VR.
Virtual-reality environments are already in use to control remotely guided systems such as the U.S. Air Force's
Armed Predator UAV.
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Even if a soldier is inside a weapons system (such as an Abrams tank), we don't expect him or
her to just look outside the window to see what is going on. Virtual-reality environments are needed to provide a view
of the actual environment and allow for effective control. Human commanders in charge of
swarm weapons will also
need specialized virtual-reality environments to envision the complex information that these distributed systems are
collecting.
By the late 2030s and 2040s, as we approach human body version 3.0 and the predominance of nonbiological
intelligence, the issue of cyberwarfare will move to center stage. When everything is information, the ability to control
your own information and disrupt your enemy's communication, command, and control will be a primary determinant
of military success.
. . . on Learning
Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.
—I
MMANUEL
K
ANT
(1724–1804)
Most education in the world today, including in the wealthier
communities, is not much changed from the model
offered by the monastic schools of fourteenth-century Europe. Schools remain highly centralized institutions built
upon the scarce resources of buildings and teachers. The quality of education also varies enormously, depending on the
wealth of the local community (the American tradition of funding education from property taxes clearly exacerbates
this inequality), thus contributing to the have/have not divide.
As with all of our other institutions we will ultimately move toward a decentralized educational system in which
every person will have ready access to the highest-quality knowledge and instruction. We are now in the early stages
of this transformation, but already the advent of the availability of vast knowledge on the Web, useful search engines,
high-quality
open Web courseware, and increasingly effective computer-assisted instruction are providing widespread
and inexpensive access to education.
Most major universities now provide extensive courses online, many of which are free. MIT's OpenCourseWare
(OCW) initiative has been a leader in this effort. MIT offers nine hundred of its courses—half of all its course
offerings—for free on the Web.
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These have already had a major impact on education around the world. For example,
Brigitte Bouissou writes, "As a math teacher in France, I want to thank MIT ... for [these] very lucid lectures, which
are a great help for preparing my own classes."
Sajid Latif, an educator in Pakistan, has integrated the MIT OCW
courses into his own curriculum. His Pakistani students regularly attend virtually-MIT classes as a substantial part of
their education.
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MIT intends to have everyone of its courses online and open source (that is, free of charge for
noncommercial use) by 2007.
The U.S. Army already conducts all of its nonphysical training using Web-based instruction. The accessible,
inexpensive, and increasingly high-quality courseware available on the Web is also fueling a trend toward
homeschooling.
The cost of the infrastructure for high-quality audiovisual Internet-based communication is continuing to fall
rapidly, at a rate of about 50 percent per year, as we discussed in chapter 2. By the end of the
decade it will be feasible
for underdeveloped regions of the world to provide very inexpensive access to high-quality instruction for all grade
levels from preschool to doctoral studies. Access to education will no longer be restricted by the lack of availability of
trained teachers in each town and village.
As computer-assisted instruction (CAl) becomes more intelligent the ability to individualize the learning
experience for each student will greatly improve. New generations of educational software are capable of modeling the
strengths and weaknesses of each student and developing strategies to focus on the problem area of each learner. A
company that I founded, Kurzweil Educational Systems, provides software that is used in tens of thousands of schools
by students with reading disabilities to access ordinary printed materials and improve their reading skills.
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Because of current bandwidth limitations and the lack of effective three-dimensional displays,
the virtual
environment provided today through routine Web access does not yet fully compete with "being there," but that will
change. In the early part of the second decade of this century visual-auditory virtual-reality environments will be full
immersion, very high resolution, and very convincing. Most colleges will follow MIT's lead, and students will
increasingly attend classes virtually. Virtual environments will provide high-quality virtual laboratories where
experiments can be conducted in chemistry, nuclear physics, or any other scientific field. Students will be able to
interact with a virtual Thomas Jefferson or Thomas
Edison or even to
become
a virtual Thomas Jefferson. Classes will
be available for all grade levels in many languages. The devices needed to enter these high-quality, high-resolution
virtual classrooms will be ubiquitous and affordable even in third world countries. Students at any age, from toddlers
to adults, will be able to access the best education in the world at any time and from any place.
The nature of education will change once again when we merge with nonbiological intelligence. We will then
have the ability to download knowledge and skills, at least into the nonbiological portion of our intelligence. Our
machines do this routinely today. If you want to give your laptop state-of-the-art skills
in speech or character
recognition, language translation, or Internet searching, your computer has only to quickly download the right patterns
(the software). We don't yet have comparable communication ports in our biological brains to quickly download the
interneuronal connection and neurotransmitter patterns that represent our learning. That is one of many profound
limitations of the biological paradigm we now use for our thinking, a limitation we will overcome in the Singularity.
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