He uses the phraseology that the Internet is rewiring our brains. Whether he is right or wrong, I am intrigued with the concept that a piece of technology could cause our brains to operate in a new and different way.

We know from the medical research done on stroke victims that they brain does have the ability to map around damaged areas and repair itself in some ways. We also know that a person can completely change the way the view the world, and operate within it. In other words that in both a physical, and metaphysical sense we have the ability to rewire our brains as it were. So it is logical to think that technology could be changing the way our brains operate.

I first have to ask myself if we have any precedence for a technology rewiring our brains from before the Internet came along, and of course we have catalysts like television. Before we had instant access to billions of electronic pages, images, and video, we had access to a never-ending stream of visual stimulation. In it’s earlier days (back when I was a kid) TV was viewed much the same as the Internet is today. People that had not grown up with it felt it was too addictive, filled your head with junk, and often caused kids to just sit around for hours at a time when they could have been playing outside with a refrigerator box, or a some sticks. Sure, the moon landing was cool, but generally, there was not much on that was beneficial to ones life.

Eventually, TV matured to the point of new entertainment forms like MTV and that is when we started to notice that it was causing watchers to get a specific form of attention deficit. If content delivery in real life was not flashy, intriguing, loud, and fast paced, kids would lose interest in about 90 seconds. Teachers were the first to complain about the MTV generation and the difficulties in holding their attention. So did TV rewire a generations brains? Or, was TV just a dense information delivery source that made others look pale by comparison?

So along come the Internet and all of its permutations, such as social networking sites, YouTube, powerful search engines, Twitter, and other instant communication capabilities. Now we are seeing the amount of time spent watching TV dropping and the rate of Internet use increasing. We also see Internet devices becoming like outboard brains. We can lean on them to inform us of any fact, memorize bits of information on our behalf, help us communicate instantly with contacts, and find just about any piece of content every produced. Access to these capabilities from a device that fits in our pockets certainly impacts just about every aspect of life as we know it. Which brings us back to the question as to whether and outboard brain rewires our brains, and if so, how.

The assumption that we are dumber because we are leaning too hard on the outboard brain flies in the face of logic. The argument that we are interrupted by too much stimulation, or that we can just ask the magic box any question so we are not force to memorize the answers sounds good, but fails to really tell the whole story. Yes we are more interrupted by technology at this point. Yes, there is less of a need to memorize facts when they are all instantly available to us. But that pales in comparison to the positives we get from the Internet. I am going to simply list the positives, and rest my case because there really will be nothing else to say…

• Access to instructions on how to do anything you can possibly imagine allows us to learn how to do things we would have never learned before.
• A more dense stream of information naturally results in more knowledge sticking in ones brain. This offsets the debt paid for interruptions
• The instant ability to find any fact or figure at a moments notice gives us the ability to do research on any subject from anywhere we happen to be standing. This is all about learning, and we can now learn more conveniently than ever before.
• With one search, you can find multiple opinions on any subject in a way you could never do before. It would have taken hours at a library to even gather a handful of opinions on a subject in the past. This was a barrier that caused people to not even look. Think about the improvements in our ability to manage our own health instead of depending on a doctor as an example.
• The ability to build real time rivers of information on any subject so that we have information pushed to us in convenient ways allows us to stay current on any field of study, sport, health issue, career or subject. We simply had small and slow streams of information before the Internet. The volume of information on any one subject is now ten times what we once had at our fingertips.
• The ability to tap a community (our friends and contacts) to ask any question, at any time, from any place, gives us an ability to gain knowledge in an efficient way we have never had before.

Seriously… Saying the Internet makes us dumber would make about as much sense as saying that reading books at the library made us dumber.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I remembered carbon paper this morning.  I am not sure why, but the distinct memory of the days when we actually stacked up sheets of clean paper, with sheets of carbon impregnated wisps and then hit the keys extra hard to make sure that our words actually were copied onto all pages.  Of course this also made me think of white out, and the big step forward when we got NCR paper, which had that magical ability to copy words through without the actual carbon paper being in between.

