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Think about the following when editing your CW1

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Article 4 - robot vs student

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In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines?

Children learn best when teaching aligns with their natural exuberance, energy and curiosity. So why are they dragooned into rows and made to sit still while they are stuffed with facts?

We succeed in adulthood through collaboration. So why is collaboration in tests and exams called cheating?

Governments claim to want to reduce the number of children being excluded from school. So why are their curriculums and tests so narrow that they alienate any child whose mind does not work in a particular way?

The best teachers use their character, creativity and inspiration to trigger children's instinct to learn. So why are character, creativity and inspiration suppressed by a stifling regime of micromanagement?

There is, as Graham Brown-Martin explains in his book Learning {Re}imagined, a common reason for these perversities. Our schools were designed to produce the workforce required by 19th-century factories. The desired product was workers who would sit silently at their benches all day, behaving identically, to produce identical products, submitting to punishment if they failed to achieve the requisite standards. Collaboration and critical thinking were just what the factory owners wished to discourage.

As far as relevance and utility are concerned, we might as well train children to operate a spinning jenny. Our schools teach skills that are not only redundant but counter-productive. Our children suffer this life-defying, dehumanising system for nothing.

At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era

The less relevant the system becomes, the harder the rules must be enforced, and the greater the stress they inflict. One school's current advertisement in the Times Educational Supplement asks: "Do you like order and discipline? Do you believe in children being obedient every time? ... If you do, then the role of detention director could be for you." Yes, many schools have discipline problems. But is it surprising when children, bursting with energy and excitement, are confined to the spot like battery chickens?

Teachers are now leaving the profession in droves, their training wasted and their careers destroyed by overwork and a spirit-crushing regime of standardisation, testing and top-down control. The less autonomy they are granted, the more they are blamed for the failures of the system. A major recruitment crisis beckons, especially in crucial subjects such as physics and design and technology. This is what governments call efficiency.

Any attempt to change the system, to equip children for the likely demands of the 21st century, rather than those of the 19th, is demonised by governments and newspapers as "social engineering". Well, of course it is. All teaching is social engineering. At present we are stuck with the social engineering of an industrial workforce in a post-industrial era. Under Donald Trump's education secretary, Betsy DeVos, and a nostalgic government in Britain, it's likely only to become worse.

Photograph: Alamy

When they are allowed to apply their natural creativity and curiosity, children love learning. They learn to walk, to talk, to eat and to play spontaneously, by watching and experimenting. Then they get to school, and we suppress this instinct by sitting them down, force-feeding them with inert facts and testing the life out of them.

There is no single system for teaching children well, but the best ones have this in common: they open up rich worlds that children can explore in their own ways, developing their interests with help rather than indoctrination. For example, the Essa academy in Bolton gives every pupil an iPad, on which they create projects, share material with their teachers and each other, and can contact their teachers with questions about their homework. By reducing their routine tasks, this system enables teachers to give the children individual help.

Other schools have gone in the opposite direction, taking children outdoors and using the natural world to engage their interests and develop their mental and physical capacities (the Forest School movement promotes this method). But it's not a matter of high-tech or low-tech; the point is that the world a child enters is rich and diverse enough to ignite their curiosity, and allow them to discover a way of learning that best reflects their character and skills.

There are plenty of teaching programmes designed to work with children, not against them. For example, the Mantle of the Expert encourages them to form teams of inquiry, solving an imaginary task - such as running a container port, excavating a tomb or rescuing people from a disaster - that cuts across traditional subject boundaries. A similar approach, called Quest to Learn, is based on the way children teach themselves to play games. To solve the complex tasks they're given, they need to acquire plenty of information and skills. They do it with the excitement and tenacity of gamers.

The Reggio Emilia approach, developed in Italy, allows children to develop their own curriculum, based on what interests them most, opening up the subjects they encounter along the way with the help of their teachers. Ashoka Changemaker schools treat empathy as "a foundational skill on a par with reading and math", and use it to develop the kind of open, fluid collaboration that, they believe, will be the 21st century's key skill.

The first multi-racial school in South Africa, Woodmead, developed a fully democratic method of teaching, whose rules and discipline were overseen by a student council. Its integrated studies programme, like the new system in Finland, junked traditional subjects in favour of the students' explorations of themes, such as gold, or relationships, or the ocean. Among its alumni are some of South Africa's foremost thinkers, politicians and businesspeople.

In countries such as Britain and the United States, such programmes succeed despite the system, not because of it. Had these governments set out to ensure that children find learning difficult and painful, they could not have done a better job. Yes, let's have some social engineering. Let's engineer our children out of the factory and into the real world.

