The Coming Collapse of the University System

In 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony established New College – the first institute of higher education in the Western Hemisphere. A Boston minister named John Harvard donated 320 books and £800 to the new institution, which was promptly renamed Harvard College in his honor, thus beginning the modern university system in the United States. For most of the time since then, universities were the province of the elite. Since most Americans were farmers prior to the 20^th century, they had little use for even a high school diploma, much less a bachelor's degree. Following World War II, the paradigm shifted dramatically. As the need for college-educated labor dramatically increased, universities became much more commonplace. The university system has grown to immense scales that John Harvard could scarcely have imagined – there are now over 2,600 universities in the United States, and more than half of all Americans have completed at least some college education.

For the past 60 or so years, the university system has served a dual role: Professors both conduct academic research and instruct students. High tuition price tags are, in large part, used to subsidize academic research rather than pay for student education. Although this arrangement worked reasonably well for several decades, it began to show cracks in the early 2000s and is now near the breaking point. This paradigm for higher education is no longer sustainable.

The most obvious reason is the soaring cost of tuition. The average college graduate has accumulated $26,000 in student debt when he or she graduates. In 2010, student loans became the largest source of unsecured debt in the United States, surpassing credit card debt for the first time. This wouldn't necessarily be a problem if accumulating so much debt was a worthwhile long-term investment, but recently many people have started to question this longstanding assumption. They are right to be worried. Student debt is an albatross around the necks of many recent graduates which hinders social mobility. One definition of an economic bubble is the trade in a product or service at a price that far exceeds its intrinsic value; another definition is a widespread public consensus of the high value of the product or service, that is at odds with a realistic examination of the facts. By these definitions, university tuition prices are most definitely in a bubble, and it's only a matter of time until the bubble pops.

But the tuition bubble masks another looming problem that most universities barely acknowledge today, but poses an even greater threat to them: The prominence and quality of free online education is poised to improve dramatically in the next few years. Today, most online universities are for-profit institutions with horrible brand images, but that will soon change. MIT and Stanford now offer many of their courses online for free, to anyone who wants them. Additionally, a slew of free websites have popped up in the last couple years to teach specific skills such as computer programming, mathematics, history, biology, foreign languages, and business.

As the course offerings proliferate and quality improves, more and more students will begin to question why they are paying tens of thousands of dollars to attend a university, when they can learn the same material online for free (or at least very cheaply). This will, in turn, encourage employers to accept “alternative” certifications to a traditional bachelor's degree, such as educational websites vouching for the student's knowledge. This will badly damage the credibility of universities and undermine their role as the gatekeepers to white-collar careers. With the exception of certain professions for which formal credentials are absolutely required for employment (e.g. law and medicine), the necessity of acquiring a formal degree will fall by the wayside as more alternatives present themselves, causing a mass exodus from universities.

As this happens, universities will need to sharply reduce their tuitions in order to stay competitive with their free counterparts...and eventually, even the sharpest reductions will be insufficient. As the cost of a good education drops to nearly zero, universities will need to completely rethink their business model.

This will cause major funding problems for scholarly research, if nothing is done. The dual responsibilities of universities, instruction and research, will separate from one another. As universities earn less money from tuition – and have fewer alumni to provide large donations – academia could suffer unless steps are taken to find another stream of revenue. The research that professors conduct benefits society as a whole, but is usually not profitable. As tuition money dries up, I suspect that universities – both public and private – will rely more on government largesse to support their research.

Ultimately there is another role that universities might serve. Although the tuition model is doomed in the long term, many students crave the “college experience” that only being on a campus can provide. Universities might still serve as places for young people to come together and live, join clubs, and play sports and music together...despite getting their actual education online from many different sources. In this way, perhaps universities can earn a bit of money from their “students” and retain some loyalty from their “alumni,” although they will never again be centers of education.

