Where are EdTech market heading?

https://vimeo.com/179114563

Where are the educational market and EdTech heading? The forecast for 10–15 years.

The public was shaken by the TechCrunch article “Edtech is the next Fintech,” so I decided to organize my education market forecasts for the next 10–20 years. To understand how things would work, where the major breakthroughs would happen, and the biggest money and market growth would occur, it is necessary to answer the following:

• What is learning as an activity and what does it consist of?
• What are the biggest problems?
• What is the difference between learning as an activity and education as an institute?

Learning: Process and Elements

At the beginning of the learning process, there is a person, (a student or artificial intelligence), who doesn’t know or doesn’t understand something, who doesn’t know how to do something, who is incapable of seeing, recognizing, operating efficiently, or demonstrating certain cultural patterns. At the end of the process, there is already a different person who knows and can do everything that’s needed. It means that learning as a process and as an activity has a clear result — a learned person can act more efficiently, productively, and effectively, than before learning. As it can be measured if needed. Learning can improve the efficiency fundamentally, life quality, and therefore provide new opportunities — that’s why learning is in demand. Requirements for learning always depend on historical and social environments, such as, where a person residents. These requirements define two main elements of the learning process:

• The content, what should be taught, what kind of knowledge should be given and so on.
• The skills, what a person should be able to do.

An ancient man, who lived in the African savannah tens of thousands of years ago, obviously had other requirements of knowledge and skill, rather than a modern hipster from San Francisco. Knowledge and skill — are two different things. Skill allows us to achieve results, while knowledge gives an opportunity to achieve the best results and determine the direction. Knowledge also includes such concepts as World View, values, principles and the knowledge of world events and phenomena in the context space. anding. Moreover, experience shows, that the power of personality is more important than knowledge and skill. Thus, learning also deals with personality transformation, i.e. at the beginning, there is a weak creature, that is not able to cope even with a petty problem and is frustrated by a trifle, yet at the end, there is a powerful leader, who can master difficulties himself and lead others. This is at its best.

So, learning should provide three important results:

• personality transformation
• skill development
• knowledge transfer

However, that’s not all. Learning shouldn’t take much time, it should be prompt, if possible, achieving results effectively, considering students’ individuality, hence, the concept of teaching methods — i.e., the set of techniques and approaches, giving an answer to the, “HOW to teach?”, question.

Also, learning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s like a process, very like a project; it has steps, cycles, tasks, resources, it takes place in a specific environment, has its metric. It means that learning as a process is organized in some way. For example, in addition to the content and teaching methods, there is the organization component that gives an understanding of what to do and in what sequence. It is important because knowledge and skills can be steep, a technique can be successful, yet a process itself can be poorly organized, what may influence a result as well. Therefore, an organization of learning process is noteworthy.

Furthermore, methods and organization of process, especially, differ sharply for individual and mass learning, as a rule. Finally, learning is not an impersonal process — there is the subject of learning, the one who teaches, makes changes — a teacher, a lecturer, a trainer, a tutor, a coach, an instructor, and there is the object of learning — the one who is taught, who is tried to be changed — a student, a mentee, a protégé, etc. Roles of a teacher, a lecturer, a trainer, a tutor, a coach, an instructor differ, as each of these roles focuses on different results. In practice, these roles are often mixed.

A teacher is a person who creates learning content. Usually, we refer to them as lecturers. They narrate, explain, and answer questions. The purpose of teaching is knowledge awareness and understanding. Often, a teacher is an expert in a certain field, but the fact that they are a good teacher or a coach, doesn’t mean they know how to teach, or have good teaching methods and can organize the process. Reading a lecture is one thing, but teaching — is another. These things are different, a different expected result. Reading a lecture is all about interest, fascination and preferably understanding. Teaching is about knowing that a person could demonstrate knowledge and skills at the end of learning. A content author and an author of teaching methods are copyright owners also.

A teacher, a coach, an instructor usually teaches a skill. The purpose of training is the achievement of skill with a certain result or quality level. A coach can also be a teacher, i.e. he can narrate something, but only to help in achieving a quality skill. For example, literacy is more about skill. We were taught literacy not because of its value, but not to make grammar mistakes. This skill is important and casual. But a biology teacher is more about the subject and erudition. There is no task to develop skill in school. Accordingly, the task is different in university — theoretically, it’s a professional education, so a university graduate should not only know or understand something but should, ideally, be able to put it into practice.