* A fully linked version of this column will be published at monbiot.com

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In the age of robots, our schools are teaching children to be redundant | George Monbiot

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In the future, if you want a job, you must be as unlike a machine as possible: creative, critical and socially skilled. So why are children being taught to behave like machines? Children learn best when teaching aligns with their natural exuberance, energy and curiosity.

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Article 3 - The threat of AI

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By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the US, starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That's just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week.

These robots, or intelligent agents, represent a set of AI-powered systems that can understand human behavior and make decisions on our behalf. Current technologies in this field include virtual assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri and Google Now as well as chatbots and automated robotic systems. For now, they are quite simple, but over the next five years they will become much better at making decisions on our behalf in more complex scenarios, which will enable mass adoption of breakthroughs like self-driving cars.

These robots can be helpful for companies looking to cut costs, but not so good if you're an employee working in a simple-to-automate field.

"By 2021 a disruptive tidal wave will begin. Solutions powered by AI/cognitive technology will displace jobs, with the biggest impact felt in transportation, logistics, customer service and consumer services," said Forrester's Brian Hopkins in the report.

The Inevitable Robot Uprising has already started, with at least 45% of US online adults saying they use at least one of the aforementioned digital concierges. Intelligent agents can access calendars, email accounts, browsing history, playlists, purchases and media viewing history to create a detailed view of any given individual. With this knowledge, virtual agents can provide highly customized assistance, which is valuable to shops or banks trying to deliver better customer service.

Forrester paints a picture of the not-too-distant future.

"The doorbell rings, and it's the delivery of a new pair of running shoes, in the right style, color and size, just as you needed to replace your old ones. And here's the kicker: you didn't order them. Your intelligent agent did."

In the transportation industry, Uber, Google and Tesla are working on driverless cars, while similar technology is creeping its way into trucking to replace expensive human drivers.

It's easy to get dazzled by such innovations, but what happens to the 6%? The call center staff, the taxi drivers and the truckers. There may be new jobs created to oversee and maintain these automated systems, but they will require an entirely different skillset.

"Six percent is huge. In an economy that's really not creating regular full-time jobs, the ability of people to easily find new employment is going to diminish. So we will have people wanting to work and struggling to find jobs because the same trends are beginning to occur in other historically richer job creation areas like banking, retail and healthcare," said Andy Stern, the former president of the Service Employees International Union.

"It's an early warning sign and I think it just portends a massive wind of change in the future."

Studies have shown that higher rates of unemployment are linked to less volunteerism and higher crime. Taxi drivers around the world have already reacted with violent protest to the arrival of ride-hailing app Uber. Imagine how people react when Uber eliminates drivers from its fleet.

"There is a lot of correlation between unemployment and drug use," said Stern. "Clearly over time, particularly in urban settings, the lack of employment is tinder for lighting a fire of social unrest."

The challenge posed by automation is not being taken seriously enough at a policy level, Stern added. "Politicians would rather talk about getting a college degree and technical skill training, things that are probably five to 10 years too late. We don't really have a plan and we don't appreciate how quickly the future is arriving."

Does this mean we're all doomed? "No. But what level of pain do people have to experience and what level of social unrest has to be created before the government acts?

Workers, many of whom don't have technical skills, are competing for less and less jobs. If the market works without intervention we're going to have no way to mediate the displacement."

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Robots will eliminate 6% of all US jobs by 2021, report says

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By 2021, robots will have eliminated 6% of all jobs in the US, starting with customer service representatives and eventually truck and taxi drivers. That's just one cheery takeaway from a report released by market research company Forrester this week.

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Article 2 - White collar jobs

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In the battle for the 21st century workplace, computers are winning. And the odds of us puny humans making a comeback are not very good.

A January 2017 report from the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that roughly half of today's work activities could be automated by 2055, give or take 20 years. (McKinsey helpfully offers a search portal to find out how likely you'll be given the boot by a bot.)

Bottom line is robots want our jobs. And no one is going to build a wall around them or tariff them out of existence.

In a way this is nothing new. Technology has been replacing human labor since the invention of the wheel. Typically, though, machines have stepped in to perform relatively low-skill, low-wage, highly repetitive work. The least digitizable jobs have belonged to recreational therapists, members of the medical profession, social workers, teachers, and managers. The reason: computers are not yet as good as humans at things like personal interaction and off-the-cuff decision making.

But that's changing.

Thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and inexpensive computing power, jobs that once weren't considered good candidates for automation suddenly are.

