The Race Between Education and Technology: Round Two
Indeed,
I have borrowed the title from Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz's
classic study, because we are living through a time when th race is
visible in all its splendour, with anxious hinges and critical turns.
It's time to decide and act, and every step counts. Of course,
technology is not autonomous and we are indeed the 'driver in the
driverless car', and the choices we make today will decide whether
technologies will tear apart our society, as some fear, or, if it would
unleash the next cycle of prosperity.
The
optimists have empirical evidence, indeed. They cite - and this is what
Goldin and Katz were primarily looking at - Industrial Revolution.
Despite all the early fears of job losses and social unrest, the
technological progress eventually ended up unleashing a new era of
prosperity. The prosperity took time to build, and there were many
social unrests along the way: Malthus came along to make us think people
can be surpluses and wars and famines may be good things, just natural
corrections. However, in the end, in the long run, everything fell in
place: Working men learnt the use of new machines, not least as
schooling became universal and new skills were learnt. Soon, Malthus, as
well as Marx, faded from view: Population ceased to be a problem and
became a resource, and Wage Labourers became enthusiastic consumers.
And, everybody lived happily ever after.
Till
the next disruption came along, which we are living through now. The
Optimistic case is that, despite the current anxiety about the effect on
jobs, it would be just like the last time: In the end, education would
facilitate the diffusion of technology, productivity will rise and we
shall unleash the next cycle of prosperity.
While
the economic argument is clear, the history is less straightforward.
Indeed, telling the tale of Industrial Revolution in this way glosses
over all the revolutions, wars and bloodshed that came along the way.
That we shall withstand another global war, or another exterminatory
project like the Holocaust (inspired by a Malthusian vision), is a big
assumption to make. In the long run, this time around, we may indeed be
all dead.
Besides,
while this narrative treats colonialism as a mere sideshow - in fact,
co-opts the colonial history as march of civilisation - the societies at
the receiving end suffered much and lost a lot. The 'general
prosperity' in one part of the world came at the cost of decline in
another part. We can't really compare the loss of life and livelihood in
Africa, Central Asia, China, India and elsewhere with the gains made in
North America and Europe, but that some part of the process was
accumulative - the machines imposed a mechanism of exploitation - can
not be denied. This time around, with a different global dynamic, and
natural world showing signs of wear and tear, such abundance may not be
there for the taking. And, therefore, this time may be different.
And,
finally, the technologies are different, too. The technologies of the
industrial revolution were aimed at extending physical capabilities. The
steam and the automobile extend the horse power, the loom bettered the
efficiency of the operator, and so on and so forth. They did what we
were not good at, and leveraged our abilities: The horse population
declined with the advent of the cars, but an average worker got better
with the mechanical drill or the typewriter. But the 'tools for
thought', as Howard Rhinegold presciently labelled what we have now, are
designed to do what we do well, and demand from us abilities average
person is not good at: The automated processes expect human operators to
watch and intervene if they go wrong, despite distractability being our
principal weakness: It is only a matter of time when we bring in
machines to oversee machines, as we have started doing now.
That's
my case, then, that this current phase of the race between Education
and Technology are different from the last one. It is not just the
challenge of lifting the literacy and allowing the diffusion of
technology that the education has to achieve; its task would be deeper,
of creating a moral awareness of our engagement and responsibilities, so
that we become aware of the consequences of our actions, on others as
well as on the natural world. We are masters of technology as long as we
understand it, and education is tasked with, not just of mastery of the
tools, but of the logic of their existence.
The
point is, we are doing a bad job at it. The education systems that we
have, our approaches, are geared for the race we have run, and possibly
won (with the steroid of colonialism perhaps, but who cares), but that's
no guarantee for success now. The state-sponsored education, the
credential obsessed society, the formal and monetised forms of
knowledge, allow little space for coffee-house learning, a point I made
in earlier posts, and little opportunity for moral and sympathetic
considerations. We are yet to innovate our paradigm of innovation,
disrupt our notions of disruptions, and get real.
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