The time machine

Mr Peter Connolly Helensvale State High School Queensland, Australia

What lies ahead depends on what lies behind and has as much to do with location as it does with time.I step into the classroom of the future every day, not simply because I teach graphic design and information communication technology (ICT), my stock and trade, but because the future cuts both ways. Time and space are linked. What lies ahead depends on what lies behind and has as much to do with location as it does with time. Let me explain: I can travel three hours on a plane to another country and go back in time to whatever classroom of the past I choose. Yet I don’t even need to do that, I can traverse less space and experience the same time-shift in my very own country.

Because of the broad diversity of the present, a vision of future schooling very much depends on one’s starting point. Time, and thus the future, is, as Einstein observed, entirely relative to one’s location.

Not only are time and space linked but, at any point, the speed of our passage through the one inevitably changes our perception of the other. You don’t have to hit hyperspace to see that, just as a physical journey suffers time constraints, so the flow of time suffers physical ones. Time is like a revolving door. Crank it too fast and opportunity closes, run it too slow and the same thing happens. In dealing with both the present and the future, you have to get the balance just right.

Time-balance depends upon awareness and the rate of awareness depends on the amount of information one is able to process at any given point. It is this that determines our perception of time. The speed of information communication governs how fast the revolving door – our sense of time with all of its opportunities – passes. Mediate Information Communication (IC) with Technology (IT) and the balance shifts so much that what you effectively have is a time machine – a way of processing the moments ever faster, of condensing the response-rate ever closer, of compressing social and cultural evolution ever tighter. In short, adding IT to IC alters the very perception of time itself.

In a sense, all machines are time machines for, to a greater or lesser extent, they all have time leverage. Think of the hours they save us and, by this leverage, they effectively catapult us forward in time. We even have a word for it: ‘progress’. In a sense, the rate of progress is nothing more than the speed at which we are able to accelerate time.

Yet, unlike other machines, ICTs take moment-shifting further, for not only do they save even more time by managing our other machines for us, they also mediate the flow of information itself – something that is at the very heart of this kind of time-travel. Not only so but they feed back upon themselves, ever speeding the information flow at an apparently exponential rate.

This accelerating feedback is not a new phenomenon. Industrialisation has been doing it for as long as machines have been making machines. What is new is the application of this ever-increasing speed inherent in the industrial process, to thought through electronics. As mechanisation has steadily encroached on thinking, the rate of change has rapidly increased until it has reached a threshold of potentially infinite expansion.

Prior to this, materialism was concerned with more and better goods. Time was on our side because the thinking domain was safely ours. However, with the industrialisation and mass-marketing of Artificial Intelligence (AI), our mental ‘inefficiencies’ are coming home to roost. We are being driven faster than we can adapt. Faster than we can assess the moral implications. Faster than we can think.

In teaching, ICTs are still largely seen as learning aids and not as intelligent assistants.Acceleration always causes pressure and time acceleration is no different. In the west, prior to the information era, the pressure was on physical performance as machines ‘competed’ for blue-collar jobs. Next, the white-collar sector was ‘under attack’ but the dust settled and we all moved on. Now education feels the pressure, as widespread cyber-deployment ramps the general expectation of perpetually increasing rates of learning. Although debatably unrealistic, these expectations nevertheless produce a demand for greater teacher accountability in order to produce more learning in less time. This, in turn, diminishes teacher individuality, freedom and fulfillment, to say nothing of the unnatural pressure it places on the developing minds of students. Stress is inevitable because the equation is unbalanced. There is no commensurate technological boost to aid teacher performance in the pursuit of the various technologically inspired accountability regimes. Although the technology is, in most cases, available it is not being used appropriately. In teaching, ICTs are still largely seen as learning aids and not as intelligent assistants.

Contrary to most educational practice, computers are not merely electronic scissors and glue to help teachers produce neater worksheets or to present boring information in new and better ways; nor are they simply a better way to assemble resources or a means to surf the web. Computers aren’t fancy typewriters! They are machines that think and with the right software they can remove all of the tedium from teaching. This includes curriculum composition and writing, resource gathering, task-setting, grading and reporting - the works – but we just don’t see it: and yet there is more.