I have often recalled those cute little pink “While You Were Out” tablets that my admin used to fill out with the 50 or so calls I would get a day on the telephone.  That was back in the day when I received that kind of volume of calls.  Today a busy phone day might be 5 to 8 calls, and they come on my cell phone, which has a system that recognizes most callers by checking the number against my contact list.  That means the caller is greeted by name, their message is taken, converted to text and sent to my email and texted to me.  No admin involved at this point.

I remember going to library and using the Dewey Decimal System to look up a book so I could find the piece of information I was searching for in that large institution of knowledge.  I remember having to be quiet, having to check out the books, which meant having a library card, and being forced to have a deadline for the return of their property.  Oh, and I remember the fines.

Of course I remember vinyl records, 8 tracks, cassettes, and CD’s.  That means I remember having to clean the needle on the record player, and buying a new one every once in a while.  I remember my kid brother scratching the needle across my favorite Elton John record, and I remember chasing him around the house after it started skipping – never to be repaired.  And I recall the tape players eating the tape on occasion.  I also remember sitting by the radio with my cassette recorder ready to go so I could tape a song I liked that I just could not get on a piece of media, then being the only one of my friends with the recording – even though is started 10 words into the song.

OK, let’s go to bullet points from here!

• When my news came from TV and paper
• When I lost touch with friends and co-workers never to be found again
• When I had to memorize addresses, birthdays and phone numbers
• When I could be by myself and no one could find me and make me work
• When my kids communicated with the person in the room, and not ten people on their mobile device
• When my Rolodex was the most important contact tool I had
• And finally, when I read books that were made with real paper, and I carried one at a time.

The truth is, life has changed a lot and I am not just talking about the tools we use.  The pace is changing – It moves much faster.  The input has changed; it is now a fire hose of information, not just bits and pieces.  The ways we communicate and get entertained are completely different now.  The ways we have meals, and what we think is appropriate has changed.  So how does all this looking back, help us look forward?

The strange thing about we humans is that we most often get what we want.  That is to say that when we seek advancement, we always seem to find a way to make it happen.  We believe in a world of possibilities and for this reason it is safe to say that the tools we use today will continue to evolve to help us get what we want.  That concept is always hard for most people to wrap their heads around because they can only see what is right in front of them and they believe we are SOOOO advanced that we simply could not invent yet another way to improve things.  This of course is not true…

Here is a list of what we seek by the way:

More convenience – Life in general and work specifically should be simpler to handle.

More connection – We like to connect with others that think like us, are related to us, or have some other connection to us.  At times we just want to connect with famous people because it makes us feel important.

Easier communications – The simplest form of connection is simply being able to “talk” to others.  We crave easier, faster, and simpler ways to get in touch with whomever we want, whenever we want.

Better entertainment – Need I say more?  We like to be entertained.

More productivity – Our bosses demand it, and we have found that our pocket book gets enhanced when we can get more work done in a 24-hour period.  Anything that helps us get more work done faster is a winner for most of us.

With this list as a touchstone, and given the changes we have already seen from the past, what can we look for in the future?  And maybe the bigger question is will our lives be better when we get it?  Is everything we want actually good for us?

The answers to these questions could take up five more posts, but let me make a few observations…. There are lots of things that are still broken with how we communicate, connect, and get work done.  Without even thinking hard, think about how inefficient the keyboard and mouse are as interface devices.  It takes me way longer to document these thoughts than just to think them.  I need them to get stored in digital as fast as I can think of them.  When I want to send them to my friends, I have to just pick one method, or work really hard to guess what each of you would prefer.  Wouldn’t it be great if I could just tell my computer the people I want to receive this and my system would reconcile with your systems the best way to get the information to you!

Productivity is still in the dark ages for the most part.  We do not have automatic system to update those around us when we complete a task, or even what the status might be.  We still must do lots of tasks by hand, and do the same things over and over.  We still gather information through long painful meetings and discussions… You get the idea.

