3. The Needs of a Digital Society
Prediction is always risky, but usually the big trends in the future can already be seen in the present. The future will merely magnify these current conditions, or current conditions will result in a transformation that we can see coming but are not here yet.
Some examples:
- The Internet of Things where almost everything is digitally connected
- Autonomous vehicles and transportation
- Massive amounts of data about our personal lives being collected and analyzed to anticipate/predict/influence our future behavior
- Automation replacing and/or transforming human work and leisure
- State agencies and/or commercial oligopolies controlling access to and use of data
- Lack of transparency, corruption of messaging, and magnification of these distortions, in digital communications
One thing is clear. We can either as individuals throw up our hands and leave all these developments to either state or commercial entities to manage in their own interests, or we can try to prepare ourselves so that we can influence or even control how these developments are managed, for the greater good.
This is what I mean when I talk about developing 21st Century skills or preparing for a digital society. We have a responsibility for ensuring our students are educated sufficiently so that they understand these issues and have the means by which to address them. This is the responsibility of every educator because it affects all areas of knowledge.
For instance, the science professor needs to instill in her students an ability to identify reliable and unreliable sources of scientific data, and an ability to apply that knowledge in ethical ways that benefit mankind. This is a particularly important responsibility for those teaching computer sciences. We need to teach about the dangers of unintended or unknown consequences of artificial intelligence applications and of automated analyses of mass data, potential biases in algorithms, and the need to audit and adjust automated procedures to avoid unforeseen but harmful consequences before they do damage.
Digital (rather than purely online) learning has a critical role to play, because in order to develop these skills our students’ learning itself needs to be digitally embedded. Only by mastering technology can we control it.