It’s a chicken-and-egg relationship: we need to understand the technology in order to define the roles and we need to understand the roles in order to define the technology. Yet all the while we are run off our feet trying to keep pace with the ever-rising standards, requirements and expectations inspired by the very same technology.Were the right software available and the technology ubiquitous, every teacher could delegate even the teaching process itself to cyber assistants and conduct orchestrated learning that targeted the specific temperament, learning styles and individual differences of each and every learner. There could be a different, self-organising plan for every student, leading through common standards to diverse goals. Even the software developers don’t realise the potential of existing technology for such quantum educational reform. Only we teachers can really understand what is needed but our cultural mindset is locked in a pre-AI framework. We just don’t see the possibilities. It’s a chicken-and-egg relationship: we need to understand the technology in order to define the roles and we need to understand the roles in order to define the technology. Yet all the while we are run off our feet trying to keep pace with the ever-rising standards, requirements and expectations inspired by the very same technology. In other industries it has taken decades to evolve an appropriate relationship to ICTs but in teaching we don’t have that luxury. The information sector is simply evolving too fast and carrying with it society’s rising educational hopes.

In teaching and society there is a cultural mindset of what education should be, yet no one seems to have taken the time to think systemically of what it could be and to begin to set it in motion. I suspect we are all simply caught off-guard by the speed and apparent open-endedness of the change. As a result, we find it difficult to navigate the present let alone look much beyond it. But this we must do. Future success depends on current planning and yet all the while our cultural baggage tethers us to the past, to the old mass-production ways of thinking.

We need to establish dedicated tertiary courses for priming and exploring future visions of how to utilise technology to deliver broad-scale, individualised, custom-built education. At present there is little realisation of the need to do this or to redefine teaching within such a framework. As a result we fail to see the need to delegate both the teaching tedium and even much of teaching itself to thinking machines. Yet without a strategic shift in the means of educational production, the stress inherent in the mismatch of expectations with reality will weigh ever more heavily on teachers. If nothing changes, it is simply a matter of time before the limits of human endurance are reached and the system stalls.

We need to learn from the past. We need to understand how the industrial process worked to bring about the mass individual ownership of goods and services and then apply it to information transfer. We have to balance the equation of individualised, machine-induced demand with individualised, machine-produced outcomes if our journey through time is to proceed unimpeded.

Paying the piper

Whatever we might like to think, education is tied to commercialisation. Even democracy stands or falls on its economic viability. A universal franchise relies on universal education; education in turn relies on funding and the money has to come from somewhere. To justify the expense, the whole educational train is focused on providing a steady stream of candidates who are not only able to slot in, but to advance the competitive advantage of the economic order. This then provides the increasing prosperity needed to supply excess funds for future education.

In the commercial world, time is money and speed is king. As the competitive corporate model is lauded as the paragon of organisational virtue, it is little wonder that increasing the speed of information transfer to the economy’s young hopefuls is of vital concern.

Competition is stimulating and speed addictive. Our time-acceleration makes us ever more impatient with the present. We are no longer satisfied with the future being now, when it could as easily have been yesterday.

Given that in our society everything to do with ‘progress’ is ultimately driven by a competitive, commercial bottom-line, as the increasing proliferation of ICTs drives us ever more frenetically, we are given no time to assess the moral worth of our course. Is interpersonal competition ethically defensible, let alone sustainable? Is materialism the ultimate good? Are we any wiser for all our knowledge? Is knowledge really desirable for its own sake, for in the wrong hands its consequences could be far worse than blunt ignorance.

While there is the very real potential for good in our future, it is by no means certain. The blinding pace of progress could just as easily be a precipitous decline depending on where it leads. We could even now be ignorantly and enthusiastically accelerating our own downfall. Because ICTs are such a power for good when rightly used, they can also be a power for evil in wrong or misguided hands.

