The Future is Always “Plastics”
I got into the tech field right around the same time that the World Wide Web was a nascent technology and its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, probably didn’t foresee how broadly the Web would impact the modern world and change the course of human history.
Berners-Lee’s invention was built on the work of the early pioneers of the Internet whose initial goals were to simply connect several computers into a network of computers. And their work in turn was built upon the efforts of their predecessors who built the first computers. And so the iterative story of technology goes further and further back into the past all the way to our most distant ancestors who created the first technologies some 3 million years ago: tools made from stone, wood, antler, and bone.
Since then, technology has advanced not in an intuitive and linear way, but in an iterative and exponential way. This is summed up well, I think, by computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil in his Law of Accelerating Returns, which states that “fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories”.
One of those fundamental measures is the better-known Moore’s Law, which was coined by Intel founder Gordon Moore in 1965 and predicts that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit will double every 2 years. That doesn’t sound like much but Moore’s Law has stayed the course and that’s why today you can hold in your hand a smartphone that has more computing power than all of the computers on Earth back in the day when Gordon Moore came up with Moore’s Law.
We, of course, don’t marvel at any of this on a daily basis. Just like we don’t marvel at the layers of inventions and technologies it takes for the Internet to work on a daily basis or how petabytes of data is exchanged around the globe via wireless radio signals you cannot see and transported via millions of miles of fiber optic cable at the speed of light, brought from there to here in mere milliseconds.
As science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke famously stated: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
For most people, the Internet is magic. That is, if they think about it at all. For the Internet, like most technologies, was novel at first but then became ubiquitous and faded to the background fabric of everyday living just as electricity, telephones, automobiles, televisions, refrigerators, and microwave ovens have.
But the Internet is not magic―it’s the culmination of some very significant advancements in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics that make it all possible.
Today, we refer to these collectively as “STEM”. It’s a catchy acronym that we like to toss around when talking about the future of education.
The Department of Education has developed a “Five-Year Strategic Plan for STEM Education” and schools all across the country are pursuing the development of “STEM Curriculum” and investing millions of dollars in the construction of “STEM Classrooms”.
This begs the question: Is the pursuit of STEM worth all of this?
My answer to that question is most definitely yes, but with an important caveat that I’ll get to shortly.
Whenever I talk about “STEM” I can’t help but be reminded of this scene from the 1967 movie The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman as the recently graduated Benjamin Braddock who’s trying to figure out what he’s going to do with the rest of his life now that he’s graduated with a bachelor’s degree. His parents throw a graduation party for him and one of the attendees is Mr. McGuire, a businessman who pulls Benjamin aside to counsel him about his future:
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
Benjamin: Exactly how do you mean?
Mr. McGuire: There’s a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?
“Plastics.” That quote ranks #42 on the American Film Institute’s 100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time.
To a certain degree, all educators and parents are a bit like Mr. McGuire, telling students what they should consider doing with their future, which is always some version of “plastics”.
At the risk of sounding like just another Mr. McGuire, I think that one of the things current students should consider doing with their future is being involved to one degree or another in the study of computer science, which will increasingly permeate all modern scientific and technological advancements.
Most future jobs will be in the STEM fields, many of which will, in one way or another, involve computer science. Many of those will be opportunities that we don’t even know exist yet. For example, a year ago, no one was thinking there would be a demand for a “blockchain analyst”. Most people hadn’t even heard the term “blockchain”. Today, most people have probably heard the term but don’t know what it is.
Like Mr. McGuire’s “plastics”, there’s a great future in STEM but — and here’s that caveat — only if we combine it with the ethical and moral guidance that is uniquely human.
There’s a great future in STEM education too, but only if it is not at the expense of the study of the humanities, of history, philosophy, art and literature, which are foundational to the development of wise, ethical, and moral human beings who will, quite literally, be inventing and creating the future that we all, for better or for worse, will have to live in.
Think about it. Will you think about it?