A coach, a tutor — is a person, who usually helps to develop a personality.
However, in practice, these roles are often mixed. In any case, a professional in learning is different from just a subject expert because he owns the teaching methods and organization methods of the learning process. For example, a professional teacher not only knows the subject as an expert but also knows how to teach and how to organize the learning process.

Intermediate summary — learning elements include:

• The needs that determine potential students’ demand for learning or, in fact, expected results targeted by a learning process.
• Knowledge — answering questions WHAT is it? HOW does it work? HOW to do? Knowledge can be kept, packed, and reached differently.
• Skills — an ability to achieve results, goals, and to solve problems.
• A set of personal qualities — an ability to stem difficulties, to learn, etc.
• Learning methodology — HOW to teach effectively?
• Organization of the learning process — HOW to organize the process to teach effectively?
• A teacher — the main learning subject: a person who teaches and who is responsible for the result. A teacher can be both human and machine.
• A student — a person who learns and shares responsibility for the result. A student can be both human and machine.

All these elements are immutable and can be applied not only to humans but also to any system, that interacts actively with an external environment, that is to change, to adapt — animals, computers, society.

What functions present in the learning process?

Obviously, all the functions are performed by a teacher, a coach, a mentor, a methodologist. He can perform all the functions or some of them, but these functions should present in education to achieve quality results. None of the functions can be ignored.

• Collection, creation, and accumulation of knowledge in the bound form.
• Development of learning methods and skills.
• Development of organization methods of learning process.
• Organization of learning process.
• Storage of information about knowledge, methods, or cases.
• Distribution of knowledge, bringing knowledge to students.
• Formation of tasks, issues, learning situations, and cases within which a student should do something, to achieve something, to explore, to create, to repeat, or to form a skill.
• Students’ subject understanding and activities control regarding their academic performance — done/not done, lags, etc.….
• Students’ subject understanding and activities assessment to identify mistakes and problems — how well a student understands a subject, how well a student copes with an issue?
• Answers to questions, explanations, interaction with a student or a group.
• Student’s psychological state assessment, his ability to steam difficulties; identification of frustrations and problems.
• The impact on student’s motivation to help him to steam difficulties
  Steady self-education, self-development, self-reflection and identification of one’s own problems

What has changed in the learning process over the last few thousand years?

In ancient times, all the functions and all the elements mentioned above were present in a single person — either a father or a mother, or someone of elder brothers/sisters. When a man went through an initiation ceremony and moved from the maternal tent to the adult man tent, he could get another mentor. The girl studied until motherhood and then studied to be a good mother, to save a child’s life and teach him. But one should keep in mind that:

• learning was individual or was performed in small groups of people
• everybody learned the same skills
• every person passed through three phases — a student, a full-fledged member of the tribe (professional — person who is good at his job), a teacher.
• no one could avoid this cycle
• there were no independent teachers, but cripples who were unable to get food, so they helped their tribe, looked after the fire and taught children

With the society development, a lot of specialties appeared, many skills increased, as well as the amount of knowledge. Therefore, several new needs arose at a certain phase of society development:

• To teach more people the general skills and knowledge within the culture/era/state/nation
• To teach different professional skills in different directions
• To store, to organize, and to relinquish special knowledge.

Thus, the teacher’s role gradually became more specific and detached. A teacher focused on learning and knowledge relinquish, they could be in a separate profession or could combine it with other activities.

But the trend was obvious — as more people needed to be taught about different things, learning from essential and natural parts of every person’s life, it transformed into a professional activity. When the problem of large amounts of people needing to be educated arose, the demand for process organization appeared. To teach five people for ten years is not the same as the need to teach millions of people within a few months.

However, the biggest change concerns learning consumers. In ancient times, the main learning consumer was a man, his family and tribe, but, as time passed, new learning consumers appeared — the state and corporations. This occurred, because at some stage, even the most ignorant elites realized that their authority and the state’s power depended on the skills of its residents, soldiers, slave masters and governors. It was necessary to be able to conquer new lands by means of military art, and to manage new assets competently.