The coming crash in tuition prices will be bad for universities and potentially bad for academic research if nothing changes...but it will be great for students. In a certain sense, the ability to acquire a college education for free or nearly free will be a throwback to the “old days” in which young people started out their careers without any debt. Many of the most dynamic companies are started by young people, but student debt provides a significant drag on this economic engine. Eliminating this problem for future generations could potentially create a large economic boom, as more dynamic companies are born to solve the world's challenges.

PREDICTIONS:

By 2021 – The average cost of tuition at the 100 top-ranked brick-and-mortar universities is lower than it was in 2011, after adjusting for inflation.

Predictions for 2012

Due to a dearth of predictions for 2012 (since my blog only began in 2010), I have decided to do what I did last year and make a list of predictions that I think we'll be reading about in the news for the coming year.

The Arab Spring sputters out. With the exceptions of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, almost no Arab states are poised to make a real transition to democracy. Many of them are too poor to make a democratic transition likely, and several of them are cursed by their own oil wealth, which encourages corruption and enables autocrats to buy off opposition. There may be a few other Arab dictators that fall this year, but in the end they will most likely be replaced by other dictators and/or chaos. Some Arab states may successfully hold democratic elections, but find their newfound democracy short-lived and ultimately revert to authoritarianism.

Medical data processing costs continue to fall, as the work is increasingly offshored and automated. As computing power grows, it becomes easier and cheaper to process medical data from nearly anywhere in the world. The cost of sequencing a human genome continues to fall faster than Moore's Law, and currently stands at roughly $4,000. Computers can now identify breast cancer more accurately than human doctors can. IBM's Watson is currently being repurposed into a medical diagnosis tool, which will have access to more information than a human doctor could hope to acquire: the latest medical literature, clinical trials, patient histories, and (soon) the patient's genome.

Smartphone apps that monitor the user's health proliferate and become very popular. This has already begun to happen to some extent, but in 2012 health apps will proliferate as they become better and less invasive. The less the user needs to interact with the app, the more likely it is that the app will be used effectively. Look for more gadgets like Nike+, which combine the functionality of a smartphone app with a device that is worn near the body to measure some aspect of health.

The discovery of the Higgs Boson is confirmed. In December 2011, scientists at CERN confirmed with a high level of probability that they had discovered a new particle at the energy level believed to be associated with the elusive Higgs Boson, the last undiscovered piece of the Standard Model of particle physics which is believed to carry mass to all other particles. However, the level of probability was not high enough to be labeled a new discovery with any certainty. Since two independent teams found an anomaly at roughly the same energy level, it is highly unlikely to be a mistake. It will probably be confirmed by the end of 2012, thus completing the 40-year-old Standard Model.

The air starts to leak from the higher education bubble. Speaking as one of the suckers who just completed his education at the peak of the higher education bubble, I think that we've just about seen the highwater mark for tuition charges. Over the last decade, tuition for higher education increased at nearly twice the overall inflation rate. This cannot go on forever. The economics of university tuition will be difficult to sustain, because several factors are working together: The poor economy makes expensive university tuition look like a worse deal than before for those looking to maximize their payout. Government budget cuts will mean that the states are less generous about financial aid to students, and universities will need to adjust their charges accordingly. Finally, higher education itself is on the verge of a major overhaul, as presaged by MIT's announcement that they would start offering accreditation for a small fee for their free online courses. Tuition charges may continue to increase for another year or two...but I think they will increase by a smaller amount than they have in the past decade. And it's only a matter of time before they come crashing down.

PREDICTIONS:

As of 2012 – No Arab state has held free and fair elections resulting in a representative government as a result of the Arab Spring, with the possible exceptions of Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco.

By 2012 – Medical data processing costs continue to fall, as the work is increasingly offshored and automated.

By 2012 – Smartphone apps that monitor the user's health proliferate and become very popular.

By 2012 – The discovery of the Higgs Boson is confirmed.

By 2012 – Tuition at US four-year universities increases at a slower rate for the 2012-13 school year, than it has in the past decade.

