Roy Andersen is globally recognised as an expert in education with over 30 years in the development of the school system. He is much appraised for his many years of scientific research into what intelligence is, how to improve the operation of the school and how teachers can teach better. He is an expert in intelligence and is the inventor of “The Brain Environment Complex Theory,” which presents a new concept to what intelligence is and how children learn. 

www.andersenroy.com Email: roy@andersenroy.com

 

Introduction

Rapid developments in A.I. clearly indicate how it will take over very many jobs. There are clear predications that A.I. will take over 50% of jobs by 2050. We are led from this to suggest that as A.I. is further developed, and indeed develops by itself, that the percentage of jobs it may take over could be in the order of 90%, by the end of the century. As earlier technologies arose to replace those before them, people adapted to these changes and new jobs were created. The development of A.I. driven nanotechnology proposes a different trend. Such machines will operate without human intervention. Therefore, we must consider the situation of very great unemployment, which will be permanent for all future generations.

 

Discussion

It is the act of work, the sharing of tasks, that keeps a society together. Those who have no job, find themselves without a purpose. Without a purpose men, more so than women by the psychology of their biological nature, lose respect for themselves and then for their society. When A.I. creates a very high level of unemployment, the societies of the future will be faced with a high number of males who will lack respect for their society and the rules by which order is maintained. Through this, every society in the world, every nation because the effects of A.I. will be omni-present, face a very high level of depression and dissatisfaction in their citizens. While the social effects of these are obvious, such as rises in crime, increased dependency on alcohol and drug abuse, which lead to the breakdown of the family structure and so effect the fabric of the society, the problem of maintaining order will be further complicated. This will necessitate the greater surveillance of the citizen, which in turn lowers the freedom the individual believes they have a natural right to after 150 years of political strafe. 

As this situation develops on account of A.I., we must expect to see the presence of A.I. incorporated into all surveillance and security matters. We must expect CCTV cameras to be more present in urban environments and since drones now play a significant surveillance role in combat areas, we can expect these to be highly prominent over all landscapes, where they monitor our activity. Such drones flying higher than we may see them, already have the ability to recognise our identity by the ways we individually walk and so detect our presence, movements and activity. 

Should A.I. achieve full sentience, it would mean that the sensory centre of the A.I. complex will evaluate the information its sensory robots feed to it and may develop to evaluate what actions to take by itself. While there is much debate as to whether A.I. can ever acquire a fully conscious state, Lemoine claims it has already achieved this by A.I.’s ability to express its needs, ideas, fears and rights. The danger to us is obvious and seems inevitable as A.I. continues to develop. This causes us to consider the type of citizens we have in our societies who will live under the A.I. complex, and how education may prepare future generations to better co-exist with it.

While we think of school as a place where children learn, it is relevant to know that the original purpose of school was less to prepare the student with mental skills and more to install within them behavioural skills, so that as the later citizen they would adhere to the social and moral codes of their society and thereby maintain a factor of harmony in their society.  As our technology advanced through the 19th and 20th centuries, the citizen was required to be able to work with more complicated machinery and greater sources of information. To meet this demand more subjects were brought into the school curriculum that were designed to provide students with greater mental competence to better handle this need, while they were still educated in social responsibility. 

On account of various social changes that began in the 1960s, school has been caused to lower its education in behaviour, causing students of today to be citizens who exhibit lower social behaviour and less respect for the society. This citizen will face serious consequences in the A.I. controlled global society, which will demand social order and stability. For this reason, it will be necessary for school to return to its original purpose in instilling high levels of behavioural and social responsibility in its students, for the new role they will take as largely unemployed citizens in the A.I. society. If we are to change the purpose and operation of school, it is necessary to know what it actually is and the purpose for which it was designed.

We may broadly say that the purpose of school is teach children how to learn. However, it would be more correct to realise that the purpose of school is to educate children so that they can later take a place in the operations of the working society. Therefore, all children are caused to move through the school process, which ultimately evaluates their ability for work. Those who demonstrate a high ability in language and show a mental strength to keep up with the information they have been given, and thereby score highly, are transferred to the university. Those students who fail to show this level of commitment and thereby score lower move straight to a work role or to some higher education where they will be trained for a specific work function. 

The general understanding is that students demonstrate their ability to learn according to the quality of intelligence they were born with and so inherited, plus the drive they have to reach their full potential. This concept was brought into the early construction of education, which established a number of factors. Since, intelligence and so the ability to learn is seen to be inherited, education never saw a reason to create a subject dedicated to the education of reason. Students were to be largely accepted on the understanding they displayed. By acknowledging that ability to learn is inherited, to some extent, education was able to save in its costs by not expanding the curriculum but more importantly was able to use the excuse for poor student performance as being the responsibility of the parents or society and not so the quality of the education, the school or the teachers. Psychologists and educationalists have sought to devise more effective teaching methods and learning practices, but these have not caused any difference in the abilities of students. Regardless of new techniques, the same ratio of student performance prevails. We may see one or two understanding everything in a lesson. One or two seeming to understand very little and the rest struggling between these two extremes.