All corporations consume the main resource — humans, but humans tend to age and die. Knowledge and technologies obsolete. Population is growing, so there is a constant and growing demand for, ‘corporate cogs’, of different specializations, (it’s probably a more politically correct term, rather than ‘slaves’).

As a result, education occurred — i.e. a social institute, the purpose of which is to organize the mass process of general and vocational education in the interests of the state, corporations, and consumers a little bit. Thus, learning and education — are two different things, events and phenomena.

Learning is about how to teach a person, about knowledge and techniques, it’s about teachers and students.
Education is about how to organize the process of mass education in a variety of directions to meet the state and corporations need for skilled workers. Education is about logistics.

Why is it important to understand that education is about logistics? The process of true, quality learning is always individual, whereas any logistics in mass education is a compromise. The more mass approach is standardized; the worse education is efficiency. We should understand, that if a person or a small group of people is taught individually by a teacher, a tutor, a mentor is the role model. Thus any mass education will always be worse.

Founders of a vast number of start-ups don’t understand this simple point. They may have a vast amount of experience and competence, but they never try to teach anyone anything essential. That’s why most people equate learning and lecturing to content consumption. The problem is that since the process of true learning is always individual, then the communication between teacher and student is always special. It’s an important point; we shall go into details here. To realize and understand why is it so, we need to understand the point of view of neurophysiology.

From the point of view of neurophysiology, primarily from the point of view of how our brain works, (although it is not right to equate brain and consciousness), any learning is a special case of plastic changes of the neural network in a human brain. In turn, it is a consequence of a brain physical property called neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity, also known as brain plasticity or neural plasticity — is an umbrella term that describes the lasting change to the brain throughout an individual’s life course. The term gained prominence in the latter half of the 20th century when new research showed that many aspects of the brain could be altered (or are “plastic”) even into adulthood. This notion is in contrast with the previous scientific consensus that the brain develops during a critical period in early childhood and then remains relatively unchanged (or “static”). Neuroplasticity can be observed at multiple scales, from microscopic changes in individual neurons to larger-scale changes such as cortical remapping in response to injury. However, cortical remapping is more extensive early in development. Behavior, environmental stimuli, thought, and emotions may also cause neuroplasticity change through activity-dependent plasticity, which has significant implications for healthy development, learning, memory, and recovery from brain damage. At the single cell level, synaptic plasticity refers to changes in the connections between neurons, whereas non-synaptic plasticity refers to changes in their intrinsic excitability.

The key process for achieving sustainable change is a repetition of different situations processed both with repetitive patterns and brand new. In other words, if a person needs to be taught to do something, or a strong skill needs to be developed, it is necessary to have a certain amount of repetitions. It is essential to generate the topology change of brain neural network. There is no problem with repetition, the repetitions may lead to learning but when we try to repeat an action differently every new cycle, considering the errors of the previous cycle and the attempts may change the direction the next cycle.

For example, learning is a combination of formic and genetic algorithm, which can be both in the form of, ‘with a teacher,’ and ‘without a teacher.’ Learning is a cyclic process, where the direction of each subsequent iteration is slightly changed.

Genetic algorithm (GA) is a metaheuristic inspired by the process of natural selection that belongs to the larger class of evolutionary algorithms (EA).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_algorithm
Ant colony optimization algorithm (ACO) is a probabilistic technique for solving computational problems which can be reduced to finding good paths through graphs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization_algorithms
Unsupervised learning is the machine learning task of inferring a function to describe hidden structure from unlabeled data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsupervised_learning
Supervised learning is the machine learning task of inferring a function from labeled training data. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervised_learning

So, a human can learn by himself, but the learning efficiency with a teacher is undoubtedly much higher.A teacher essentially represents the factor, that provides:

1. Identification, assessment and error analysis of previous iterations
2. New data, the need for which was unknown before the resulting assessment of the previous iteration. I.e. based on previous iteration a teacher may make a creative decision — what knowledge, or information is needed to be intergraded for correction of next iteration
3. Recommendations for direction, and correction for the next iteration.