Book Review - "Disrupting Class" by Clayton Christensen

Clayton Christensen’s book, Disrupting Class, is a fascinating look at how disruptive new technologies will soon transform the dismal state of the American education system. By far, the most intriguing aspect is the potential for online education to completely upend traditional schools and dramatically improve education.

Some of the biggest problems with schools are often lost in the contentious political debates over teachers’ unions, vouchers, and merit pay. Often, the underlying problems are completely ignored because they seem intractable. The traditional classroom model – where one teacher instructs 25 students – is antiquated and ineffective at addressing students’ needs. As Disrupting Class illustrates, each student has unique learning styles and abilities, which are completely ignored in traditional schools.

In brick-and-mortar schools, where there are vastly more students than teachers, education cannot be customized to individual students. The instructor tries his or her best to teach according to the learning style that reaches the most students, but those who march to the beat of a different drum inevitably fall through the cracks. Classes invariably move at the same pace despite the fact that students do not learn at the same pace. An instructor teaches a unit, the students are tested on the material, and the entire class moves on to the next unit, regardless of the performance of individual students. As a result, the advanced students are bored in school and want to move faster, while the struggling students fall farther and farther behind as their knowledge deficiencies accumulate.

Disrupting Class envisions a future where these things are no longer problems, due to interactive online education that is far better than today’s education software, which far too often is nothing more than glorified flash cards. In the online classes of the future, each student will be able to learn at his or her own pace, and won’t advance to the next unit until he or she has mastered the material from the current one. The concept of awarding letter grades for classes might be replaced by measuring how long it takes a student to earn an A.

Additionally, online education will allow for classes to be customized to the student’s particular learning style. The debates over whether one particular teaching style is better than another, or whether charter schools are better than traditional schools, will vanish. When each student can learn the material in a manner tailored to his or her own needs, we will finally recognize that no single teaching style or type of school is best for all students.

Although the book primarily focuses on the American education system, the international implications of disruptive education technology are possibly even more profound. Salman Khan, the founder of the Khan Academy, stressed this point in his recent TED Talk. Online education offers the possibility to turbo-charge the human development of countries where access to education is still a problem. Far too many children in the slums of developing countries have little access to education of any kind. The proliferation of online education – which should roughly coincide with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets in much of the developing world – will open up vast new worlds of information to students in the most remote parts of the planet, where local teachers are unavailable, unknowledgeable, or expensive.

Disrupting Class gets its name because, in Christensen’s view, these educational innovations will largely take place outside of traditional classrooms, and eventually supplant them entirely. In the infancy of online education, teachers will use online education to supplement their in-class curriculum, or use it to allow students to take classes that are not offered at the school. Over time, education software will play a larger and larger role in classrooms until the schools themselves are no longer necessary. Students might continue to gather with their local friends in a building called a “school” to learn, but classes will be determined by learning style, ability, and personal interests rather than by school district. Teachers will instruct students entirely via computer.

How long will it take until online education is widely adopted? Not long, by Christensen’s estimate. He notes that online education is following the same adoption pattern of many other disruptive technologies, such as digital photography, which start off very slowly but suddenly become dominant once they reach critical mass. According to Christensen, in the United States in 2000 there were 1,000 students in classrooms for every 1 online learner. By 2007, this ratio had dropped to 100 to 1. If this trend continues, online learning will command a sizable chunk of the market (10%) by 2014, and gain a majority by 2019. Shortly thereafter, our 170-year-old model of classroom-based learning will come to an end.

Projections from "Disrupting Class" by Clayton Christensen

My sole criticism of the book is that it is a bit too broad. Christensen primarily focuses on online education, but devotes short sections to other innovations like new methods of evaluating teaching styles, and teaching highschoolers the necessary parenting skills they will need to one day raise successful children of their own. Although these are certainly interesting ideas worth exploring, they felt a bit out of place in a book primarily about the disruptive nature of education technology. I would have liked to see these chapters replaced with more information about online education, which is, after all, the main focus of the book.

Disrupting Class is thought-provoking and charts a very plausible course for would-be developers of online education tools. The future of education will inevitably be online. The advantages are just too numerous to ignore.

