This is not a book for the faint of heart.
Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist’s Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations is long and packed full of ideas that take a while to digest.
I read a chapter at a time, sometimes only half a chapter. Many summaries and reviews of it appear on the web, including one by Bill Gates.
My point in this review is to look at it from an educator’s perspective.
Briefly, Friedman makes the case that changing technologies, the changing geoclimate and changing markets in a globalized world will all converge to make more progress in the next 100 years than in the last 20,000 years.
Or not. He notes that we live in a world where one angry person can literally destroy all.
At the same time, it takes all people cooperating to make the world more friendly. The outcome depends on our ability to build community. That’s hard work.
Our guns and our borders may be necessary to defend our nation-states, but they are insufficient to protect us from the inside out. Only our values, our reaching out and our unity can accomplish that.
One job qualification will be the most important for the future.
Chapter 8, “Turning IA into AI” had the greatest impact on me. Imagine a cartoon in which the top of a person’s head has been opened and a pitcher full of ideas poured in — that’s how I felt.
The chapter described “STEMpathy,” the combination of STEM content and the human skills of empathy and cooperation, as the single most important job qualification for the future.
Friedman’s assertion persuaded me that we all already use artificial intelligence in the form of our (bionic) attachments, including phones, pacemakers, C-PAP machines, smart watches and the like.
He asserted that we must close the divide between people with and without degrees.
The author also described numerous public-private education partnerships (pre-Purdue/Kaplan) that are changing the way Americans learn.
The ideas are exciting and provocative, but Friedman is not an educator.
Friedman missed the pitch in several respects. He thought that education has no role in motivation, neglected pedagogy and cognitive development altogether, didn’t discuss the use of technologies in the K-12 domain and was ignorant of any theory that might drive our planning or interventions.
He was also, in my opinion, correct in many respects. I do believe that apprenticeships and mentorship are important. I agree that MOOCs were more of a novelty introducing a platform, but not transformational.
I further believe that effective engagement is essential, and a major and yet unmet challenge is to harmonize concepts taken from the business world with concepts in education.
In addition, educators must step up to the plate along with city and other civic-minded leaders to teach ethics. As we leave algorithms or data analytics to make more choices for us, we must remember they will not make decisions based on ethical considerations.
Algorithms are by definition designed to divide, segment and target specific groups; they are not targeted to the larger, common or long-term good.
Simultaneously, new technologies are advancing at a pace so fast, they are implemented before we understand them fully. Artificial intelligence potentially threatens, therefore, our privacy, and potentially our jobs though that need not be the ultimate outcome.
In the end, the most important question is how to empower learners to learn.
Technology is a sideshow, not the main show. It can help us get to where we want to go, but it is not the destination.
Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you want to go, any road will take you there.” Let us not get lost.
Our aim is to flatten barriers and boxes such that we cultivate creativity, critical thinking, deep understanding and engagement, not leaving the heart behind, but rather enlarging it. The new technologies should be our treasured assistants in this enterprise.