This potential undoing is on two fronts: firstly the gulf of time-displacement is only set to widen between the ICT ‘have’s’ and ‘have-nots’. Look descriptively from the First to the Third World and what you see is a divide between rich and poor, but look causally and what you see is time-displacement on a massive scale. Using the time-leverage of over two centuries of enculturated industrial feedback, the affluent world has shot centuries ahead of the subsistence baseline. This is why it is so hard for the two to form mutually beneficial bonds: they are simply passing through time at vastly different speeds – any wonder then at the social carnage that results from contact. With ever-faster ICTs, this gap is only set to widen.

Secondly, the rate of acceleration exceeds that of our own cultural adaption, for social acceptance is entirely based on the rate of human, rather than machine, awareness. As a result, the best decisions may not necessarily be made because we are simply travelling through time too fast for wisdom to adapt. We are, in a sense, flying blind.

In air-travel the sound barrier has always been a natural limit to speed. Sound propagates through the air as a series of shockwaves. The speed of the shockwaves expresses the air’s maximum ability to respond to change. The closer one travels to that speed, the less the air is able to respond and the more turbulent and dramatic is its resistance. The molecules pack tighter and tighter until they form an impenetrable wall.

… it is social friction and not processing power that will be the ultimate limit to the rate of ICT deployment.Information systems face the same problem in dealing with cultural resistance. With time this may change, but it is social friction and not processing power that will be the ultimate limit to the rate of ICT deployment. An example of this can be already seen in the ethical controversy surrounding embryonic stem-cell research. This is a field of endeavour only made possible with the aid of advanced ICTs and it is lagging not because of inferior or unavailable technology, but because of cultural resistance to the speed of the social consequences that result from its use.

Other more mundane areas experience the same phenomenon and this includes education. Because we are flying blind and being driven beyond the rate of normal social adaption to change, there is a human cost to progress. Even for the ICT ‘haves’, the future cuts both ways.

How as educators are we to meet these challenges? Firstly, by recognising them and secondly by factoring them into the mix. There has to be commensurate cultural awareness and change if ICT deployment is to be maximised, yet there are limits that must be respected, limits that demark our common humanity and set us apart from both animal and synthetic intelligence.

Given these constraints and ignoring possible catastrophes, what will future schooling be like? While there are, and always will be, a multitude of learning institutions, if trends continue there will be only enough space for one classroom: for not only will there be only one information source, but distance will be irrelevant to its access and learning will be lifelong. As a result, proximity to time-warping technology will supersede the old proximities of time and space as the prime educational determinant.

At the sharp end of this new global classroom, the technology, and thus the time-shift, will be extreme. Yet, at the blunt end, the lag will trail far behind even the present. For the unwired elite: broadband will seem quaint, the internet will be everywhere, and instant, untethered, personal, visual, multi-channel communication will be the norm at any point on the globe. Students will have learning ‘conversations’ rather than lessons and, because of their personal time machines, location will be irrelevant to formal learning, commerce and lifestyle. The digital convergence of all information combined with the future wireless ubiquity of the web and the proliferation of ever more powerful, portable, hybrid devices will provide seamless, instant, individualised access to lifestyle and learning anywhere, to anyone, in any variety of formats. Yet if things continue as they are: cheek-by-jowl spatially, but separated by decades and even centuries of time, will be the other learners of that same global classroom. This has major ethical, social and political implications that can only be ignored at their peril.

Since space and time will be rendered irrelevant by technology, for the elite the educational future will not only be whatever, but whenever they want. Let us hope that they want the right things – but then that’s our role: the task of current education.

For both the leading and trailing edges of future lifelong learning, the predominant issue will be information access.For both the leading and trailing edges of future lifelong learning, the predominant issue will be information access. Interface style and transparency will be the concern of the ‘digeratti’ while, for the rest, education will be based on the bare bones of access - if at all. Classroom boundaries will follow suit, being as flexible and transparent as the relative technology - or its lack - will allow. ‘Contoured learning’ may well emerge as a descriptive term for this time-displaced and zoned, educational access.