4/5 stars

State of the Union Analysis

President Obama’s 2011 State of the Union address was one of the most future-oriented addresses to Congress in recent memory, despite proposing relatively few new ideas. Although the speech consisted mostly of the same policy recommendations that could have been given by any Democratic politician of the last two decades, the things the president chose to emphasize offer some hints to the direction the United States is heading.

I felt that the first half of the speech dealing with domestic policy was far stronger than the foreign policy section. President Obama hit most of the key policy ideas that will dominate American politics in the coming decades, referring several times to “investing in the future.” As America’s infrastructure crumbles and its education system falls behind that of other nations, viewing this type of spending as an investment rather than an expense is absolutely essential for our future wellbeing. President Obama mentioned his National Broadband Plan for the second year in a row. Although it is a welcome step in the right direction, it is woefully inadequate at meeting the needs of a 21^st century economy. If the goals are met, broadband coverage in the United States in 2020 will be about the same as South Korea has today. Additionally, President Obama failed to take a firm stand on net neutrality or wireless carrier oligopolies, which have made the United States one of the least efficient countries in the developed world in telecommunications.

The President touched on our need for a new energy policy, referring to it as our “Sputnik moment” which is absolutely essential for the long-term success of the United States. I was pleased to hear him voice support for nuclear power, and continued subsidies of solar and wind power. The biggest flub from this section was his continued advocacy of biofuels, which have largely been discredited as an economical, environmentally-friendly form of energy. Biofuels sound to me more like an excuse for agricultural subsidies than a serious energy proposal.

President Obama hit a positive note on education, where he signaled a willingness to break with the teachers' unions, which have begun to fall out of favor with many Democrats. He touted the success of his Race to the Top Initiative, which has been the most progressive piece of education legislation in decades, and urged Congress to replace No Child Left Behind with an initiative that encouraged educational innovation. There were a couple areas of education policy that I would have liked to hear the president mention: online schools and charter schools. Although both are in their infancy and have problems which will need to be solved, mentioning them would have fit quite nicely with his theme of investing in the future, which will certainly not be dominated by traditional brick-and-mortar schools giving students standardized curricula.

President Obama’s calls for bipartisan deficit reduction were a bit difficult to take seriously, since neither political party has shown any real interest in the subject. The US structural deficit is only a problem inasmuch as it is larger than our rate of economic growth. President Obama proposed an ill-advised five-year discretionary spending freeze (which doesn’t square very well with his “investing in the future” theme, or the fact that we still have extremely high unemployment) but did not offer any substantial cuts to entitlements. He called for modest income tax increases after 2012, which will certainly be opposed by Republican members of Congress. President Obama’s deficit reduction commission offered a series of centrist proposals and compromises to reduce the size of the deficit, but the president mentioned almost none of them. I think that Obama's deficit reduction pledge was one of those promises that presidents make during State of the Union addresses that are forgotten a few weeks later...and perhaps that is for the best.

The foreign policy section of the speech was mostly boilerplate rhetoric, and provided a very odd contrast to the high-flying futuristic vision of the domestic policy section. The president could have continued the theme of investing in the future (for example, by offering more humanitarian assistance to African and South Asian nations) but instead chose to focus primarily on the same trouble spots that have dominated US foreign policy for a decade: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Although he offered nothing substantively different from his previous policies, he did have the foresight to point out that the real danger of terrorist groups comes not from a repeat of 9/11 or isolated bombings, but from weapons of mass destruction. Nuclear proliferation poses the greatest short-term threat from terrorists, by far.

It was disappointing to hear the president utter not a single word about the chronic crisis in Israel and Palestine, indicating that he has given up on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a potential peacemaker. To make matters worse, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has no legitimacy in the eyes of his people, and lacks the political ability to agree to a compromise. It is time for some creative thinking on the subject. Efforts are afoot at the United Nations to establish a unilateral peace agreement which could be imposed on all parties in the conflict. Although this certainly would not bring about peace in the Middle East immediately, it would change the dialog from prodding both nations to compromise (which they have been unable to do for nearly 50 years), to instead urging them to adhere to the UN-imposed peace plan. Unfortunately, such an effort has no chance of success without at least the tacit approval of the United States. If the next 50 years in the Middle East are to be brighter than the past 50 years, President Obama will need to think outside the box about how to help the region establish peace.

