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Honda's Asimo, Living with Robots

In Calling Transformative Learning into Question:  Some Mutinous Thoughts, Michael Newman thoughtfully declines the notion of a ‘transformative learning’ that differs from other kinds of learning, not just by degree but as an entirely new category.  Learning may be good, he claims, may even be profoundly good.  The current literature, however, presents insufficient evidence of teaching interventions which actually cause transformations at the level of personhood, bringing learners to entirely new realms of self-efficacy and power. His review finds instead mostly anecdotes and self-reporting. Stories don’t prove anything, he claims, including invention along with the recording. From that viewpoint, one might wonder what Mr. Newman would make of the coming ‘Singularity’, that mother of all transformations, where the intelligence of our machines will exceed all human intelligence on Earth.  Futurists such as Ray Kurzweil predict this event no more than one more human generation out, 30 years or so, and have labeled it as the endpoint of the human era – 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal. Yikes.

Such projections imply that students in school now can expect to compete worldwide for jobs and a niche in the global exchange.  Their children, however, will have to contend with robot-kind as well for their rightful place on Earth and a future worth living in. If even partially predictive, how are we doing at preparing for such massively disruptive changes?  What role does “education” have to play in the coming contestation: man versus machine?  With exponentially rising machine intelligence, how is human intelligence supposed to keep up? If Mr. Newman is correct and we have no solid foundation (yet) for transforming our current educational system, how big o’ trouble are we in, really?  Certainly Kurzweils’ Law of Accelerating Returns graphs inspire a rising sense of urgency to it all.

But imagine if you will a kind of learning that could map to exponential gains in understanding, accelerating the learner’s journey from novice to wise mastery.  What might such a learning path look like?  The remainder of this post will sketch out a first pass at such a description.
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