The point I want to drive home is that we are making an escalating amount of progress in applying technology to improve our lives.  We are not done.  Because we have a driving need to improve on the ways I mentioned, we are only halfway there if that.  So the change from carbon paper to Microsoft Word is only a partial improvement.  Get ready for much more to come.  And when you have some free time, think about the really big question concerning whether we will ultimately be happy when we get there.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Things that need to go away in education:

• The summer vacation – this was caused by farming needs, and does nothing but help people get out of the habit of learning. Give a few more breaks during the year and go all year long
• The Jug and Mug philosophy of teaching. The teacher is the jug of wisdom, and they pour out that knowledge into the mug of the student. We need to move more to a style that teaches through lots of other methods like self discovery and observation
• Not allowing Wikipedia as a reference source. Please explain to me how Wikipedia is any less of a resource than other sources that have less people giving expertise. Wikipedia now attributes authors so give it up and step into this century
• The ban on laptops in classrooms. I don’t care what age you are, if you have a laptop, you should be able to use it to take notes, and do searches – at the appropriate time! So they cannot be open all day, but can be opened during work times.
• We have to get rid of tenure. Teaching needs to be performance based as to rewards. Don’t even try to debate this because it does not work today and no one can show that it does.
• Memorization and regurgitation as a model for learning. With every fact available in a nanosecond, it makes no sense to just stuff facts temporarily into people minds. All this tests is a students ability memorize for a few days, then dump the information to memorize more.
• Teacher parent meetings as the only communication between us. There are a ton of tools for communicating over the Web and this can make a more robust flow of information so parents are not blind until the report card comes out. By the way, it is not a report card anymore…

Things we need more of in education:

• Collaborative learning by using the Internet as a tool for students to work with other students around the world
• Problem solving skills – this is the number one skill that will help kids prosper when they get out of school – because there are always problems
• More life skills, less subject facts that will not be used by the majority of kids. For example, everyone will need financial literacy. Very few will need advanced algebra. Yet, what do we spend time teaching?
• Creative thinking is going to be more and more valuable as computers take over left-brain tasks. So let’s teach processes and build skills around creativity as a life skill
• Worldwide communication skills. Now that we have the technology to talk to people anywhere in the world, we should build deep skills on students with how to use social networking to enhance your career and quality of life.
• Self-discovery skills. With the Internet now providing a huge resource of help and information, we need to teach students how to have critical thinking and to use the Web as a tool to help learn how to do anything you have not been taught to do as of this point.

In the end, the story from the Bible of teaching a man to fish instead of giving him a fish applies with this new model of education. The education system has said for years that they are teaching kids how to learn – not just teaching them facts. The truth is, technology changes the game entirely as to what that means. We are still stuck with old teaching methods for the most part – and need radical change.

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

I did not have a great experience in my K thru 12 years in school. I found the whole process to by mind numbing in many ways. I did have a few good teachers along the way, and realize now that it was not so much the method they used as the force of personality I was attracted to. Luckily, I absorbed enough from them, while sporting a solid 2.5 GPA that I had the skills to go on and be successful in life. I have never forgotten how much I hated the process of school, and how freed I felt the day they let me out. I also recognize that some people loved school and it was the best time of their life. I suspect that had more to do with things other than getting an A however. Long and short, I have become less and less of a fan of how we educate. This is a technology content source so allow me to segue to the technology part of this diatribe.

Technology has afforded us large set of tools that can radically change how we teach, what we teach, and why we teach. I am mystified as to why as taxpayers and parents, we are not rising up to put more pressure on schools to modernize their approach. Only in a system without profit motive, and outdated measurements could you allow for such inertia to exist as we have today at schools. Allow me to present a list of ways that technology should be impacting education:

We have now created a massive “library” called the Internet, on a scale that is hard to fathom – and is instantly accessible from anywhere, for free. With a structure like this that will only grow and improve, why do we make people memorize facts as a measurement of IQ? Facts that anyone can get in a nanosecond with a search.