Perhaps the most outside-the-box foreign policy idea the president mentioned was his statement that the United States “supports the democratic aspirations of all people,” in reference to the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia. Although this notion has been well-established for some time in theory, it has not always been the case in practice, and under the circumstances I was surprised to hear it in the State of the Union address. But supporting democracy in an inconsequential global backwater is one thing. As the Tunisian unrest spreads to key US-aligned countries like Egypt and Yemen, it remains to be seen if the president will support the democrats, although the early signs are encouraging.

Overall, the policy prescriptions in the State of the Union were mostly good ideas that can potentially garner the bipartisan support they will need to become law. The speech itself, while very progressive and futuristic, was somewhat uninspiring. The biggest disappointments came not in what Obama said, but in what he didn’t say. Perhaps the State of the Union address is not the ideal forum for floating trial balloons of creative new ideas, but if Obama is serious about investing in the future at home and abroad, he will need to develop more innovative solutions of his own than what he offered on Tuesday night.

Giving Thanks

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” – Martin Luther King

With the constant barrage of stories in the media about war, recession, terrorism, swine flu, natural disasters, and various other tragedies, one could easily conclude that the world is a horrifying place. But instead of looking at the latest headlines, we should instead contemplate the broad trends of history. The world is a far better place to live today than it ever has been before, and all indications are that the quality of life will continue to improve. This is not just Panglossian optimism; the world is empirically a better place to live by almost any metric one chooses, compared to almost any other historical era one chooses. The arc of human development is long, but it bends towards a better quality of life. And for that, we should be thankful.

For most of human history, life was “nasty, brutish, and short” as Thomas Hobbes described it. The average life expectancy in most major civilizations – including ancient Greece, ancient Rome, and medieval Britain – hovered around 30 years. And these were among the leading civilizations of their era. Today, even the least developed countries on earth typically have life expectancies far higher than that. The advent of the Germ Theory of Disease has revolutionized the way we think about infectious diseases, and has increased the global life expectancy to 69 years. In many developed countries, life expectancy at birth exceeds 80 years.

Education is now ubiquitous in a way that it never has been before in human history. Prior to the middle of the 19^th century, universal education was a completely unknown concept. Education was the province of the elite, designed solely to teach young people how to be the future leaders of the world. Although the American education system is rightly the target of much criticism today, we should not lose sight of the fact that it is a crowning achievement of our history. Universal education has enabled people from all walks of life to apply their talents to make the world a better place in a way that would not have been possible otherwise. Chris Anderson, the curator of TED Talks, proposes this thought experiment: “Pick your favorite scientist, mathematician, or cultural hero. Now imagine that instead of being born when and where they were, they had instead been born with the same abilities in a typical poverty-stricken village in, say, the France of 1200 or the Ethiopia of 1980. Would they have made the same contribution they did make? Of course not.” The ubiquity of education in our society is something for which we should be truly thankful, since it has allowed many more people to solve societal problems than were previously able to do so.

But even many of those who readily acknowledge that life today is much better than in the distant past may wonder if we have run out of steam in recent decades. Stories about the decline of Western civilization are not hard to find in the media, nor are dire warnings about how abrupt climate change could cause widespread famines and wars. If only we could return to the good old days, they wish. But the fact is that the world is much better now than in recent decades as well. Although many people might like to turn back the clock to 2007, before the recession, in the grand scheme of things the recession will be a small blip on the radar screen. If you turn the clock back much farther than just a few years, it becomes obvious that the world is a much better place today than in the past. Over a billion people have been lifted out of grinding poverty in China and India in the last 20 years. The World Wide Web – a strong contender for the single greatest invention of mankind – is less than 20 years old. In the United States, women and minorities have had equal rights for less than 50 years. The Cold War no longer enslaves half the world, and no longer carries the credible threat of a nuclear apocalypse. The overall number of humans per capita killed in warfare is at its lowest level since at least World War II, and possibly all of human history. The “good old days” were never that good. The quality of life today is staggeringly better than even the recent past.

