Learning from the Future.
Time, the final frontier.
The laws of physics prohibhit us from breaching that dimension — no physical machine can as yet take us when we want to go. How then, do we go when no human has gone before?
Humanity has been blessed with what I dare say is its greatest asset — an imagination. The capacity to create worlds within worlds. The ability to bring to life that which never existed. The capacity to fast forward, and visualise possibilities and probabilities.
Of all the probabilities that we can imagine, the one that ends up closest to reality is the one with the most accurate dynamics of how the world really works.
In his Foundation series, Isaac Asimov proposed a crazy idea. A tool that — considering humanity’s past and present — could predict where we were headed. He called this tool psychohistory. Although the concept is fiction, what if we could jerry-rig a version of this?
Let’s give it a go. To start with — psychohistory is made of two words. Psychology and History.
Let’s break down the psychology bit first.
Every action that we take is aimed at satisfying a need — we eat and drink because we have a need to sustain our bodies. We build houses because we have a need for shelter and safety. We create art and music because we have a need for aesthetics. And so on. You get the idea.
While the rest of the world was trying to blow each other up during the Second World War, a guy called Abraham Maslow came up with a model that put these needs on a scale — at one end of which were needs that were crucial to survival and at the other end were needs that were crucial to growth. The idea was that all living things try to satisfy survival needs, but as life evolved from plants to humans, the needs at the other end of the scale started to become important.
Every creation, innovation and disruption that we humans have made throughout history has been to move from a space of survival to a space of growth.
So there you have it — one classic human tendency is to solve for the problems that cause us the maximum discomfort, and to accept and adjust to them. We were miserable in the rain, we built houses. We were miserable walking, we built vehicles.We always look to make ourselves comfortable, and solve for the pain points. Each pain point has an underlying need that isn’t being satisfied, which in turn causes us to solve for it. So the easiest way to spot where a change is about to happen is to find the most crucial pain point in that context and watch how people try to solve it.
Now that we know why we humans do what we do, let’s move to the history bit.
This part is a lot more straightforward, and is a concept that all of us are familiar with and use consciously or unconsciously. We tend to evaluate people from the track record they have, or their history — which tells us how they have changed over time. We use this to build a perception of the person and assign attributes to it, from which we evaluate our future relationship with them. The same concept is used to analyse stock markets, and is called a technical analysis in that context. In the contexts of science and data analytics this is what is known as a time series analysis, where data is analysed over time to understand the trend.
The key is to look back into history to understand the subject and how it has changed, long enough to be able to predict — with reasonable accuracy — where it may be headed. This helps us understand what drivers of change have, in the past, impacted the way we live with respect to the subject and therefore allows us to evaluate how the drivers that exist today can create our future, by impacting our present.
And that’s it — we’re ready to take a jump into the future!
Let’s take the future of education as an example. Education today is incredibly expensive, outdated, and teaches us nothing of how the world actually works (note the pain points). Analysing the history of how learning has evolved, the past century has seen a shift away from teachers and instiutions — with the focus more towards what you can do than what your grades say you know. The need for experience has begun to overtake the need for education — the general consensus is that anyone can learn anything on their own from the internet, given the easy access to and availability of information.
So what could the future hold for education?
Given the current COVID-19 crisis, and how it has rendered physical educational institutions near useless and obsolete, I feel the future of education lies in self-learning boosted by technologies like artificial intelligence. Institutions could be replaced by cheap and efficient digital platforms that enable individual learning for all, with each student learning at his/her own pace. We could see people joining the workforce at much younger ages (due to the breakdown of traditional education timelines) — learning and upskilling themselves on the job.
Is this exactly what the future of education will be like? Maybe, maybe not. The aim of trying to predict the future isn’t to be accurate. Rather, the intent is to be able to recognize possibilities that could revolutionize the way we live, so that we can start working to turn those ideas from fiction into reality.
The same way we learn from our past mistakes, what would it be like if we could learn from the possibilities of our future?
