Knowledge frontier: Educate ourselves or outsource to artificial intelligence? VALUE MINING
The author’s shorthand for Happiness Index, Infrastructure, Talent, Regulations, Access and Capital. The six pillars that make UAE a great place for a startup. This week’s article is about the infrastructure required to develop talent.
Of course you’ve heard about Cubetto by Primo Toys. The little wooden robot that’s programmed by three-year olds using something that looks like a cross between a washboard and a snakes-andladders game. It received $2.3 million in funding on Kickstarter (Kickstarter.com). A big amount for a crowdfunded initiative and the largest for a startup in EdTech (Education Technology for those of you from the classroom system).
Not another “*Tech”, please! Well the reality is that tech is what has got us into the planetary mess that we are in and hopefully tech will take us out of it too. For one, we certainly need a new way of learning. The papers were rife a couple of days ago about two Facebook bots talking to one another in a seemingly incomprehensible language. What was missed (mostly) was that the bots were actually negotiating with each other and lying to gain advantage! For many, it was the first time they’d really thought about Artificial Intelligence. There was a general air of discomfort in the reportage. As if there are limitations to human intelligence.
An alternate view of looking at the situation described above is that there is a need to change the way we get coded. That’s the premise behind the $252 billion that will be poured into EdTech by 2020, a figure that a report from EdTechXGlobal has suggested. Some would get offended by the word coded. The reason that Cubetto got funded and the reason that bots are talking to each other is that in both cases, the externalities related to learning have been minimised to a code. Leading to efficiency in absorption, assimilation and application.
By the end of this century, our planet will host 11 billion people. Provided we don’t extinguish life on it with our apparently incorrect utilisation of its resources. Right now we are at about 7.5 billion people.
Current education is simply not geared to provide the quality and quantity of learning that is required to meet the demands of this massive explosion in population. So while we rightfully fret about food, water and shelter for these 11 billion, there is little value if a significant percentage is illiterate and unskilled. The digitisation of education, selflearning, remote evaluation and certification, simulations and related technologies and formats will be required to fill part of the gap.
At one end of the economic spectrum, in 1999, Sugata
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Mitra, an education scientist, installed a personal computer in a slum in New Delhi, India, and situated the screen and controls in a wall at a height of about three feet or one metre. He hooked it up to a high-speed internet connection, switched it on and walked away. Barely literate children soon figured how to browse the net, download content and learn things without any adult intervention. This experiment was repeated around the world. The results are astounding. As Mitra postulates in the brilliant 2010 TED Talk Child-driven Education, “Education is a self-organising system, where learning is an emergent phenomenon.” He further suggests in the talk that an investment of $180 billion in self-organising education over a period of 10 years will solve the problems of a lack of education. The number is in the same ballpark as the EdTechXGlobal prediction.
Now let’s look at the other end of the economic spectrum. According to the report The new, subtle ways the rich signal their wealth, “The top 1 per cent (in terms of wealth) now devote the greatest share of their expenditures to inconspicuous consumption, with education forming a significant portion of this spend (accounting for almost 6 per cent of top 1 per cent household expenditures, compared with just over 1 per cent of middle-income spending). In fact, top 1 per cent spending on education has increased 3.5 times since 1996, while middle-income spending on education has remained flat over the same time period.”
Apart from the personal education area, there is also a massive opportunity for corporate training and education to go digital. Most global companies have introduced selflearning opportunities for staff via their internal websites. According to Elearning Market Trends And Forecast 20172021 by Docebo, the Corporate eLearning market will be in the range of $31 billion by 2020.
There is tremendous opportunity for EdTech startups in the Mena region. Although Arabic is the seventh most used language on the internet, the level of digitised educational content is low. A couple of these have been featured in this column. However the cutting edge innovation required to transform learning does not seem to have been noticed here as yet. Looking out for the big game changer.