Preamble
In this article, I want to say that everything around us is changing really fast, and the mechanisms of education need to be changed because people have their weaknesses, and there is no escape from them.
Suppose you are a bearded man who has managed to acquire a good knowledge base and more or less (as much as possible) understanding of the world around you (your own principles, codes of honor, etc.). The new environment is not easy to break you, and it is easier for you to adapt because your personality is well enough formed.
The child poses another situation. Of course, not every child. Many children are just put behind the phone to avoid interfering unnecessarily. They may not get such a base without the required education by society (family, environment, etc.). A lot of experiments have been conducted, and they really reveal intellectual disability in children.
Let`s start.
The Human Need for Adaptation
The development of “smart” technologies is increasingly influencing changes in society and the culture within it, which inevitably leads to changes in the human environment and, consequently, in human society as a whole.
In this regard, humans must adapt to global changes in order to preserve themselves as a species. To do this, human society needs to understand what place human occupies in the world and what regulatory mechanisms need to be developed and applied.
The rate of progress is beginning to outpace the rate of adaptation of our species. And this could be the missed punch that sends humanity into a knockout.
Technosubjects and the Cyborgization of Society
The emergence of new human-machine forms of interaction has always heralded the creation of not only new tools and schemes of action but also the emergence of new participants in social interactions. As a rule, it was accompanied by the emergence of new professions for humans, but recently some technosubjects (smart machines) are beginning to fulfill the role of full-fledged specialists.
A technosubject is a technical system that ensures the formation of its own future, i.e., is capable of self-development.
The probable emergence of “human” and “posthuman” as products of cyborgization (i.e., filling his body with automation, self-controlling means, devices, etc.) can be attributed to the technosubject variant. In this case, the line between bioorganisms and machines is erased.
In the culture of video games, the image of a posthuman, i.e., cyborg, is quite colorfully presented. Such games include Deus Ex and Cyberpunk.
The game “Deus Ex: Mankind Divided” acutely raised the problem of the split between “natural” and “augmented” people, which hints at the possibility of confrontation in real life. And there is a grain of truth in this, as cyborgs will have an advantage in employment opportunities and survival. Cyberpunk perfectly reveals the fact that all power lies with those organizations that specialize in technology; here comes to mind the giants of our time as Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc.
I would like to note that Cyborg is a creature that combines artificial (machine) and natural (organic) control systems. An Android is an artificial creature outwardly indistinguishable from a human being.
Socio-Cultural Changes in Society: Internet of Everything
New social groups are appearing everywhere. Of particular interest are the “centaurs”, a symbiosis between humans and robots. This is a group consisting of humans and robots, in which everyone does what he or she is better at. It is a more efficient team than a homogeneous one. The union of humans and robots has the prospect of becoming a new community or even a special quasi-group.
There are already emerging formations similar to forms of sociality that can develop into two kinds of communities: “robot society” (as a variant of the embodiment of global artificial intelligence) and “human-robot” symbiosis.
The culture of attitudes towards robots is also changing. It is not uncommon for humans to attribute to a robot reasonableness, learning ability, memory, and individuality. It has been found that people sympathize with robots when they break down, accept them as colleagues at work, create and apply norms of communication with them, stand up for them, imitate them, show politeness, give them preference, and even get jealous.
Many people are familiar with IoT (Internet of Things) and IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things).
The primary goal of IoT is to achieve personalized comfort for every person. IoT is characterized only by household applications. A vivid example of IoT technologies is Smart Home systems.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has a different value: it maximizes the energy efficiency of production lines. IIoT technology meets the challenges of the industry as well as its narrowly focused areas. For example, IIoT is often used in municipal lighting systems.
Once IoT and IIoT are connected to the “Internet of People”, an “Internet of Everything” is formed. This is a more developed and advanced state in which the physical and digital (symbolic) worlds merge into a single space. A “Human-Machine” world is being formed.
IoT and IIoT are evolving towards the creation of powerful AI by integrating the physical and virtual worlds. Thus, another kind of technosubject is born in the form of a population of machine-devices. In this way, AI creates a new space, a new world, transforming the reality available to humans.