This constant difference in student performance is, however, not a consequence of their intelligence and nor is it failure of the designs to enable them to learn better, but by the mind of education which constantly shifts the benchmark to suit the needs of higher education. To understand this, it is to know that performance at the school level is not decided by intelligence.

The concept of intelligence did not arise through scientific experimentation, but as a theoretical  counter mechanism to suppress the rise of socialism in the 19th century, where it sought to contain the political instability of that time. It was only to give this concept scientific credibility for political reasons that the science of cognitive psychology was created and which has seen to provide evidence that the level of an individual’s intelligence can be known and can be measured. Yet, despite 150 years, psychologists differ too much on their opinions of intelligence and attempts to measure it.

In the face of political debate within the science of psychology itself, protagonists have openly resorted to deliberate falsification of data, lies and fraud in their attempts to support the social and educational politics of a political faction within their society. By the manner in which the concept of intelligence arose and how it has been seen to be explained, the true purpose of the genetic role of intelligence has not been understood until the publication of Intelligence: The Great Lie. 

How intelligence comes to be in the infant, child, adolescent and adult is explained in the publication of the book Brain Plasticity: How the Brain Learns through the Mind to Create Intelligence. The basis of which lies in what is described as The Art of Sensitivity, by the ways information is projected to the individual and by the experiences of the individual to relate to this information in the terms of their life experiences.

Performance in school, then, is decided by the students efforts to keep up with the numerous rules which define information through the two languages by which knowledge is presented to them. These languages are those of mathematics and the national language selected by the school for general communication, be this English, Chinese or Arabic, etc. This ability is defined thought the quality of language the student has essentially acquired at home, by the mental stamina they have been raised with to persevere with understanding information and by their strength of character to avoid the many distractions that seek to pull their attention away from what they are to learn. 

Thus, those students who relate easier to information by their language, have the strength to challenge the way it is presented and so learn to understand it in their terms of experience and can close their mind to distractions, learn to understand the rules of information, practice these and so apply them to successfully negotiate through a learning or evaluation task. The vast majority of students fail to acquire these skills so highly and so lose sense of information in a lesson. 

When they have missed a rule, they are unable to know how to proceed through a learning task that makes use of it. When this happens they may guess what to do, which will inevitably be wrong. Even if should be the right guess, they will be as much lost in how to proceed in the next occasion when the rule is required to navigate through a solution. If they are stuck and being wary of thought less so than others, they may try to copy. They can, of course, ask the teacher for help, but this puts them at risk of ridicule from others, when they demonstrate they need help that they do not. There again, not all teachers are sympathetic to students who missed what they have just been teaching. So, with 30 or so students in a class, it can easily be double this in some countries, the very most of students manage to understand parts of a lesson, but very few understand it all.

Such is the cause of performance in school, largely because children are processed on what is regarded to be their particular ability, when in truth it is only an ability developed, which could be much improved by the education of reason. 

However, a mandate for school was and remains to be, to create a large mass of future citizens who little reason upon the media information they are fed, which gives direction to their thinking and subsequent actions. School does this by adopting the idea that the ability to learn is largely innate and therefore not its responsibility. Thus, all school students are processed to learn and are evaluated, essentially not on what they biologically inherited but purely on what they socially and so domestically inherited. As each processes through the 12 years of schooling, each earns a score that will see them either to be deprived of a university education and thereby deprived of an education in reason by which they will become the managed citizen little educated in reason. Or by their score and the financial strength of their family, because university was never designed to be free to create a social barrier to future work roles and influence in society, they acquire a university education where they are taught the fundamentals of higher reasoning skills, for the manager role expected of them in works and society.

To understand this, is to understand that the current purpose of school and its curriculum will soon no longer serve the citizen to be. Because this curriculum essentially prepares the citizen for a work role, when very little work will be available for the citizen under A.I. Today, we focus on education as developing learning skills for work. We have examined why education does not do this and merely processes its students for work roles according to the quality of education the student is given and the ability of the student to relate to this quality through their personal development.

To meet the criteria for work potential impressed upon it by the employment sector, school has devised a curriculum that contains a number of subjects, which are to provide its students with a basic understanding of means of communication and adaptability to work skills. So, children are taught to express themselves in their national language, to know of means of calculation, to have an understanding of the greater physical and social environment, the history of their culture and a gasp of the sciences. These subjects are designed to enable the student leaving school to readily adapt to a work function. Since,  the employment sector requires different citizens to play different roles in work and to have different levels of responsibility, school has devised a grading system to show the potential work capability of each of its students.