Thus, a teacher and a student represent a single system, where they do the following:

• Relinquish experience and knowledge within learning situations, as well as development of skills and personal qualities
• The introduction of a student to the experience and practical skills of a teacher or, even of all humanity.

Such things are always individual. Learning can take place in small groups, but in fact, any group is a set of pair-wise interactions because learning is always an individual and subjective process. Results can be subjective and objective, but the way a teacher and a student experience together is always individual and depends on a student and environment, as a teacher is trying to help a student to reach standard goals. The environment may vary and be different for each person, so environment in combination with student’s personal qualities sets the learning trajectory, which is important in a person’s destiny. And any uniqueness and 100% customization are a problem for scaling. Though there is a challenge; on the one hand, there is a social problem — it is necessary to teach millions of people, but on the other hand, the learning process is unique and individual. It’s not a problem of knowledge and teaching methods.

This problem causes a lot of sub-problems, such as process cost, teacher’s reputation, and trust issues, as instead of one Aristotle there is an army of featureless professionals. Also, there are problems of logistics, profit model, and so on.

Solutions to these problems have been found during the past two to three thousand years, and have affected existing school and vocational education systems. Technologies have brought new opportunities, and have helped to find solutions to certain problems as well as having formed markets. For now, realizing learning opportunities, we can say in what areas changes have already occurred, and in what areas changes are expected to occur. Moreover, future changes will affect humanity development much greater than the prior education field.

So, what exactly have technologies brought for the moment? And what has it not? What areas are expecting breakthroughs?

The process of collection, storage, processing and delivery of information and knowledge has changed. This has led to teachers no longer needing to perform the function of storage and distribution of information. It means knowledge value goes to zero, the margin of content delivery and production goes to zero. You can get content easily if you have internet access.

However, knowledge is not just information, but the information related to meaningful content networks. A teacher needs to understand their subject area, not only remember facts, that’s the only way to make a student understand information and use it, turning it into knowledge. An individual approach is still relevant, and the abundance of inexpensive content doesn’t solve the problem of deep subject understanding. In this case, the challenge is growing.

With the abundance of content offers, the selection problem increased. What content is really worth using? Unless the value of content decreases, the time for selection and consumption of it increases. Here comes the problem that results in the creation of relevant educational content and effective teaching methods. The paradox is that the value of content is falling, but the value of relevant educational content is growing. How to distinguish one from another? Here are relevant reputation services, as well as metrics and tracking services.

Almost 100% of startups don’t relate to the learning process at all, but they relate to education itself — i.e. they are all about logistics and management processes:

• creation, packaging, and distribution of educational content,
• remote access
• automated testing
• group work and interaction
• various analytics
• diaries, educational games, packed content
• communication of all process participants
• dating-services for students, teachers, and tutors
• media libraries with tons of free and paid content, monetization services,
• recommendation and aggregation services, educational marketing services
• management systems of an educational process, that are called learning management systems (for some reason)
• tools, marketplaces, recruiting

Here is a partial list of the main directions of projects and startups in education fields. What is critically important to realize?

• 100% of these startups have no relation to learning, and they relate to education only, as a system of the mass education organization.
• 100% of these startups do not offer anything new in approach to education itself; they use vulnerable spots in the education system that was formed over 1,000 years ago. They do not offer a new education system that meets the challenges of time.
• 100% of these startups bring nothing to either the content nor to the learning methodology, i.e. they do nothing for learning process… the only one notable trend is wider use of project approach.
  Only a small part of startups are focused on human improvement. There are much more marketing and mythologies than true breakthrough technologies.

There has been no revolution yet. There are solutions to some of the most superficial problems of mass education, related to affordability, expensiveness, lack of content and reduction of routine operations of all process participants. There is no solution to fundamental queries of people and companies. Therefore, the most intriguing things are to be discovered.

