Peak plasticity: we might be missing sensitive periods in brain development on the big scale

Here is one of my worries emerging from connecting the following topics: peak oil, global warming, technological singularity, online education, smartphone penetration, gamification, reinforcement learning, brain development, population growth, demographic change, and longevity escape velocity. How are these connected? As it is with many people, my most proximal worry is that global warming and resource shortages will have even worse consequences in the near future than they already have right now (e.g. increases in food prices via increasing oil prices and more common and severe extreme weather events). There are two types of people: the doomists, who believe this will lead to a collapse of the prevalent system, and the copernicists, who believe we will solve the major problems through science and technology. Thus, my more distal worry is that the copernicists are wrong and we will not be innovative enough to quickly figure out solutions to these problems. The distal solution to all major challenges is, when defined in the broadest sense, education. The hope is that if we educate a critical mass of the world to a high standard, the resulting multiplication of intelligences, will directly solve humanities major challenges (potentially indirectly by virtue of economic and social progress and better governance). Online education will significantly contribute to educating the world and, through its scalability, has a very high social return on investment. Here is an anecdote from a recent panel discussion on online education: some kids got addicted to Khan academy math exercises and had to be told to get off the computer. This made everyone laugh, but might be proof of principle that learning can be made as much fun as conventional videogames by using gamification: adaptive difficulty levels and minimizing the delay between response to a test question and feedback about whether one got it right or wrong are simply more rewarding than traditional instruction (this is why time flies by when we play videogames or program code in contradistinction to working on math and science problems). But online education is in its infancy. For instance, there is at this point no high quality website teaching English from scratch using the above mentioned principles. And despite online education progressing fast, this might be an urgent matter: though it is widely acknowledged that the brain is plastic enough until old age for lifelong learning- it is definitely more plastic while people are young.

Soon, we might reach peak aggregate brain plasticity with more young people around then there have been and will ever be again — and we fail to educate them sufficiently.

We have failed to educate many young people hitherto but, by approaching longevity escape velocity, these insufficiently educated people might make up a significant portion of the population for a long time to come.