FuturistSpeaker.com - FuturatiPodcast.com
Hello, I’m Futurist Thomas Frey and I’m speaking on behalf of Riiid Labs based in San Ramon, California.
For many years now I’ve been predicting the emergence of an AI education system that will radically transform the learning process, and along with it the institutions we’re currently using to educate our society.
More specifically, I’ve been predicting that by 2030, the largest tech company on the planet will be an education-based company the world hasn’t heard of yet.
I am excited to see what Riiid Labs will be developing over the coming years to push the envelope-of-change in the world of education.
When it comes to understanding the future of AI, our present is becoming a more distant past every day.
For most of us, AI is the magical genie in some invisible box that is redefining a new state of normal on a daily basis. AI is not something that we can touch, feel, taste, swallow, or toss back and forth like a ball.
Not yet anyway. Soon, it will become part of our every day activities. The change will be so gradual, it will be hard to notice, until one day, we can’t miss it.
In 2012, I was asked to speak at a TEDx event in Istanbul on the future of education. Several times throughout my talk I touched on the topic of teacherless education.
By some counts, we are short 69 million teachers globally, and a full 23% of kids growing up today don’t attend any school whatsoever.
There simply aren’t enough teachers at the right time and place to satisfy our growing thirst for knowledge.
In fact, if we continue to insert a teacher between us and everything we need to learn, we can’t possibly keep up with the demands of the future!
Many of today’s most valuable skills will be replaced with new ones. We can only begin to understand those new skills by improving our foresight, visioning, and future forecasting abilities today.
Our education systems have been built around “just-in-case learning” which ends up being a poor fit for our “just-in-time business world” and daily reality.
Very little of what we learn in college ever gets put to use in today’s business world.
For this reason, we’re seeing alternative forms of credentialing taking center stage. Certification programs are now competing directly with college degrees. Since they are faster, cheaper, and have the potential to lead to much higher paying jobs, they are making serious inroads.
Education is now on the verge of a major transformation and artificial intelligence-based teacherless education systems are quickly taking center stage. This doesn’t mean that teachers go away, it just means that they take on more of a coaching role to interact with students.
Thousands of years of history have us hardwired for human interactions, and this means it will always be a critical component of learning.
If we apply A.I. to teacherbots, the new game will be to find the fastest way to teach students.
Over time, using a conversational interface, AI’s will learn every students interests, their proclivities, idiosyncrasies, preferred tools, personal reference points, and how to keep them engaged and learning even in the face of distractions.
Throughout this training curve, individual learning will begin to scale far faster than anything we’ve ever dreamed possible – 4X, 6X and perhaps even 10X faster than anything today.
Completing the equivalent of a four-year college degree in 1-2 months is entirely possible with this form of A.I. learning systems.
As always, the advantage will go to those who are most prepared, prepared for jobs that currently don’t exist, using technology that hasn’t been invented yet, to solve problems that we don’t even know are problems yet.
The future is ours to create.
This is why I’m convinced that by 2030, the largest tech company on the planet will be an education-based company the world hasn’t heard of yet. It remains the single largest opportunity in the online world that no one has cracked the code for.
We’re entering a world that will require higher caliber people to make it work, and it is preposterous for us to think our existing systems can suddenly start producing better results.
Each of us has only one body, one mind, and one life, and whatever we do to increase our skills and capabilities will make each of us more valuable on the world stage.
People in the future will view themselves as being in a constant state of improvement.
This means that over the coming decades we will become exponentially more fixable – trainable, repairable, improvable, and even re-inventable.
It will no longer be about who we are today, but who we have the potential to become.
When it comes to education, we have met the enemy, and it is us. Ironically, we need to step aside so AI and automation can help us unlock the person we were truly meant to be.