Let’s talk about the most interesting issues and true problems that keep big opportunities. (Investors know it’s about money). Serious problems to be solved, which are the biggest markets! To understand the problem, let’s get into requirements, because the impossibility or the difficulty to meet the requirements gives possible technological solutions, which must create a new value:

• Learning should be individual. Otherwise, it won’t give maximum results. It means everyone has an individual approach and a teacher, as well as a unique learning trajectory, which is a part of life.
• Learning should be affordable to any motivated person worldwide.
• Learning should be steady and flexible, because in modern times a person needs to study constantly, to live his life efficiently not to huddle himself up in a corner.
• Learning shouldn’t be a separate process, it should be an essential part of one’s life, along with wealth creation, the upbringing of children, caring for parents, etc.
• Learning should be adapted both for the youngest people and for the oldest ones, as well.
• The learning process should be quite fast, because the amount and the rate of knowledge change are constantly growing. On the one hand, we need to be constantly learning, but on the other hand, we cannot spend much time on it because there are a lot of other activities in our life.
• Learning should solve not only personnel reproduction problems for corporations, but also meet the main need of a person — to help him to become successful and happy. The purpose is happiness and success. The profession is just one of the temporary tools.
• Most learning processes will take place in the virtual environment when appropriate. However, much of the communication and group interaction, in general, will be integrated into the virtual environment, so an essential part of the learning process as well.
• Learning should consider increasing chaos and uncertainty in the world. The world becomes more complex so that it will be more chaotic and less predictable. The more chaos, the more opportunities. In the changing world, it is necessary to make people’s lives successful and happy using flexible strategies, forecasting, and data processing, not by teaching skills only.
• Learning should make an absolute success for all students. Statistics of 35% succeed means the failure of the education system in achieving the goals of success and happiness for a particular person.
• Learning should be aimed at developing pro-activity, initiative, and entrepreneurship in the broad sense, not only at mastering a profession. In the modern world, to teach a profession only, without any business skills is a cruel mockery and manipulation.
• Learning can be started, finished, and resumed at any time, with no logistical constraints.
• Learning is not an absolute right. One has to deserve it and be worthy of this right.
• Learning should be affordable, but still, requires payment. The fee may be paid later, using credit, work, volunteering, etc. Payment gives rise to responsibility. Everything that comes easily and for free is underappreciated, so it has no effect. Even if a person learned for free, he would never reach any results. Affordability and payment requirement don’t contradict each other. Affordability means open opportunities for trials and testing, but it doesn’t give benefits automatically without any effort. Affordability means possibility, provided motivation. Education is the gateway to the future, and a future student must prove their interest if they want to get a grant.
• Learning should be flexible regarding subject content and skills. Learning should not only keep up with a development of humanity and technology but foresee it.
• Learning should provide a person competitive advantages in comparison with machines.
• Learning should eventually provide an absolute opportunity of human growth in the social hierarchy.
• In 10–20 years, unconditional income will be introduced in developed countries, society will be gradually switched from Democratic to meritocratic model. I.e. minimum standards of living like “burger and free porn” will be available to citizens by default because the production and distribution cost price of a

If you look at the list above, every requirement has a technological problem, which can radically change the market and behavior of its participants. However, these problems and requirements are hierarchical and derived from the essence of the learning process, as I wrote above. I’m going to list these points because they are important:

• Efficient learning is a special case of plastic changes of the neural network in a student’s brain.
• The key process for these changes is a repetition of different situations, when a student tries to repeat an action differently every new cycle, considering the errors of the previous cycle and the new attempts direction of the next cycle.

A teacher provides 1) identification, assessment and error analysis of previous iteration, 2) new data, the need for which was unknown before the resulting assessment of previous iteration and 3) recommendations for direction correction for next iteration. A teacher and a student represent a single system, where: relinquish of experience and knowledge occurs within learning situations, as well as the development of skills and personal qualities. Also, there is an introduction of a student to external context space of experience and practical skills. Besides learning, a teacher as a mentor helps to ensure an absolute growth in society. The learning process is individual and unique and requires the deep engagement of teachers and mentors.

Now there is no other approach to learning both for humans and artificial intelligence. Multiple repetitions of exercises leads to the formation of skills and proper behavior. It has nothing to do with either the way we pack content nor how we distribute it — by a lecturer or remotely, via media. These are the 10,20, to 100 thousand hours of practice, that ultimately will allow us to create something. For now, the statement about learning acceleration in 10 and 20 times — is a blatant lie.

