As Yogi Berra once said, "The future isn't what it used to be." Yogi was
right, but he didn't go far enough. The future isn't even what it was
the last time you looked at your watch. Ask any stockbroker or anyone
else whose plans change moment to moment as new information arrives.
Bertrand de Jouvenal (a futurologist who rejects the term futurology in
favor of conjecture) emphasizes that the study of the future is the
study of possibilities; it's not about what will happen but about what
might happen. It's not about the future itself (which is not knowable)
but about likely possible futures (what he calls "futuribles"). De
Jouvenal says that a possible future state of affairs enters into the
class of futuribles only if its mode of production from the present
state of affairs is plausible and imaginable. As an example, he notes
that aviation was seen as a possible even in ancient times, but it
became a futurible only when certain new facts made its development
conceivable.
Thus we can see that the reason the future "isn't what it used to be" is
that new facts are now arriving at incredible speeds and in incredible
quantities--courtesy of various forms of information technology.
Isaac Asimov once pointed out that, although man's landing on the moon
had been predicted from early times, not one of the writers who
predicted it was also able to predict that we would all be watching the
landing on television when it happened. Information is everywhere now,
and information changes everything--including especially the future.
Perhaps the information age should be renamed the age of the future,
because a constant stream of new information implies a constant change
of likely futures.
And so to think productively about what the future will be like in the
year 2020--a quarter century from now--we need to be thinking about how,
when, where, why, and to whom "certain new facts" are likely to arrive.
In other words, we need to be thinking about information technology and
its consequences.
Of course, we need to begin at the beginning; we need to begin with the
past and examine how it has led us to the present state of
information technology. Once we do that, we see continuous improvements
in technology performance, continuous decreases in size and cost, and
continuous dispersion of power to individual people. In the 1960s--the
decade of the mainframe--all computing power was highly centralized; in
the 1970s, the introduction of the minicomputer began the dispersion
process and allowed individual departments to operate their own
computers. Then, in the 1980s, the arrival of the personal computer
brought computing capabilities directly to individuals, and in the 1990s
we see a distribution of computing power over networks that facilitate
collaboration and communication. The vectors are clear. The future will
be like the past in the sense that it will fulfill the past--by allowing
more dispersion, more collaboration, and more communication.
Changes in communication technologies, strategies, and styles will be
the fundamental factors determining how the future is defined and how
certain new facts arrive; it's clear that the supremely important change
is the digitization of information. Our future is a digital one, in
which all information is captured, manipulated, stored, transmitted, and
received in digital form through a wide variety of compatible digital
devices. The particular characteristics of the various devices will be
far less important than the central fact of common digital format,
because digitization makes all information (data, sound, video, etc.)
malleable, fluid, combinable, changeable. With an infinity of
information patterns comes an infinity of possible new worlds based on
the certain new facts that those patterns convey.
Of course, though they are indeed less important than the overarching
idea of digitization, the mere things or devices that convey the
digitized information are interesting in their own right. They certainly
include all of the technologies that are now discussed in newspaper
stories about the convergence of computing and communications, and they
include local area and wide area networks, television and HDTV (high-
definition television), satellites, cable, fiber optics, cellular
communications, wireless communications, optical scanning devices, and
the like.
Consider for a moment the impact of scanning devices and their use in
electronic data interchange, which allows the electronic exchange of
virtually any document (i.e., the abstraction of any kind of
transaction) between customer and supplier, client and service provider.
In the 1990s the existence of this capability is evidenced most
noticeably in North American retail stories and on products that bear
scannable Universal Product Codes, but in the year 2020 the capability
will be global (geographically) and universal (unrestricted to
transaction type). As a consequence of these and other technologies--
such as sensing devices and optical character recognition devices--the
world in 25 years will be replicable abstractly as a boundless flow of
interlinked data points. It will begin to seem as though all the lilies
in the field were bar-coded--and the physical, social, and management
scientists will certainly have their work cut out for them.
Neural networking will probably be one of the principal techniques for
coping with such a torrent of data; neural nets are systems with pattern
recognition capabilities sufficient to learn from experience as they
examine new data. Another principal technique will be case-based
reasoning, a set of artificial intelligence strategies that, like neural
networking, attempt to learn from experience. The point is that as
experience is increasingly codified, abstracted, quantified, and
digitized, information and intelligence will redefine reality. Whereas
today's commonplace judgment is that "if you can't say it, you don't
know it," tomorrow's will probably be that "if you don't know it, it
doesn't exist"; it's "off the screen" of shared experience and therefore
not part of human consciousness.