Total Decentralization of Society
Virtual reality technology is increasing the trend towards total decentralization of human society. Communication systems will reach such a level that you will feel the physical presence of your interlocutor. And if so, why would you travel somewhere to meet him or her?
In the near future, people will no longer be tied to the workplace – robots will replace them in the workplace, and offices will disappear. The end-to-end blockchain will make all our interactions extremely transparent so that employers and customers will not need to control anyone.
There will be no need for theaters, stadiums, or even travel – all relevant experiences will come to the house themselves. Therefore, it will be pointless to live in big cities, taking into account the ecology, noise, crime, and epidemiological load.
Problems of Human Adaptation
Despite the undoubted usefulness of new technologies, there are also side effects, which are not so much the fault of technosubjects as of humans themselves.
Someone probably remembers the sensational story about the deletion of Peter Rubens’ paintings on Facebook. An AI cleaned the artist’s paintings from the Tourist Board’s page because they contained a lot of pornography. Many were shocked and embittered at such a prank by Facebook. But aren’t a woman’s breasts in a painting and the breasts of a porn actress the same thing?
Human beings are fickle and contradictory creatures, so what people mean by “Art” is hardly the truth of last resort.
Digital dementia is another side effect. Quite normal and healthy people spend a lot of time on the Internet and entertainment, which leads to their dumbing down. This is especially deplorable for children because it is in childhood that the human brain and personality are formed.
Humans are lazy creatures, and if they lack goals, principles, and proper upbringing, the probability of getting pseudo-debility increases greatly.
Pseudo-debility (pseudo-dementia) is the result of an unwillingness to be smart, to develop and train one’s brain, and to put complex intellectual objects together. In this case, in fact, there are no pathologies of brain development in a person.
Everything is aggravated by the fact that AI learns in an extremely “enriched environment”, literally overflowing with our knowledge. A child, on the other hand, is not – he or she falls into the tunnel of recommended content created by the AI.
The digital brain has no concept of fatigue. It can absorb and process huge amounts of data, while the human brain is limited in its resources and needs to receive information. Therefore, without proper education, experience, and training, an ordinary person (especially a child) will expectably follow the path of least resistance, saving energy and peace of mind, i.e., scrolling endlessly through the feed.
If we remember that all people are different and with their own peculiarities, it is quite difficult for us to understand each other. That is, if there is ambiguity in our speech, the interlocutor will not always understand what you mean. Machines don’t have such problems. Maybe someone remembers the robots Bob and Alice, who shared some things between them, but in the process of communication, switched from human to invented language.
This scared Facebook developers because they did not expect that machines could invent their own language and start communicating effectively in it, even though it was not foreseen at all.
Machines are very logical creatures, and they communicate according to rigidly established protocols because they are created by the best minds who realize that ambiguity is the enemy of effective communication.
You can go on and on with the list of weaknesses of human nature and how it suffers because of it, but everything needs to be measured.
What Should We Do?
In my opinion, first of all, it is necessary to eliminate the manifestation of digital dementia in children because then it will be difficult to teach a pseudo-demented brain anything.
It is necessary to provide an integral modern school education where children are taught to think, learn, and “get to the bottom” of the truth. Memorizing solutions will already be a useless skill. It is very important to conduct practical classes to immerse students in the context of the problem because raw knowledge is a half-finished product that quickly wears off. Tight recall and re-learning in such a fast-paced world are an unreasonable luxury.
It is extremely important to be able to filter large amounts of information (to separate the wheat from the chaff), which is impossible without basic knowledge in the professional field.
It is necessary to form a habit of reading books and completing finished works (any). Since it is in them that one can understand quite fully what the author wanted to convey. A short post in an entertainment public is usually condensed information taken out of the context of any work, which is just served in the right sauce to form a particular point of view.
As I said in the chapter “Technosubjects and the Cyborgization of Society”, it is possible to upgrade the human being himself. After all, just think about what possibilities will be available to humans if Neuralink invents a brain chip that will allow a human to process a huge array of information from various sources.
Conclusion
The human habitat is changing, and to preserve ourselves as the smartest species on the planet, which is essential for survival, we, too, will have to change. And what these changes will be depends on us. The main thing is not to give up, to constantly develop, and to look at the future.