Thus, if a person will have access to such teachers with all the above-described options + an opportunity to spend the necessary amount of time, then this is the ideal model of future education. But the key problems remains:

• How to solve the problem of teacher’s working time limits? A teacher can teach efficiently not more than 4–5 hours a day. It is about how communication and teaching processes are organized. This is a fundamental logistical challenge. If the solution is found, the education market will change instantly — universal access to individual education and mentor of the highest quality for the price of mass market products. Relatively speaking, Stanford would be affordable to everyone. (We don’t consider such component of Stanford University’s value as elitism and exclusivity).
• How to improve the learning speed of a student? We can see the process speed up, but the speed of perception and skill consolidation doesn’t increase significantly. This is the more serious problem of neurophysiology. It’s about human’s cognitive limitations as a species. If the solution is found, it would be a new stage of human evolution and humanity as a whole, with all the consequences described in numerous science fiction books.

Main features of the future education based on these reflections.

Logistics level — an object of changes and technologies — the organization of learning process and the set of necessary tools:

Individuality regarding access to a teacher. It means each student has his teacher and mentor, who are primarily responsible for student’s growth, not for understanding and skills so much. Whereas the cycle of creating new products in companies has greatly reduced, corporations will spend most of their time on teaching employees and their development, since it would be more profitable than searching for an appropriate one. There are a personal career plan and a mentor for every employee. This is purely a logistics issue, since good learning processes require the deep engagement of teachers and time resources, as was mentioned before. There are two solutions at this stage:

1. Logistics, when content and methodology are transformed so that it was possible to implement a multi-level model of teacher’s network within, which requests of different complexity are solved by mentors of different levels. This is a more pragmatic solution; it has already been implemented in various forms in a lot of industries, although, it’s only beginning to emerge in education areas. This approach I implement in my project.
2. The uses of artificial intelligence instead of teachers where appropriate. It won’t happen anytime soon, but it’s still realistic. The problem is not in creating such algorithm, but lies in what data it needs, and how to teach it so that it could substitute a certain class of interactions between a teacher and a student. There is already one case, but it’s more like a joke.

A business solution of logistics barrier pursues the main goal — affordability increasing, setting of elite products to the mass market, maintaining quality. Premium segment is transformed into the mass segment with affordable products of higher quality. 100% availability. It means learning opportunities are always by one’s side, implemented through the appropriate interface at any time, in any place. Permanent connection to the system that not only provides a link with the teacher, access to knowledge bases and joint groups but also cooperation opportunity.

Obviously, it will happen by the proliferation of smartphones, the Internet and by a development of feature-rich BCI headsets. Education market is a segment of the internet. The educational function of all technical system interfaces will grow significantly. The microwave will teach cooking; dishwasher will teach how to set crockery correctly, compilers will teach programming and so on. Learning will be embedded in the environment, as clothes will teach how to take care of itself, and a medical device will teach how to take readings and to interpret them.

In many cases, the role of a teacher or a mentor will be performed by a machine. Moreover, it would be possible to pass learning functions to all technical devices and environments using IoT.

Content level — an object of changes — content, the list of skills, learning methods, tools:

• The uniqueness of learning trajectory, considering peculiarities of a student, dynamics and situation uncertainty. It means that predictive capabilities of education implement, i.e. one can learn not only what is in demand now, but what will be in demand in the future.
• Learning primarily helps to make one’s life, not only to develop professional skills. There is no contradistinction. It means that skills and knowledge are the tools to live a successful life. The role of teacher and mentor, first and foremost, is to educate a person to stem difficulties, to collaborate effectively, to lead, to solve problems. If there is a challenge, a mentor helps to overcome it.
• Learning helps to integrate into society, to get a job, to move up the career ladder, run the projects.
• Learning will be merged with the roles of personal assistant, agent, manager, coach, psychotherapist.
• First, learning will help to compete with people and machines in the world, where not only people will act but robots as well. Eventually, the main mission of future learning and education will be generating ideas and assistance in development and implementation of these ideas.

This is possible under two conditions — a vast array of real case-trajectories and the system that can analyze this data and to model different life and education paths. Here is the microscopic service based on the framework of Caste and Role Theory.