For example, a decade ago researchers thought the complexity of navigating an automobile around obstacles and through traffic was beyond the reach of silicon. Now virtually every auto maker (as well as companies like Apple) is working on a driverless car.

The number and types of jobs that computers can do has expanded enormously in just a few years, ranging from the predictable to the absurd.

Starship Technologies' delivery robot can shuttle food and packages to destinations within a nearby radius. Photograph: Starship Technologies

Middle managers: last month, the world's largest hedge fund announced it was developing algorithms to automate management decisions, including the hiring and firing of employees. Bridgewater Associates's ambitious PriOS project is based on the philosophy of its billionaire founder Ray Dalio; the company hopes to roll it out within five years.

Lawyers: next time you get stung by a meter maid you may be able to hire a robo-lawyer. DoNotPay has helped more than 160,000 people fight tickets in London, New York and Seattle, and will soon be expanding to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago. Fill out a questionnaire; if the legal bot decides you have a legit case, it fires off a letter contesting the citation. The company claims a success rate of 60%.

Journalists: AI bots created by companies such as Narrative Science and Automated Insights are already cranking out business and sports stories for clients like Forbes and the Associated Press. In a June 2015 interview with the Guardian, Narrative Science co-founder Kris Hammond predicted 90% of journalism will be computerized by 2030, and that some hardworking j-bot will nab a Pulitzer sooner than that.

Therapists: human-like "social robots" are already being used to help teach children on the autism spectrum appropriate social behavior. Therapeutic robot pets provide companionship for seniors with dementia. The US military is using a computer-generated virtual therapist to screen soldiers in Afghanistan for PTSD.

Teachers: software such as McGraw-Hill Connect and Aplia allow college professors to manage the coursework for hundreds of students at a time. Massive open online courses (Moocs) extend their reach to thousands more. And actual physical robots are being used to teach English to students in Japan and Korea.

Actors: Peter Cushing, who died in 1994, reprised his role as Grand Moff Tarkin in 2016's Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, thanks to some digital wizardry by Industrial Light & Magic. But he's hardly the first human actor to have returned from the grave. Paul Walker, Audrey Hepburn, Sir Laurence Olivier, Bruce Lee and Marlon Brando have all been digitally resurrected for use in films and commercials.

Cookbook authors: in January 2015, IBM Watson - the Jeopardy-winning cognitive computing platform - published a cookbook. The tome's 65 recipes include instructions on how to whip up creole shrimp-lamb dumplings and brew hoof-and-honey ale.

Delivery people: Aloft Hotels is experimenting with a robot butler (called "Botlr") to deliver towels or toiletries to your room. (It won't accept tips, but does encourage tweets.) Looking like a Roomba on steroids, Starship Technologies' delivery robot can shuttle food and packages to destinations within a nearby radius. DoorDash and Postmates have announced partnerships with Starship Technologies Starship Technologies. And in December, Amazon delivered its first package to a customer using an unmanned aerial vehicle (aka drone). Amazon Prime Air promises to deliver packages weighing under five pounds in 30 minutes or less.

Amazon Prime is promising to deliver packages weighing under five5 pounds in 30 minutes or less. Photograph: Amazon

The tasks least likely to be replaced by a computer, according to a widely cited 2013 Oxford study on job digitization, are those requiring the highest degrees of social and creative intelligence. But even there the digitized writing is on the LCD wall.

For years, computers have been creating art, music and literature - just usually not very good art, music and literature. Robot poetry and computer-generated music have become genres unto themselves, but so far they've failed to have much impact on the already dismal employment prospects for human poets and musicians. Last February, the first algorithmically authored musical, Beyond the Fence, debuted in London's West End - though to less than stellar reviews.

Still, there are glimmers of a future where algorithms and artists compete head to head. The winner of the 2016 RobotArt competition, National Taiwan University's TAIDA, creates pointillist-style compositions that would not look out of place hanging next to a Seurat.

Last April, a computer-generated novel titled, appropriately enough, The Day a Computer Writes a Novel, was in the running for Japan's Hoshi Shinichi Literary Award. The judges were unaware the book was produced via AI.

Kulitta, music composition software written by Yale computer science lecturer Donya Quick, has fooled "musical sophisticates" into thinking its original phrases were composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, according to a report in Yale News.

Are all of these people capable of acquiring new skills? And even if they are, do they want to do it?

Michael Jones, professor

But for the time being - or at least until algorithms learn how to suffer for their art - humans will continue to have the upper hand when it comes to creativity.

