The Global Learning XPRIZE Challenge is offering $15 million dollars to the team(s) who creates an engaging, scalable, open-source software which measurably increases the learning of children with limited access to schooling. The solution should enable children to learn by themselves or in self-organized groups. Additionally, our own challenge, Patterns For Success, aims to create an effective, practical online business curriculum for self-starters and entrepreneurs. ShiraX, another HeroX challenge, is actually attempting to assemble all of the components necessary to win the Global Learning XPRIZE Challenge via their own incentive prize.
Ultimately, the goal for XPRIZE is to create a software program which functions like a life-long learning companion. Ideally, the programs will evolve to cover more than simple reading, writing, and arithmetic. Peter Diamandis has described the Young Lady’s Primer (from Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age) as a reference point for the type of learning tools artificial intelligence makes possible. The Young Lady’s Primer does not only teach core academic subjects, but also self-defense, emotional intelligence, philosophy, programming -- just about anything this engine determines to be potentially useful to the user. Educational experiences take place via an immersive virtual reality environment that adapts to meet the user's needs; a broad spectrum of characters and events acting as the primary "teachers," as opposed to one central authority. The result of this revolutionary educational experience? A well-adjusted, healthy, and fully actualized human being.
What would the world look like if we equipped every person with a life-long learning companion from the moment the beginning of their life?
What impact would a Global Learning program have on the present social inequalities currently enforced by unequal birth conditions, food deserts, underfunded schools, and economic barriers to education? What would the world look like if everyone had a brilliant (and infinitely patient) tutor guiding them from budding curiosity all the way to an empowered adulthood?
Foresight 2020
The Global Learning Challenge is set to announce its winners in 2019, and our most optimistic prediction might imagine a world-wide implementation of the winning solution the following year, in 2020. Factoring the additional impact from many of the non-winning but effective alternative solutions (and their respective cohort) we can say with some certainty that there will be an abundance of valuable online education opportunities. Considering the growing popularity of open-source and collaborative software, it is a safe bet that many of these will cost nothing.
Universal (or nearly so) access to open source programs would not cause instantaneous change, but it would initiate a massive ripple effect on the future of society.
Fast Forward 2030
For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that the first graduating class does not emerge until 2030. Ten years after the initial release, we see our first class of young adults who have a decade of experience with the Grand Prize winning program, among others. If a self-administered universal learning system was successful, we have more than 1% of the world’s population now imbued with a capacity and love for learning -- a truly game-changing statistic.
What, then, would become of traditional, "brick-and-mortar" academia? Could virtual schooling render the university model obsolete? Would "real" schools begin to compete by scouting out talents to bolster their programs? In this way, they might become more like employers in a competing to attract and retain global talent (as opposed to service providers deemed “prestigious” by their slim acceptance rates)?
What would the world like if academia became an environment of empowerment and collaboration as opposed to one of competition and exclusivity?
What kind of impact would this have on world markets, human migration and how people are employed?
Let's incorporate the predictions of Ray Kurzweil and others who foresee an end of work (as we know it) into this hypothetical future scenario. It is likely that the massive shift in education and (ultimately) demographics would accelerate a revolution in how we apply human effort. With machines taking over nearly every labor role imaginable, a traditional hierarchy of intellectual over manual labor would become obsolete. No longer would human roles (and quality of life) be determined by the level of education one had access to -- for a rapidly growing number of people, it's all the same.
Future Shock 2040
20 years after the release of the first Global Learning Program, 10 years worth of global graduates now exist. Presumably, most people, no matter their age, have begun learning through the program(s). More than 10% of the global population (more than 1 billion people) have “graduated” from the program.
Now we're talking more than 1 billion graduates and generations of children following in their footsteps, all looking forward to a lifetime's worth of the best educational experience humans have ever known. If everyone under the age of 40 had been empowered from an early age, not only in math, reading, and writing, but in self-awareness, civic engagement, and systems thinking...what would this world look like?
We'll talk more about that next week, in part two.
