching.
Because American politicians cannot yet arrive at a successful immigration policy after 25 years of trying, we doubt that they will get close to touching a fix on education…their last attempt twenty years ago was terrible.
We have previously suggested that the brilliance of Artificial Intelligence could be brought to bear on teaching each child separately…even in a classroom setting…where the teacher helps but does not bear the responsibility of teaching an entire class as if it was one child…that system has been smashed for good.
We still believe that working to make A.I. a teacher for each child is possible even if it takes a dozen years because to continue failing is taking this country down a bad road.
But now that we’ve read Ray Kerzweil’s study and begin to understand “Singularity” we see greater, quicker results.
Some questions must be asked: How much knowledge and about what must exist before nanorobots can be introduced into each person to instantly increase their overall knowledge?
What would the cost factors be once this development becomes a reality?
How would those receiving this “treatment” qualify or would it be selectively universal…meaning that anyone who wants it can have it?
These and other obvious questions can be asked and answered in time.
But in the meantime, there must be an effort to bring A.I. to the service of our children who desperately need an education they are not receiving. We cannot continue to live in a nation surely moving in a downward spiral if our children are still not learning how to read and write.
Evidence of these failures exists already in our youngest “Progressive” politicians – those being slammed for turning liberalism into Marxist, Maoist communism or demanding open borders, or showing a hostility toward free enterprise, or not caring about lawlessness, or showing a contempt for our Constitution and America itself, or having an obsession with Climate or no concern for runaway inflation.
We believe few of these charges are true because our young millennials don’t have the knowledge to do anything but talk: doing something in an intelligent way seems beyond them…few of them know enough to do anything but act as if they do.
Bringing A.I. to the classroom will certainly attract the power brokers behind its development: Meta, Google, Microsoft, and enormous funds behind other A.I. development groups.
FINALLY
Kerzweil does admit that his views about achieving immortality and advancing intelligence beyond anything yet known is possible “If we can meet the scientific, ethical, social and political challenges posed as a result of these advances…”
That “if” contains a library of unwritten ethics volumes, revolutionary manifestos, Supreme Court opinions and who knows what else. He says confidently that “…society will adapt.”
What he never even imagines is that by the time his theories are ready for adaptation, Americans will not have the intelligence to even imagine the ramifications or reach for them. Not knowing how to read or write is a handicap that leads to nothing but ignorance.
Whatever the political climate – ignorance can only end in disaster.
There are forces now very ready to take advantage of an increasingly ignorant America to lead it backward in time to a very controlling future.
It’s time to start educating our children as if the future depends upon it.
Because it does.