But the most important thing for which we should be thankful is the hope for an even better future. The 20^th century was by far the most disruptive century since the dawn of civilization, and there is no reason the 21^st century can’t be just as important for radically altering the way humans live. Some of the transformative technologies that are now on the horizon include self-driving vehicles, stem cell therapy, lab-grown meat, ubiquitous computing, genomics, 3D printing, solar energy, and mature nanotechnology. These all offer the potential to dramatically improve our quality of life for the better, just as sanitation and education did in the 19^th century, and as plumbing and electricity did in the 20^th.

Let us give thanks for the fact that we live in the best epoch of human history – relative to both the distant past and the recent past. Furthermore, let us be grateful that the technological revolution of the last 150 years shows no signs of slowing down, and will continue to unlock the true potential of human beings by freeing us from menial tasks and unpleasant maladies. We live in interesting times. Let’s treat that as a blessing, not a curse.

The Future of Education: Effective Distance Learning

The year is 2025. Moseka, a 5^th grade Congolese girl living in Kinshasa, uses her tablet computer to access her interactive learning software from the cloud. It is capable of accessing any book in the world, watching high-definition videos of her instructors, and tracking her progress. Her tablet is a lower-end model – only a thousand times more powerful than the iPads of 2010. She doesn’t worry about it breaking; they are as cheap as scrap paper, and only slightly thicker.

Although Moseka is fluent in French and English as a result of her lessons, she still prefers to learn in her native Lingala. There is an entire library of online courses available in Lingala, complete with ratings from previous students and parents. Unlike the online classes in the United States of the late 1990s and 2000s, which were largely inferior to in-person education, Moseka’s classes are among the best of the best. Many of the best educators in the Congo (as well as everywhere else in the world) have become celebrities in their country, reaching thousands of pupils at a time. The old model of online education, which was mainly confined to reading text on a desktop computer screen and submitting homework assignments digitally, has mostly been replaced by interactive software and tablet computers which make the classes much more productive and engaging. Moseka doesn't have any physical textbooks; she can easily access them from the cloud on her tablet whenever she needs them. These e-books are not merely electronic copies of books that exist in the physical world. They are full of video clips, learning games, and customization.

Like most of her friends, Moseka has only ever seen schools in old American cartoons. This is not because of her location; she has lots of friends in the United States and Europe who have never set foot in a school either. What is the point of going to an old building to learn from a local teacher, she wonders, when she can learn whatever she wants to learn, whenever she wants, from some of the best instructors in the world? Her parents and friends all seem to agree, as do the governments of most nations. Nearly everyone has access to a good education now. Ubiquitous computing has eliminated the need to waste money on school buildings, and created the economies of scale necessary for the cost per pupil to drop to nearly nothing.

However, Moseka’s education is not impersonal just because her instructor has many students. Large class sizes are mostly irrelevant now that brick-and-mortar schools are a thing of the past; in fact, Moseka likes having a huge network of classmates whom she can turn to for help. Whenever she gets stuck on her lessons, she first turns to some older girls to help her (and likewise, she helps her younger brother with his schoolwork). If she is still confused, she can ask her class for help. With so many classmates, someone else is almost always having the same problem…and someone almost always knows the answer. Intelligent software can easily match these students with one another.

Moseka is excited about her future. In much of the developing world, her generation will be the first that has the opportunity to use their abilities to change the world. She wants to be a teacher, confident that she’ll be just as successful as the teaching superstars who instruct her today. And due to the new education paradigm, she very well might be.