In the works of Strugatsky brothers, such tasks are performed by a teacher-mentor in special schools. I think the model is described in the novel, Humans as Gods, by Sergei Snegov is closer to the ideal model of future education. Because there are some attempts to use artificial intelligence in some parts of learning and education process. These efforts are still far from reality, but time goes by:

“Who but she vigilantly takes me from danger, protects from disease and hasty steps, and if I’m worrying about something, she doesn’t dig down to reasons of problems and discouragement, and small, not bigger than myself, part of Big, puts them in front of the entire society as an important social problem, if according to her criterion, they deserve.
And am I not always sure, that if I get a useful idea, though I can forget about it, Guardian will grab it and enter in the code of Big, so she immediately implements or puts up for discussion to all mankind — even if only a flashed idea of mine worth such kind of attention! I also remember if I make a mistake, commit a bad deed, without harming others, Guardian will keep silent about my failures. No one can keep secrets as she does!
No, for me she wasn’t just an intelligently invented, intelligently mounted part of the huge machine, she was kind of part of myself, my connection with all of the humanity and millions of hands stretched out to each person!”

Humans as Gods, by Sergei Snegov

Fantastic and Unavailable for the Moment Level — an Object of Human Changes and His Cognitive Abilities:

Neuro and biotechnologies that are capable of providing human cognitive improvement, whereby a student is capable of learning faster, becoming “smarter,” improving his learning and activities qualitatively and quantitatively, due to changes at the neurophysiological level. There are timid attempts, related to neural interfaces, with different types of stimulation, but the distance from the current state to the level of, if not Superhuman, then, at least, of Improved human, is still great. Moreover, this issue has been focused by humanity since myths creation about the Gods, Titans, Heroes and Geniuses who surpass human intelligence and capabilities. In General, this aspect contains the metaphysical issue in humanity development.

Scientists have been divided into two groups:

One group of people doesn’t understand the ideas of humanity transformation and doesn’t believe in them. Their thesis is — machine development is easier.

In any process, a human — is an inevitable evil. As soon as technology, able to replace humans, appears, there is human disposal.
-D.S.

The process becomes more reliable, more stable and cheaper, including policy and governance. It’s kind of cyberpunk, positive for forecasts. Welcome to Matrix, technical singularity, and virtual reality! Human world will be evolved into the world of machines, where people — endangered species. (Check the ending of A.I. Artificial Intelligence by S. Spielberg or Matrix). The compromise is human ‘cyborgization.’

Another group of people — the trans humanists who believe in the idea that we can learn to improve and change a person, so there will be no longer need for cars and man-made environments, where we live now. This path is not about human ‘cyborgization’ so much, but human transformation. The example of modern mythology — all the superheroes of Marvel or DC Comics.

What will succeed? What will stagnate?

• The market of logistics solutions in the field of education is close to saturation. Modern innovation will go into the category of commodities — we will be finding necessary courses and programs via Google special search or any other aggregator. The exception is the development of individual education, separating from mass education. The cost of content is falling, but the value of personal attitude is growing.
• Everything that ensures an individual approach and customization of programs in education will grow.
• There will be a development of new formats and forms of education organization, different from habitual school, home and higher education.
• Even now it is clear that the modern university is not optimal from the organization point of view.
• Attempts to replace a human with robots, in the learning process, will be extended. At least to relieve teachers of routine interactive tasks.
• On content market, there will be an increasing demand for integrated development programs so that classes will go into the category of free libraries. In a world where uncertainty grows, and where chaos is a rule, not a crisis, — the need for stable knowledge is reduced.
• There will be a demand for flexible strategies for achieving success with prognostic abilities. Do you want to become a programmer? Fine, but there is no guarantee that demand will remain the same in five years.
• The demand for modeling and engineering of once life, and for education trajectories will grow, especially in combination with the use of large data sets.
• The demand for virtual and augmented reality, increasing learning efficiency and group work opportunities will grow.
• The increase in embedded educational content, connected to IoT.
  Attempts of human cognitive ‘improvement’ through the use of a BCI, new training, and different kinds of stimulation, will be extended. There are endless approaches.