"Highly creative jobs are probably pretty safe for a while," says Tom Davenport, co-author of Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines. "There have been a few attempts to have computers write screenplays and TV scripts, and they have been uniformly horrible thus far."

There are other hopeful signs.

Instead of being replaced wholesale, most people in high-skill positions will likely find themselves working alongside their inanimate colleagues, not unlike the way we use computers instead of typewriters and calculators. McKinsey estimates that 60% of today's occupations have at least some portion that can be automated.

This is already happening in fields such as medicine, law and banking. When not writing cookbooks or kicking ass at Jeopardy, for example, IBM Watson is helping doctors diagnose medical conditions and analyze MRIs. Electronic discovery platforms such as Symantec's eDiscovery and Kroll Ontrack help attorneys sift through thousands of documents in a few hours. And AI-driven services such as FutureAdvisor or Wealthfront help consumers make investment decisions, freeing up human financial advisers to work on more high-net-worth accounts.

Davenport says there are five paths for surviving in a workplace dominated by robots. You can move up in the organizational chain to monitor the computer's work or make high-level decisions about what to computerize. You can focus on parts of your job computers aren't good at, or find a new career where computers are less likely to dominate. Finally, he says, you can choose to work on creating the technology that will automate the 21st century.

Michael Jones, assistant professor of economics at the University of Cincinnati, believes the problem of displaced workers can be overcome with education and training - though what positions workers should be trained to fill is not entirely clear. No one knows what new jobs will look like in 10 or 20 years, just as no one anticipated the position of drone repair technician in the 1990s.

"Automation can not only create advantages for society as a whole but also for individual workers, if they can retool their skills and use technology to complement their job, not replace it," Jones says. "But are all of these people capable of acquiring new skills? And even if they are, do they want to do it?"

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Jones adds that traditional vocations like plumbers, electricians, and carpenters are likely to be less affected by digital disruption. And while easily automated jobs will be increasingly rare, they probably won't go away entirely, says JP Gownder, vice-president and principal analyst for Forrester.

"I believe for the most part people value the human touch, but it may become a bit of a luxury good," he says. "Imagine a world 15 or 20 years from now where most people get their manicures from robots. Rich people might still want to get one from a real person."

And if you happen to be one of the unlucky millions who lose their job to an algorithm? A robot recruiter such as Entelo or Gild might be able to help you find a new one.

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Actors, teachers, therapists - think your job is safe from artificial intelligence? Think again

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In the battle for the 21st century workplace, computers are winning. And the odds of us puny humans making a comeback are not very good. A January 2017 report from the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that roughly half of today's work activities could be automated by 2055, give or take 20 years.

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Article 1 - Cyborgs

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umans must become cyborgs if they are to stay relevant in a future dominated by artificial intelligence. That was the warning from Tesla founder Elon Musk, speaking at an event in Dubai this weekend.

Musk argued that as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated, it will lead to mass unemployment. "There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot can't do better," he said at the World Government Summit.

If humans want to continue to add value to the economy, they must augment their capabilities through a "merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence". If we fail to do this, we'll risk becoming "house cats" to artificial intelligence.

And so we enter the realm of brain-computer (or brain-machine) interfaces, which cut out sluggish communication middlemen such as typing and talking in favour of direct, lag-free interactions between our brains and external devices.

The theory is that with sufficient knowledge of the neural activity in the brain it will be possible to create "neuroprosthetics" that could allow us to communicate complex ideas telepathically or give us additional cognitive (extra memory) or sensory (night vision) abilities. Musk says he's working on an injectable mesh-like "neural lace" that fits on your brain to give it digital computing capabilities.

So where does the science end and the science fiction start?

Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines
- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 4, 2016

So far, brain-computer interfaces have been used for relatively simple tasks, mainly to restore motor control for paralyzed patients and enable communication for locked-in patients with brain injuries that prevent them from communicating verbally or gesturally.

These interfaces involve decoding brain signals from the surface of the skull through EEG or via implanted electrodes and then translating those signals into a motion command for a robot or cursor.

There has also been some progress made in the other direction: using external electrical signals to stimulate the brain. This happened last year with Nathan Copeland, a paraplegic man who was fitted with a prosthetic hand with two-way feedback, meaning he can not only control the hand but "feel" when it's being touched.

Although medical applications are driving the research, there are also commercially available playthings that allow for novelties such as "mind controlled" drone racing.

Still, these are a long way from Elon Musk's vision of symbiosis between man and machine, which would require a much more granular understanding of the brain network that goes beyond the basics of motor control to more complex cognitive faculties like language and metaphor.