PREDICTIONS:
By 2025 - Youth literacy rates exceed 90% in both Sub-Saharan Africa (up from 72% in 2008) and South Asia (up from 79% in 2008). Gender disparities in literacy have mostly disappeared; the global female youth literacy rate is no less than 98% of the male youth literacy rate (up from 94% in 2008).
By 2025 - Fewer than 75% of students in the United States physically attend a school on a daily basis.

Book Review - "The Demon-Haunted World" by Carl Sagan

Astronomer Carl Sagan’s 1996 book, The Demon-Haunted World is the ultimate guide to critical thinking. Carl Sagan asks, “How can we make intelligent decisions about our increasingly technology-driven lives if we don’t understand the difference between the myths of pseudoscience, New Age thinking, and fundamentalist zealotry…and the testable hypotheses of science?”

Sagan offers a lengthy explanation of how the scientific method works, and how it is demonstrably more successful than any of its pseudoscientific imitators. He teaches the importance of having a skeptical worldview, especially of extraordinary claims. As he stated in Cosmos, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Sagan explains the necessity of Ockham’s Razor – the rule of thumb that people should not assume anything that the evidence does not require them to assume – in critical thought. He systematically exposes the absurdity behind many of the most popular modern-day forms of pseudoscience, including astrology, homeopathy, psychics, alien abductions, Freudian psychoanalysis, doomsday predictions, graphology, and numerology.

While some have criticized the book as being anti-religious, Sagan himself disputed this characterization. He was clearly an agnostic, but had a deep appreciation for the sense of wonder that religion could inspire and recognized that it had much in common with his own appreciation for science. He does take certain religious views to task – such as the ideas of young-earth creationism, faith healing, and divine intervention. However, he notes that although “religions are often the state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience…there is no reason why religions have to play that role.” Sagan was a strong advocate of finding common ground between the religious and scientific communities: a central theme of his novel Contact.

14 years after its original publication, The Demon-Haunted World seems more topical than ever. The applications of critical thinking extend far beyond the realm of science. By being skeptical of unusual claims, we can better gauge the veracity of some of the odd statements we routinely hear from any authority, including our politicians, educators, corporate gurus, and religious leaders. In my opinion, there is no more important skill that our schools should teach students than the process of thinking critically. Unfortunately, most high schools and many universities don’t offer any classes in critical thought, even as electives. Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World can guide us where our schools do not.

The Demon-Haunted World was Sagan's last book before his death in 1996. Although it never reached the same level of popularity as some of his other works such as Cosmos and Contact, I think it is his most important work for the layperson. The Demon-Haunted World has shaped my view of the world more than any other book.

5/5 stars

Augmented Reality Will Change How We See The World

Augmented reality is the technology of superimposing virtual images over top of one’s view of the real world. One of the earliest examples is the yellow first down line in televised American football games, which has existed since 1998. The technology typically works by recognizing a certain object in the real world, which triggers a computer to impose a virtual image into the viewer’s line of vision. In the case of the first down line, it operates through a television screen, but any type of screen will do. Augmented reality applications already exist for computers, smartphones, special-design glasses, and airplane windshields.

General Electric has a very cool interactive demonstration of augmented reality with which you can experiment on your computer. In this demonstration, an ordinary computer webcam scans the room. GE’s program detects a certain symbol (on a printed piece of paper), and displays a virtual image over top of it. You can hold the paper from almost any angle. If you move the paper or change the angle, the virtual image will follow your movements so that it constantly appears that the virtual image is on top of the symbol.

But although this is certainly a cool trick, does augmented reality have any useful applications beyond keeping us mildly amused? Any good augmented reality application has at least two components: 1) Recognizing a real-world object to "trigger" the application to do something, and 2) Superimposing a virtual image into the user's line of sight. Imagine you are walking the streets of an unfamiliar city looking for a place to eat lunch. As you walk by restaurants with your augmented reality glasses on, you see the restaurants’ average Yelp rating (and the most recent reviews) hovering just above the buildings. Based on this data, you select the restaurant you want to eat at. This would certainly be more convenient than looking up each restaurant individually as you walked by.

