2. Hyperlearning: A Technological Revolution
Technology is the most purely human of humanity’s features, and it is the driving force of human society. The defining benchmarks of the epochs of human history are the dominant technologies: the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age, the industrial age. The rare moments when a society’s core technologies for combat, commerce, or communication made a potent breakthrough were days, in historian James Burke’s telling phrase, “when the universe changed.”
Those “days” of transformation commonly are stretched out over months or years or even decades. The environmental pessimists’ oft-repeated parable of the frog ── toss a frog into a pan of boiling water and he’ll instantly jump out, but place him in a pan of cold water and you can gradually heat it till he boils before realizing what’s happened ── applies to human progress as well as to our ecological missteps. Few people appreciated the immense social and economic importance of the adoption of the plow, the stirrup, the printing press, or the steam engine at the time these things were happening.
Both survey research and common experience indicate that many people are at best ambivalent about technology, seeing it as much as a threat as a blessing, and often preferring to leave it to the “experts” rather than to think too much about science and technology at all.[*] Nevertheless, to echo what Leon Trotsky said of war: You may not be interested in technology, but technology is interested in you.
Albert Einstein said that the atomic bomb changed everything but our thinking. Hyperlearning is going to change everything ── and our thinking.
Hyperlearning is a categorical step ── the proverbial quantum leap ── beyond “artificial intelligence,” beyond broadband telecommunications, beyond information processing, beyond biotechnology. Rather, hyperlearning represents the fusion of these technological threads. HL is weaving them into the fabric of a new industrial base for a new kind of world economy.
To understand the fabric of what is truly a “new world order” ── and its implications for your business, your family, and your own place and prospects in it ── you first need some substantive understanding of its four key technological threads:
# The first thread is the “smart” environment, where every artifact you touch or are touched by ── cars, houses, toilets, clothes, tools, toys, whatever ── is endowed with intelligence. The special significance of that intelligence is that it increasingly includes the ability not only to aid humans to learn but to participate in learning itself.
# The second is a “telecosm” communication infrastructure that makes all knowledge accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime. The telecosm takes the most powerful knowledge, intelligence, and learning capacity of an environment that otherwise would be only local, and makes it global. For both human and nonhuman learning, the telecosm makes the “best and brightest” located anywhere available everywhere.
# The third thread is a kit of “hypermedia” tools that you will need to navigate through a knowledge-dense universe. Hypermedia is to multimedia roughly what an index is to a book. Only there’s an unlimited number of simultaneous indexes and they are built into the text or other material ── you don’t have to go to the “back of the book” to get a reference. The vital role of hypermedia in hyperlearning is to provide the technical bridge between informing and understanding.
A key to the microcosm’s economic power is the ability to represent all kinds of knowledge in digital form, as numbers, making all knowledge combinable, transformable, and communicable in ways previously unimaginable.
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What really bothers scientists and philosophers is
Moravec’s term “human equivalence.”
But it’s not necessary to settle the deep philosophical questions about whether a machine could ever be “equivalent” to a human being to recognize that, for economic purposes, ever-smarter machines already do, and increasingly will, perform roles that once only could be performed by a human.[*]
What ultimately may prove more significant about smart technology is that it can and will do things that humans never would or could do. About a decade ago someone figured out that it would take five trillion human clerks to perform the calculations being done by the world’s then-current population of computers. With the great expansion in the power and numbers of computers employed now, the number of clerks would be thousands of times greater still. But the point is that computers did not eliminate five trillion jobs ── a thousand times the earth’s human population.
But as the exploding power of information technology itself adds to the mushrooming problem of data overload, it becomes ever more difficult to discern the shape of the forest comprised by the spreading horde of twigs and leaves. The problem in most technical fields now is not a shortage of data, but making sense of the flood of data pouring in ── which, as the saying goes, is like “trying to drink from a fire hose.”
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The data storage technology of the next century will put a lifetime of information in the palm of your hand. Long before that, however, the measure of human competence in the HL world will be not what you can remember, but what you can understand.
At the heart of the HL revolution is a vital human challenge: We risk being suffocated in an avalanche of data ── the more extravagantly we are informed about everything, the more difficult it becomes to know anything. But the coming efflorescence of ever more powerful, ever cheaper technology for producing and transmitting multimedia messages is going to pour even more volatile fuel on what already seems a daunting information “explosion.”
Hypermedia so far has been concerned with easing information retrieval. The “hyper” literally refers to many-dimensional connections, but the key idea is the connectedness: the ability to link hordes of data bits into patterns or structures the human mind can grasp. Hyperlearning needs to push this technology a quantum jump further than just grasping information: to make the higher level connections needed to extract knowledge, insight, understanding, and skill from a maze of information and experiences.
The “skill” factor is crucial. The mission of hyperlearning is not only vision but action. HL’s purpose is to enhance the human user’s ability to direct the potent technology of the smart environment, lest the human be reduced to technology’s object. The job of hypermedia alone is to inform; its job as part of the fabric of hyperlearning is to empower.
The hypermedia tools that will enable a child to explore her world with the unlimited companionship of a universal tutor that can serve her curiosity with visions and sounds and words and sensation, and that can seamlessly merge knowledge and experience, will be equally common features of her parents’ world of work and play and homelife. Hypermedia will put the immense power of the smart environment and the telecosm at the constant service of learning knowledge and skill in every facet of economic activity. While many features of this hyperlearning world can be seen in place today, the wellspring of science from which it flows promises only to accelerate the HL revolution in the immediate future.
The final thread, the advancing “brain technology,” drives the spinning of the other threads that fill the world outside the human skull with growing intelligence. At the same time, it holds the potential to transform the mind inside the skull as well.
The significance this advent of new technology has for society can hardly be overstated. The hyperlearning revolution represents nothing less than an evolutionary watershed in the history of our species and, in fact, our planet.
The HL revolution that is already unfolding and
accelerating before our eyes above all poses political challenges that can no
longer be ignored, and that completely overwhelm the trivialities that pass for
education or training “reform.” Because
of the pervasive and potent impact of HL technology, we now are experiencing the
turbulent advent of an economic and social transformation more profound than the
industrial revolution.
The same technology that is transforming work offers the new learning systems to solve the problems it creates. In the wake of the HL revolution, the technology called “school” and the social institution commonly thought of as “education” will be as obsolete and ultimately extinct as the dinosaurs.