Culture, AI and Human Brain
Recently, someone on facebook shared this in his wall:
“संसार artificial intelligence अर्थात् AI युगमा प्रवेश गरि सकेको छ, तर हाम्रो शिक्षण विधि लगभग पुराआआनै ढर्राको छ।”
Translation: The world has entered into the age of AI, but our teaching methods are still traditional.
Makes sense, right? The technology is changing at the pace of a F1 car on a race track. However, one big question we will have to answer is: have we humans also changed?
Here’s a quote from an interesting book titled, “The Number Sense”,
“Our brains have remained essentially unchanged since Homo sapiens first appeared 100,000 years ago. Our genes, indeed, are condemned to a slow and minute evolution, dependent on the occurrence of chance mutations. It takes thousands of aborted attempts before a favorable mutation, one worthy of being passed on to coming generations, emerges from the noise.
In contrast, cultures evolve through a much faster process. Ideas, inventions, progress of all kinds, can spread to an entire population through language and education as soon as they have germinated in some fertile mind. This is how mathematics, as we know it today, has emerged in only a few thousand years. The concept of number, hinted at by the Babylonians, refined by the Greeks, purified by the Indians and the Arabs, axiomatized by Dedekind and Peano, generalized by Galois, has never ceased to evolve from culture to culture — obviously, without requiring any modification of the mathematician’s genetic material!
In a first approximation, Einstein’s brain is no different from that of the master who, in the Magdalenian, painted the Lascaux cave. At elementary school, our children learn modern mathematics with a brain initially designed for survival in the African savanna.”
The Number Sense, Stanislas Dehaene, 2011
In summary, despite rapid changes in culture and technology, human brain has not changed that much, and the way human brain learns has not changed that much either.
Thus a huge challenge for us, and especially for teachers.
How can we reconcile such biological inertia with the lightning speed of cultural and technological evolution?
How can we use advanced technology to teach humans with not so advanced brain?
What does it mean for teaching school kids with brains that will take years to develop and mature?
All these remain to be seen. Interesting times ahead.