Deeptech not found ❌

My job / passion / mission and great joy is to write and produce videos about the latest developments in science and technology. I cover everything from companies that are building quantum algorithms to let us navigate without GPS to why sperm racing is a bit deceiving (yep my editor is always having fun).

yet there is one area that I hardly ever come across.

Education.

Everyday you are probably bombarded by the latest developmnets in AI and our quest to create something more intelligent than us. At the same time, you might be wondering…

are we getting smarter?

or better…

how will WE get smarter?

The following is greately influenced by my time in neuroscience labs and learning about the brain at the molecular level and raising my son (a great exercise in EQ).

Although stupidity might be easier to define, intelligence seems to be the combination of things, skills, and abilities that are not easily described in a few worlds.

For example, task completion is a poor predictor of intelligence. Machines, computers, supercomputers and AI are much better at certain tasks than us. But did you know that cyborg teams perform better at certain tasks, including complex tasks like playing chess, than humans, computers, or supercomputers alone?

A prominent case of the superiority of cyborg intelligence was observed in 2005 when two chess amateurs Steven Cramton and Zackary Stephen won a chess tournament, beating both Grandmasters and well-known chess supercomputers by learning exactly when to lean into the computer’s ability to calculate, and when to trust human intuition. This was the work of several months of effort.

There is a type of human intelligence that is impossible to simply quantify through IQ or EQ alone. It is our ability to imagine things that do not exist, and the often forgotten part of our brains responsible for understanding our fellow humans that can be the most detrimental. We have dissected neuroscience and brain disease away from mental health and psychiatry, but these are simply differences that exist in our spoken words, nature is a lot more interconnected.

Perhaps as we converge more and more with machines, brain-computer-interfaces (BCIs), AI devices, smart glasses, quantum computers, smart wearables, injectable sensors and more… it is precisely the ones that learn to be the best cyborgs that will be the most intelligent.

We will get back to this in a moment.

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It was 8pm after a long lab day, running through the wintery rainy streets of Auckland, when one of my professors posed the following question. “Did we get worse at navigation because of GPS?”. After a few back and forths, interrupted by the occassional hill that would plunge the entire neuro-runclub into silence he proposed a theory. When we were navigating without a maps, we would often struggle to get to our destination, take the wrong streets, get lost a little etc. Our brain would have to perform multiple cognitive tasks to remember street names, signs, and orientate in the right direction. Although we would get to a new place in a non-optimal way, the shortest distance, getting to the destination was a form of achievement and would result in a corresponding dopamine release. He further explained, that when we lose those microdoses of dopamine thoughtout our day, we lose the sense of achievement and motivation to learn, we do not get the same reward for learning.

If you want to dive a bit deeper into the molecular basis of learning, David Epstein does as excellent job of interviewing Alex Hutchinson on the function of the DRD4 gene and how motivation and learning are interconnected (spoiler - it’s a gene encoding for a dopamine receptor.)

As we depend on technologies more and more, which I do not consider a net negative, we will have to find new ways to train and maintain the neuronal circuitry that has sustained us for all these thousands of years.

AI is only exacerbating this effect.

To be a little more Epicurean, to struggle is to learn, and through failure and retry we achieve the ability to learn and perform the higher level tasks that make us human.

While we have no magic pill that is claiming to make us smarter, and all edtech solutions that teeter on the deeptech sphere are mostly AI tutors and tools for students (nothing wrong with that).

Perhaps what we term “education” in children we coin “productivity” in adults. A more output focused definition.

For this study the authors have created a surprisingly robust method of measuring mental workload (subjects were completing a memory test of increasing difficulty), with an inexpensive, non-invasive wearable “e-tattoo”.

Although still in the early stages, monitoring mental workload might be the first step toward maintaining the right conditions for learning.

My grandma was taken out of school when she was 10 years old. This was pretty common practice in rural Greece post-war, and something that she would often recall with a tinge of shame. She would recount the songs she learnt at primary school with such pride and joy, and has instilled the joy of reading in me.

Even today, an estimated 120 million girls are out of school around the world and only 49 percent of countries have gender parity in primary school.

While we are focused on getting from the 80th percentile to the 99th of human output, let’s not forget that perhaps the greatest impact technology can have on education is not to make us smarter, but to give more of us access to education.

Always learning, 🙂

Giota