Access, dependence and control

Yet the higher one climbs, the further one falls. While passive ICT neglect will leave most in the dust, the electronic-elite are no less in danger of actively using ICTs against themselves to engineer the same discriminatory outcomes. Individualisation, like the future, cuts both ways. Remember that idea of moral resistance to rapid change, the other side of the coin to Third World neglect? Given ICT teeth, the recent reactionary restrictions to our individual liberties in the west amount to nothing less than the legal foundation for future digital discrimination. With repressive laws now in place and driven by collective self-interest, our digital democracies could well manipulate ICT access as an ‘enlightened’ measure to curb dissent. As ethical concerns come more to the fore, the reactive moral will of the majority could well be used with devastating effect to segregate those who, for whatever reason, disagree. Without access to commerce, learning or lifestyle, and with no alternative support structure, this would in effect be sending them back in time - exiling them to an uncivilised past more primitive than the Third World – all without the slightest geographical change. It would be worse than physical transportation, for there could be no legitimate subsistence. Facing eviction through rates or local tax arrears, with access to bank accounts and investments denied, one could not travel, work, eat or play – let alone pay one’s debts - even at the local store.

The downside of universal access is universal dependence and this has the potential for universal control. Like medieval Interdiction, in the near future the very threat of disconnection could be enough to curb all but the most determined dissent. Yet, sadly, it is not readily understood that recalcitrants cover the full spectrum from dangerously fanatical to conscientiously innocuous. Recent events merely reinforce historical trends where politically expedient generalisations tar all with the same official brush. For the ethically consistent, as well as the dangerous fanatic, the creation of digital ghettos could eventually be only a mouse-click away.

Whether such dissenters are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ is really not the issue. It is the official mistreatment of legitimate dissent during real or imagined crises that is the problem - the terrible problem – of ubiquitous ICT deployment. The surgical precision of individualised ICT access is potentially the greatest tool for targeted social discrimination ever devised. The last five years have shown how quickly the threat of perceived national insecurity can be manipulated to hijack social progress, effectively reversing its direction while claiming to protect it. How desperate then is the need for appropriate education, given the hell-for-leather scramble of government, industry and commerce to create complete ICT dependence?

Blessings never come without proportionate curses being attached to their neglect or misuse. We are blind if we do not see the boon of technology as a double-edged sword. We are worse than blind if we do not make commensurate moral education an essential prerequisite of its deployment. Yet, by so doing, we may well stir reactivism and precipitate the very crisis we seek to avoid. We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.

My vision of the future is haunted by the possibility of a Versailles of neglect, where the elite are quarantined in a Hall of Mirrors that merely reflects their own view of reality. Besotted by ‘instant everything’, they are unaware of the fundamentals that, beyond their cosy network, are sinking the world into Terror. Merely sending out the military and using a Bastille-based threat at home does nothing to replace the need for fundamental reform. Worldwide we seem to be slipping into the dynamics of pre-revolutionary France: even the same word is used to describe the potential threat: ‘Terror’. If history is any guide, I fear it is a dark horizon to which our time machine is drawn.

By definition, change never leaves us the same. It is to be hoped that the blessings conferred by ICTs will make us more humane through the dissemination and decentralisation of knowledge, the democratisation of its control and the augmentation of our ethical processes.

Will the global classroom have only room for the info-class to prosper, or will it be a class apart, with room to favour all?For this reason, the success of the global classroom cannot rest solely on the acquisition of ICTs. Technology must have an ethical purpose or it will have a less than ethical use. Given their potential, future ICTs could if wrongly deployed, return us to the worst – the most discriminatory - excesses of our past. That’s the problem with time machines: inappropriately used they have the potential to take us ‘back to the future’ instead of forward from the past.

Will the global classroom have only room for the info-class to prosper, or will it be a class apart, with room to favour all? The choice is ours.