Again, the important point is not that some particular computing or
communications technologies (e.g., neural nets, pen-based systems) will
play this or that particular role but that the digitization of
virtually all knowledge will change the nature of life as it is
experienced. This has, of course, already happened in a modest way;
think of the changes in American living, working, and schooling patterns
between 1894 and 1994. The "stereotypical" American has changed from
rural dweller to urban dweller, from manual worker to knowledge worker,
from isolated farmer to organizational employee, from participant to
consumer, from piano player to TV watcher; in other words, the trends
(which include both good features and bad features) are toward
abstraction, knowledge, and intelligence. These trends will continue
fortissimo during the next 25 years, and therefore the really important
question is not, Which road is taking us there? but, What are we going
to do when we get there? For we will get there, ready or not, like it or
not. What will we do about it? How will we live in the continuing age of
the future?
Cognitive scientist Donald A. Norman says (in Things That Make Us Smart,
Addison-Wesley, 1994) that the easy part of prediction is the technology
and the hard part is the social impact: "the effect upon the lives,
living patterns, and work habits of people; the impact upon society and
culture." Norman gives various examples of predictions that failed
because they did not sufficiently consider the social implications of
particular technological advances; one of his examples is the well-known
prophecy (made at about the midpoint of this century by people such as
Tom Watson Sr., CEO of IBM) that there would be a market for just a
handful of computers because only a handful would be needed to do all
the computational work required in the United States and Great Britain
for the indefinite future. Although the first flaw in such predictions
was technological in nature (i.e., the failure to anticipate
developments such as the invention of semiconducting technology), the
larger predictive error was the failure to understand that the computer
was a misnamed invention, because it could do far more than compute. The
computer was not a numerical machine; it was an information machine,
capable of handling not only numbers but also nonnumerical information.
"The failure to predict the computer revolution," says Norman, "was a
failure to understand how society would modify the original notion of a
computational device into a useful tool for everyday activities.
Progress required a different, more enlightened view of the computer as
an information processor and controller, where information includes
words, sounds and pictures."
And so, the real question for educators thinking about the year 2020 is
not, What will the hardware and software platforms look like 25 years
from now? but, What will education be like in an age when no one talks
any longer about hardware and software platforms, when protocol problems
have been solved, and when the new issues are the ancient issues:
semantic, rhetorical, philosophical, and scientific?
As hard as it may be to believe--for all of us who now struggle with
arcane rules required for navigating the network (or taking charge of
our own desktop!)--there will come a time when computer and
communications technologies will become essentially transparent to the
users of such systems. In fact, the word user will be archaic, because
systems won't be tools anymore; they will simply be the environment. And
one doesn't use an environment; one lives in it. So the question will
be, How will we and should we live when that time comes?
And it surely will come! Whether or not it comes in 2020 or earlier or
later is unimportant; it is important only to stockbrokers, for whom
timing is everything; for educational planners the real point of
thinking about the future is not prediction but self-examination. The
real point is to allow the future to inform the present and shape
today's decisions--to prompt us to ask, "Well, if that's where we will
be in 25 years, what should we be doing now?"
More specifically, it might prompt us to ask questions like these:
1. What will it mean to "register" a student?
2. What will it mean to "be" a student?
3. What will credentials and degrees signify?
4. What will a course of study look like, and who will design it?
5. Will there be any difference at all between distance learning and
traditional education?
6. Will the distinction between individual effort and collaborative
effort be different in 2020 from what it is now?
7. What will it mean to be "published"?
8. What will the difference be between a faculty member and an author?
9. What will the difference be between an author and a publisher?
10. How will the costs of higher education be apportioned among the
state, the federal government, philanthropy, and the student?
11. What will be the role of the residential campus? What percentage of
students in higher education will be seeking a first degree versus
continuing education?
12. Will the calendar of 50-minute classes, 16-week semesters, summer
breaks, and so forth continue?
13. Will the hierarchy of research, comprehensive, liberal arts, and
two-year institutions make sense?
Over a hundred years ago, Ada Augusta, a collaborator on Babbage's first
attempts to build a computing machine, made the following observation:
"In considering any new subject there is frequently a tendency first to
overrate what we find to be interesting or remarkable, and second, by
sort of a natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case."
The brief history of information technology so far is replete with
examples of overestimation of short-term consequences and
underestimation of long-term implications.
By the year 2020 higher education will be well past the point of seeing
information technology as an accretion to the historical way of doing
business and will be using the technology to radically change the way
society learns. Just as other sectors of our economy have seized the
opportunity to expand their service areas from local to national to
international, so will higher education. Information technology breaks
the bonds of place and time and extends our reach consistent with new
boundaries determined by the speed of light rather than the horse and
carriage, or even the automobile.
This article will appear as a chapter in the book Battledoor: Handbook
on Academic Preparation for the Millenium, published by the University
of South Carolina Press.
Robert C. Heterick, Jr., is president of Educom. heterick@educom.edu
John Gehl is editor and publisher of Educom Review. gehl@educom.edu
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