We have created a communications system that is now free, has many various modes of communication, and the ability to scale to deliver to millions at a time. With a system like this, why would we not use this system to deliver the best of breed education to people and not create more buildings, more local content, and more local delivery?

We now have knowledge engines like WolframAlpha that can do much of the heavy lifting in doing math based calculations, and analytics. With tools like this, why would we not teach kids how to use the tools, instead of the underlying engineering? They could simply stand on the shoulders of others instead of making every generation start at zero. I don’t even know how to do math longhand any more because I use a calculator. Am I stupid because of this fact?

With the ability to tap into Internet based communities of interest that contain thousands of people, why does it make sense to have kids only get input, or build relationships with a handful of students in their building? Why not have Italian students in Italy teach U.S kids how to speak Italian? And vice versa…

The sad part is, human beings get shaken up by revolutionary change. We are more comfortable by evolutionary changes that come at a slow pace so we can accept the changes slowly. The sad part of this is, we could easily paint a picture that is completely different as to how we could educate our youth – using technology – that they will use anyway as they grow up. It is not the students that will hold us back from completely re-engineering schools, it is the educational machine, and the parents behind them. More to come in Part 2…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

Augmented Reality combines some of the work that has already been done by Google, Navteq and many others., with the data that is available on the Internet about almost everything. These companies have mapped streets, and even the street views, as you look down the streets. What Augmented reality does is add a component where a device that is worn in front of your eyes, or the screen on your iPhone, is pointed towards a subject and the device will recognize the subject and bring in added clouds of information around what you are looking at. So you could be looking down a street and clouds of information would pop up beside the restaurants, the retail stores, the museums, or anything else that happens to be down that street. You could ask for an overlay map and a virtual street map would overlay on your field of vision. You could look at a person and ask the system to do a facial match with their social network profiles and find out who they are.. The list is endless. Basically Augmented Reality is just what the name suggests. It is a computer augmenting what you are looking at automatically, or by request. It is interesting to think about how this might improve surgery, quality control jobs, networking at social events or education. Let’s add the second piece of this stage.

The Brain Computer Interface is a device that connect to your head and uses sensors to read the electrical patterns of our brain. It can be trained to allow you to control a computer just by thinking. A company named Emotiv is preparing to offer a commercial version of a BCI to the public. One of the first uses they see will be the game community since they will quickly adopt the concept as a big improvement over using joysticks and manual devices to control avatars on the screen. Imagine being able to work at the speed of thought! Although many people will think this is science fiction, I urge you to do a search on brain computer interface and look at all of the article written, and check out some of the interesting videos available. The reality is we have already learned how to make the concept work. All we have to do now is improve it, and shorten the training time. I for one will relish not touching a keyboard anymore. Although I fear for what I would do on long highway drives if all I had to do was think in order to control my computer!

So mix these two concepts together and you get a very interesting ability to access the Internet with just a thought, and to have the results play on a pair of goggles, a visor, and soon your actual retina. You could look at a stranger, and just think that you want to run a search and in front of your eyes, you will have their background. If you get lost, you will just be able to think about needing directions and a map will overlay in front of what you are looking at. Access to anything available on the Internet at the speed of thought. So at this point, it does start sounding like science fiction, but for anyone that reads a lot of cyberpunk, you will know that a high percentage of things described come to be. The important thing I want you to know is that it is very likely that in your career, you will be faced with using the technology described above, or at least managing people that will use it.

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com

Stage five will be known as the era of intelligent software systems. We have been talking about artificial intelligence, expert systems, and knowledge based systems for years, and have been building the early versions in this class of tools. There really is no magic here, it is simply a matter of taking rules that humans use to make decisions and coding those rules into a platform that can ingest data, and apply the rules. We already have expert systems that help us make loan decisions at banks, medical decisions at hospitals, and do claim adjudication in insurance companies. Each year, we improve these systems by encoding more rules, with more variations, and create more trust that the computer can make decisions as well as a human given the same set of data. Like most big leaps forward, there is a slow run up before the major change. The Internet was like that as well in that we had it for years before the Web component was added to and it took off with the masses. Such will be the same pattern with all of the big stages that are coming. The technology will exist for years before it “suddenly” takes off and has major impacts on our lives.