"We have over 80bn neurons in the brain. Our tools currently give us access to an extremely small number of neurons. With prosthetics, we're maybe talking about 100 neurons. We need higher bandwidth interfaces," said Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel, which aims to augment human intelligence with AI.

Professor Panagiotis Artemiadis of Arizona State University has been trying to get more bandwidth using a 128-electrode EEG cap to allow a human to control a swarm of flying robots with their brain. "We can already decode basic concepts like closing a hand or moving an elbow, but we can't decode more complex behaviors," he said.

He has created a system that allows for a single person to control the collaborative movement of multiple drones, for example making the flock move closer together so that it can fit through a narrow pass.

He is skeptical that the rise of AI will render humans irrelevant.

"We are building these machines to serve humans," he said.

Miguel Nicolelis, who has built brain-controlled exoskeletons and a brain-to-brain interface that allowed a rat in the United States to use the senses of the other in Brazil, agrees.

Humans won't become irrelevant until machines can replicate the human brain - something Nicolelis believes is not possible.

"The idea that digital machines no matter how hyper-connected, how powerful, will one day surpass human capacity is total baloney," he told the Guardian.

Nicolelis argues that the brain - contrary to what Musk and Singularity proponents like Ray Kurzweil say - is not computable because human consciousness is the result of unpredictable, nonlinear interactions among billions of cells. "Our brains do not work in an algorithmic way and are not digital machines," he said.

"It used to be annoying to see these kinds of statements, but now it's becoming serious. It's leading to mass hysteria."

Nicolelis acknowledges that digital automation will lead to "serious unemployment" among people who perform certain "mundane functions" that can be replicated by machines. "But that doesn't mean the human species will become obsolete."

The idea that digital machines will one day surpass human capacity is total baloney

Miguel Nicolelis, neuroscientist

He agrees with Musk that if we can interface directly with machines we can produce a "quantum leap" in what digital infrastructure has produced today, but predicts that humans will retain ultimate control.

This contrasts with current automated systems, like autopilot, where the human is merely supervising the operation of a computer. Similarly, doctors are outsourcing the diagnosis of certain diseases to supercomputers. Under these circumstances human skills diminish and people become subservient to machines.

"I'm thinking about a future where we reverse this trend. We use brain-machine interfaces to enhance our ability to treat people, to improve our quality of life," he said.

Better communication between humans and machines, particularly the transmission of emotional signals from humans, will be a powerful tool for building trust in automated systems, added Artemiadis.

For example, it would allow for humans to hand over control to an autonomous car with confidence. "It's about making the machine more intuitive using brain signals to understand whether the human is distracted or tired."

Columbia's Paul Sajda agreed. "Rather than put us in a doomsday scenario, let's look at how the relationship between humans and machines can evolve."

He said that most people will be "scared to death" to sit behind the wheel of a driverless car, but if the AI were able to read our emotional state it could start to make predications about our desires and build trust.

Sajda described the mostly non-verbal communication between a team of six Navy Seals, which includes gestures, emotional cues and facial expressions as well as some dialogue.

"In the future it will be three humans and four robots," he said. "How can they ensure there are these team dynamics that allow them to operate at the same level as a human squad? It has to do with trust between them."

Mind-reading devices or implants are likely to introduce unprecedented privacy concerns. Sadja talks about the notion of freedom of thought as an extension of freedom of speech.

"All of a sudden what's in your head can be expressed and communicated. One's private thoughts are important to protect, I don't think anybody - government or any company - should be charged with protecting them."

It's a concern shared by the University of Calgary's Walter Glannon, who studies neuroethics.

"There is a risk of the microchips being hacked by third parties. This could interfere with the user's intention to perform actions, violate privacy by extracting information from the chip," he said.

As it stands, these risks are theoretical.

"We really first have to understand the network [of the brain] and how all of these processing units communicate with each other and interact with the world," said Artemiadis. "We are really far away."

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Elon Musk says humans must become cyborgs to stay relevant. Is he right?

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Sophisticated artificial intelligence will make 'house cats' of humans, claims the entrepreneur, but his grand vision for mind-controlled tech may be a long way off

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Watch this TED video and answer the questions before lesson 3E (Thursday 26th)

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Easily create beautiful interactive video lessons for your students you can integrate right into your LMS. Track students' progress with hassle-free analytics as you flip your classroom!

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Try this Ted Ed Lesson before you come to Lesson 2B (Monday 16th)

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Hannah Fry from Numberphile shares a few strategies to help you win your next game of Rock Paper Scissors.