Ray Kurzweil's Predictions About Education

A generation on Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines still stands as perhaps the most influential single book to come out of the '90s-era boom in transhumanist, posthumanist and Singularitarian thought. This is partly a function of its author's having had a particularly high mainstream profile compared with his peers (it is one of the ironies of life as a public intellectual that only those who are already receiving attention have their remarks noticed, never mind treated with any respect--the media just like the man looking for his lost car keys under the light), but also a testament to the book's relative breadth and comprehensiveness, which included explicit forecasts for 2009, 2019 and later dates that were much talked about at the time, and remembered as sufficiently interesting to be revisited since.

In considering those forecasts one must acknowledge that the apparent thought put into them varied greatly. Kurzweil's predictions regarding concrete technological developments only a short way removed from his field of specialty in computing tended to be solidly grounded, even when they were not correct--Kurzweil premising them on neural nets enabling increasingly high-quality pattern recognition--such that they still have some interest years later. (The apparent explosion of progress in artificial intelligence in the '10s, after all, was largely a function of this—a belated consequence of researchers getting faster computers and easy access to vast content via broadband Internet, but still a validation of his case for the potential of neural nets to achieve the ends he described.) He was less impressive when making predictions in the social realm on which he seems less expert, and frankly rather conventional, such that his work is more interesting as a relic of the '90s than anything else. (Thus does it go with his forecasts regarding the international political system and war, Kurzweil having rather complacently predicted interstate conflict finished in a world of enduring U.S. hegemony, with armed conflict reduced to computer security and drone wars against terrorist groups in the next decade, and only continuing to wither after that.)

Other predictions fell in between those two extremes, like Kurzweil's discussion of education in that book, which given the issue's higher than usual profile right now seems more than usually timely.

Revisiting the predictions in Spiritual Machines I find that, in line with his other anticipations, Kurzweil predicted that electronic displays--generally of the tablet type--would be well on their way to supplanting paper documents of all kind, and speaking the primary mode of text creation; software increasingly handling the actual teaching (imparting information, explaining what has not been understood, testing and reinforcing learning); and human instructors "attend[ing] primarily to issues of motivation, psychological well-being, and socialization" by 2009. Ten years on in 2019 direct-eye displays would have replaced the tablets in a situation where paper would have become all but residual, while human teachers would be "monitors and counselors" instead of "sources of learning and knowledge."

Of course, as in so many other ways, our actual 2019 proved to be far behind Kurzweil's 2009. The tablet did not become commercialized for many years after that--and by the way proved a flop, the cell phone remaining the standard computational device for the student, it seems, which has been all the more reason why paper has remained so important. Meanwhile, the incorporation of educational software has yet to go anywhere near so far, especially at the higher levels of instruction, in part because of its limited capacity for really individualized response. As a result the primary job of the instructor is not acting as a monitor or counselor, but still actually teaching.

Indeed, underlining the distance between Kurzweil's predictions and our reality has been his treatment of the matter of remote learning, which he takes quite as increasingly the norm over this time frame. Instead in early 2020 we all discovered how little had been done in this area as in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic much of the world switched its school systems over to this mode--with results that have been undeniably awkward and deeply controversial, and a large body of opinion demanding a "return to normal" regardless of the dangers possibly entailed for children, school staff and society at large.

One aspect of what one might flatteringly call the "discourse," not often foregrounded, was the situation's bearing out the more cynical view of what schools do--rather than impart education, keep children from getting into trouble while their parents are at work. If they don't do the job someone else has to sit and watch them, a task in an age of atomized nuclear families and single parent households apt to fall on mom or dad--with all that means for an adult work force that, to the displeasure of employers, to a significant degree switched over to remote work and has been resistant to the move back to the old norm bosses so clearly want to make happen. The result is that even were remote learning as good as, even better than, the old way in its purely academic results, it would still fail to be an adequate "babysitter"--and it can seem all too telling that Kurzweil failed to consider that.