So let’s spin forward what intelligent software will begin to do for us, and to us. As expert systems become more and more sophisticated, they will begin to encompass more rules than any one human could handle. This will create situations where the expert system is literally smarter than a human – or at least can make decisions that will prove to be better on a more frequent basis. An example would be that a heathcare system will be able to diagnose more accurately than any one doctor. This is only surprise to you today if you do not understand how crude some of our diagnostic tools are, and how often doctors are just guessing. Or how about a car insurance rating system that can much more accurately judge what your payment should be by processing 100 factors about your life instead of the 5 or 6 that humans use today. As these systems get better and better, they will become more and more valuable and companies will covet the asset that will be their expert system. These pieces of artificial intelligence will one day be the most valuable asset on the balance sheet.

Then they will become self learning… Oh yea. They will begin to monitor the results of their predictions and decisions and will self modify their rules based on outcomes. This will quickly allow them to get more and more accurate, and be ever changing with new trends, data, or variables. Will they ever become conscious? No, this is not Matrix territory, these are just highly intelligent pieces of code that know one specific thing very well, and can learn from mistakes. And these will be embedded in devices all around us. We will come to depend on them. We will do what they say without thinking because they will have proven to be dependable. We will eat what they tell us to eat, and drive like they tell us to drive, and handle business decisions the way they tell us to. Except for those rare moments when we think we know better. This already happening isn’t it. I use a GPS to take the route it tells me and I almost never try my own turns. I go where it says, when it says to. Turn now please…

Scott Klososky
scott@fpov.org

In order to do this, I want you to step back and think about the time we live in now as being in the middle of a 100 year continuum. We can go back 50 years and review how technology has blossomed for us, then look forward 50 years to what it will become. It is helpful to view our time in this way because it will make you conscious that we are on a fantastic journey of integrating technology into our lives, and early enough with it still that we do not really understand the impact. It is not only the fact that we are becoming more dependent on technology that is interesting, but also what it is, and will, do to us as human beings.

In the beginning, we have basic calculating machines. These were mechanical and had no electrical parts. A person could press a series of buttons and then pull down a handle to get an answer to some mathematical question. These actually came to being around the turn of the century, and were the only devices that could be classified as information technology because they were the first devices that could create a piece of knowledge for us mechanically. (Well, that is if you set aside the abacus.) The only impact these had on our lives was to speed up the ability to do simple math. Yet, they also created a fork in the road because for the first time, we could assemble a machine that calculated something on our behalf so that our minds did not have to go through the process or calculating. The impact on our lives was minimal because these devices really helped with small tasks on a small scale. It is important to understand that this first phase lasted for decades, and was only replaced with the advent of mainframes.

Era Two is signified by the growth and development of mainframes. We now moved out of the realm of a mechanical device that could calculate to an electronic device. This was a huge change in the scale of calculation that could be done because now, for the first time, a machine was able to crunch numbers and data at a speed and level of accuracy that was not really possible by a team of humans. Sure, we could do the math, but it would take too long to get it done, and any weak link in the chain of humans would cause a major deficiency.

They were called ‘thinking machines’ at times because to humans in that day, the machines actually offloaded the task of calculating on a huge scale and this made the machines appear to be able to think. Of course they only processed data that was fed to them in strict means of holes in punch cards or the like. The impact of mainframes was very different than the mechanical calculators before them. Mainframes were used in World War II with great impact. They invented secret codes, broke secret codes, processed huge amounts of military data, and allowed man to find answers inside of data that had been locked away heretofore. This time, technology became indispensable to man, and for the first time, proved itself to be able to change world events. Once again, this phase lasted for decades before the next phase came to be…

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com