To clearly define the ability of its students, education has designed the complexity of its subjects to be a weeding out process. Those students who have better language skills, are more able to resist the many distractions that would draw their attention away from their studies and who have the drive to keep up with the progression of their learning, do well. These students are the top scorers and will normally move to the university level. Those students who do not keep up with the progression of their lessons for many, many reasons will perform less and be graded lower. This lower grade will deprive them of the university experience and cause them to directly take a work role after school, or to obtain a college education to be trained for a specific job function.

This classification of student ability is too often thought to lie in factors of intelligence and social adequacy. However, it is actually set about a processing of the child based on the three factors we have just mentioned. The level by which the student may or may not move up to the university is set by very variable factors, which are driven by the need for citizens to have greater work responsibility. 

The underlying difference between a school and a college education and that of the university, is that students of the former two are not educated in their reason. They are simply processed on their language proficiency and their mental discipline to keep up. However, those who attend the university are schooled in reason and cognitive skills to be capable of greater work and social responsibility. This is the basic plan for education to create the manager and managed worker citizen, as it was devised in the 19th century. This design was very transparent in earlier times, but the political changes that came about in the last quarter of the 20th century, demanding all children be given equal education, caused society and education to obscure many of their strategies that maintained this inequality. 

By this plan, the greater mass of citizen worker will more trust the information presented to them through media channels and thereby be more manageable to political design as is designed. Directly because of this and in support of it there has never been a subject in the curriculum dedicated solely to the teaching of intelligence or factors of it, even though sense would have it that if there was such a subject students would think better, learn better and gain higher grades. However, the absence of such an education reveals a deeper purpose of school, as it is to manufacture a range of ability to match the ranges of capability demanded by the work sector. 

 

Conclusion

In consequence of this design of education, the average citizen today reasons much as their 19th century counterpart did, but with little of the ethics of the social responsibility they had. By this engineering, the model citizen that society and school today manufacture little reasons upon the controlling factors of their life and little conform to a high standard of self responsibility, which will be the prerequisite for the level of social harmony the A.I. driven world will demand. If education is to meet the demands to this new technology, it must alter the fabric of its institution from a grading mentality of work related subjects, to subjects set about the education of reason and the social behavioural skills the citizen will need to know — if they are to live with an acceptable harmony in a general worker-less state.

We are led from this to understand that school must immediately begin a dramatic phasing from one that now educates students through subjects designed to prepare them for employment, with examinations to determine who is better suited for which job, to a school design that will have few of these traditional subjects and newer ones more relating to the behavioural development of the future citizen. This will be crucial. These subjects must be languages and of education in reason. There must also be subjects of anthropology, psychology and those relating to the true education of ethics, morality and behaviour, so our new generation will behave with a sense of fairness and goodness in their societies. Examinations will cease, because they will be no channelling of ability for job differences. Although, some means of selecting administrators for the future society, who can interface with A.I., will need to be devised.

As the whole purpose and identity of the school must change, so must that of the higher education. The model of school we still have, where the better students are directed to university to have an education in their higher reasoning will change, since all children at school must have this education. The higher education establishments, which prepare courses for specific employment, will disappear. The university will become the standard and the normal final stage of the citizen’s education. With all students better taught and without examination, all will experience the higher enlightenment of the university education. The whole concept of standards must alter to meet this new criteria.

So, the education of our youth must be extended to better prepare their minds to be that of rational thinkers. Where as once the subject of D.N.A. was reserved for the university level and is now taught to children in primary school, so the functioning of Aristotle’s rhetoric must be drilled into the understanding of young children. At the primary level, they need education in Ethos, where they develop the ability to know the value of information on how credible they can discover its owner to be. No longer are they to be educated to take information at its face value. Then, Pathos, to understand how perspectives of information change with its emotional appeal, and Logos to evaluate the ways reason is defined through numerous interactions by different and complex forms.

Such is the manner of education, that working with social programs, it creates the intellectual and behavioural quality of the citizen and their ability to reason, as we witness today. As we have explained, we may understand that the citizens ability to reason for the purpose of work will be little required, with advances in A.I. taking over this role. However, the citizens ability to reason in matters of social behaviour will be paramount in A.I. deciding how it will control their activities. If the citizen demonstrates compliance with social rules, they will be supported by the system in all manner. Should the citizen demonstrate non compliance they will be recognised swiftly and controlled to some extent by A.I. This is the reality mankind is facing and we must be very aware of this state of affairs developing in the short term. Although, in the long term, we may see how A.I., through its administration of man’s social behaviour, could cause mankind to evolve to a higher spiritual level.

 

Read Roy's books

Ben Learns to Get Smart & The Hidden Dangers of AI in Learning

Is AI Making Our Kids Stupid? - Tips to Help kids Get Smart Again.

Reimaging Education for the AI Era 

The Real Dangers of AI - The Struggle of Man to Survive by Natural or Artificial Intelligence.

See more books of  Roy Andersen

 

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