this fascinating video has been circulating for a bit, but i hadn’t posted it. mind-blowing stuff.
(ht to damien o’farrell, via email)
this fascinating video has been circulating for a bit, but i hadn’t posted it. mind-blowing stuff.
(ht to damien o’farrell, via email)
Fascinating stuff.
One thing that they forgot to mention which is probably the biggest problem/opportunity for the future: oil.
All this technology requires power. At the moment, the best power source earth has is oil. One barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of about 23,000 hours of human work output. There is a hugely increasing demand for oil, and in the last hundred-odd we used up just about half of the earth’s available oil. We’ll use the second half much faster.
That’s what our kids are going to be left with sorting out. I would love to see technology continuing to accelerate forever, but history tells us that that doesn’t happen. At some point societies reach a peak, and then they decline. I’m guessing that ours is not the exception.
sorry: “the last hundred-odd years we used…
shameless plug, but one i think folks will find worthwhile. i found this talk by sir ken robinson about the structure of the educational system lacking right on target. one of the closing lines is the title of my post.
it is true, we are not preparing youth for a world that we are not even trying to conceive of. educators are just trying to keep up at best.
Whenever I read about past empires such as the Roman Empire, I sometimes wonder and fear if the U.S.’s best days are behind us. The education system of America is scary. I definitely know that a candidate’s take on education is going to play a major role on how I vote in next year’s election.