Augmented reality software could be installed in the windshields of automobiles (as it already is in airplanes) to dramatically improve safety, according to General Motors. The technology could scan the car's surroundings for possible hazards. Any object deemed dangerous, such as a deer on the side of the road, could flash on the windshield to draw the driver’s attention to it. In conditions of poor visibility, an augmented reality windshield could help point out the edges of the road, the lines on the road, and any important road signs.

BMW has another example for how augmented reality might work in automobiles in the near future. Suppose that you wanted to repair something in your car, but knew very little about how to go about it. Rather than take it to a mechanic, you could put on your augmented reality glasses, and get step-by-step instructions for how to repair it yourself. The software in your glasses would recognize the parts of your car as you looked at them, and create a detailed illustration showing you exactly what you needed to do in real-time.

The tutorial applications of augmented reality are endless. In addition to repairing a car, augmented reality could help teach people how to perform a wide variety of tasks, from processes as simple as cooking to those as complex as open-heart surgery. Eventually, even augmented reality glasses will become obsolete, as computing power becomes cheap enough to fit inside regular eyeglasses or contact lenses to project virtual images directly onto the user’s eye.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil envisions a future in which contact lenses come with several different viewing modes, depending on what the user wants to see at any given moment. There would be a “normal mode,” which simply displays the real world as we currently observe it. There would be an “augmented mode,” in which the user’s augmented reality applications superimpose virtual images over top of the user’s regular view of the world. Finally, there would be a “blocking mode,” in which the real world was not displayed at all, allowing the user to become fully visually immersed in a website, book, movie, or computer game.

Some of the earliest applications of augmented reality are already being rolled out on the iPhone and Android. This technology seems poised to explode into mainstream use over the next 10-15 years, and will quite literally change how we see the world.

PREDICTIONS:

By 2013 – Useful augmented reality applications exist on PCs and/or tablets to allow shoppers to virtually try on clothing before purchasing it online.

By 2017 – At least one-third of all smartphone and/or tablet users have an augmented reality application to project virtual images over the real world, as seen through their screen.

By 2021 – Augmented reality is routinely used to train people how to perform process-based tasks such as cooking, dentistry, surgery, furniture assembly, factory work, and/or auto repair.

By 2023 – At least half of all new, non-driverless automobiles in the US have augmented reality technology in the windshield for safety and/or navigational purposes.

By 2028 – Augmented reality contact lenses exist which can place virtual overlays of the world directly onto the wearer’s eye, or block out the real world altogether if the wearer desires.

AT&T predicts the future (in 1993)

There are plenty of nasty things to say about AT&T, but don’t ever tell me that they’re bad futurists. Check out their “You Will” commercials from 1993. These predictions were made before the internet had exploded into popular use, yet they managed to correctly predict many technologies that are in common use in 2010.

In this series of commercials, AT&T correctly predicted e-readers, GPS, car navigation systems, wireless internet, ubiquitous email, tablet computing, RFID, e-commerce, video conferencing, voice-over-IP, streaming videos, and distance learning. Granted, not all of them turned out to work the way that AT&T probably imagined, but I’d say they did a pretty amazing job given the date of these predictions.

The only thing that I saw which seems like an obvious miss was the voice-activated security systems. Seventeen years later, we’re still waiting for that one. That seems to be a common prediction from the 1990s that never materialized; it turns out that pattern-recognition technology is much more difficult than most futurists thought. Also, I’ll give AT&T partial credit for the prediction about medical history cards which people carry in their wallets. Those are technically possible today, but they failed to consider the economic and political problems that prevent their common use in the United States.

I only count one and a half predictions that failed to manifest themselves, but what interests me even more is the biggest trend they missed entirely: cell phones. It’s quite amusing to see people video-conferencing on a pay phone. It is ironic that one of the top cell phone providers today completely missed the fact that mobile phones would become ubiquitous and pay phones would become obsolete.

Overall, I think these are incredibly prescient. Possibly the best set of predictions I’ve seen from this time period, although the commercials don’t really specify the date when these things would become widespread.