Professor Sugata Mitra is the winner of the $1 million dollar TED prize. He is a visionary in the field of education and technology. He is best known for his “Hole in the Wall” experiments. The experiments placed a computer in a wall in a slum, connected it to the internet and then turned it over to the community to see what would happen. No teachers, no instructions, just access to the world’s living library, the internet. The result was radically positive. Children driven by the power of curiosity figured it out. They overcame language barriers and educational gaps. And as one child figured it out, they started teacher the others. This evening Sugata spoke at TED. I had a chance to interview him prior to his presentation.
Interview:
Q: What are you speaking about at TED?
A: A future where knowing is an obsolete idea. Once we get past knowing we move into an era of learning.
Q: What is the difference between learning and knowing?
A: Knowing is about repeating facts, like “I know how far it is from A to B” or you could say, “I know to multiply three digit numbers” or “I know that you are not in the best of moods”—these are different kinds of knowing. I think this is no longer the most important factor in education. Learning is the new skill. Imagination, creation and asking new questions are at its core.
Q: Do you believe in a goal of universal education?
A: We spent 7000 years debating this issue of how do we educate everybody. We have never lived in a world where one standard educated everyone. And given that we have failed for over 7000 years, perhaps we will never have one standard. Maybe the right conclusion is that we do away with standard education. Maybe the convergence of technology and curiosity will solve this problem.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: Well, that is a long story. But it takes us to the question of why do we have schools in the first place. I’ve been looking for an answer to that question for quite some time and there are many complex answers about fulfilling the human potential which I don’t quite understand. We view children like batteries to charge. What if you do not have an opportunity to go to school, are you only a half-charged human? All humans have the potential to learn, formally or informally.
Q: So how do you define education?
A: Our current definition of education is to produce individuals who can fit into a bureaucratic machine. Education prepares to be one piece of a machine.
Our current education system produces spare parts for the machine. Everything falls into place and that is why everyone dresses the same way and why everyone is taught to know the same things.
The result is a society that creates identical factory workers. The day of the factory is done. The West needs a fresh model.
Q: So what should the West do?
A: Now that is a question you should ask the Buddha. I grew up most of my early life in the city where Buddha got his enlightenment. My great-grandfather made a rule that every child in the family must have a name of the Buddha. Sugata is one of Buddha’s names and it roughly translates to “the right way.”
Q: On another note, you spoke about the radical evolution of learning and the learner of the future. Who is the new learner?
A: The cloud.
Q: The cloud? What do you mean by that?
A: We know that interconnected switches are the basis of thought. Every neuron is a switch. We know we think. But we already have billions of interconnected switches outside of the brain—that is the internet. At the moment I believe 2 billion nodes. It’s easy to imagine 3 trillion in a decade’s time. Is it thinking? Is it the new learner? How will we ever find out? What if it is already sentient? Whether it is now or will be, what people call the cloud, I think has the potential to give birth to the sentient being.
Q: How would we even know about the arrival of the sentient being?
A: One of the things I am working on is finding a way to quantify the extent of consciousness. We know lots of things are conscious. Ants, bees and dogs are all conscious. But is there a scale where we can compare consciousness? You cannot communicate or explain that down the chain. Q: So are you saying we are close the arrival of a friendly AI like Wall-e or a dark one like SKYNET or the CYLONS? Whatever evolution is coming may treat us the way we treat chimpanzees.
Q: So you see the sentient being as the next leap in evolution?
A: Evolution is not fast but it in the last decades it is accelerating at an exponential pace, , due in part to us. We know how to change genes. So maybe we don’t have to wait for a million years of trial and error. Maybe we will create the sentient being ourselves. Maybe we already are. In the worst case, maybe we already have, and they are here?
Q: So what is your hope for homo sapiens with the arrival of the sentient being?
A: We are the creators of the next magnitude jump in intelligence and learning. My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship. Let’s see, only time will tell.
