David Hughes J.

Re-examining Success


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a generation

      The purpose of this chapter is twofold. First, it explores the concept of a ‘generation’ as a technological concept in relation to the increasing rate of change in society. Second, it relates this term to a cohort of school pupils who will enter and leave formal education over the span of the next decade.

      What is increasingly apparent is that the technological drivers of change in society are moving at an increasingly uncomfortable pace for many of us. Perhaps the most uncomfortable citizens in this drive forward are school pupils preparing for a future that is changing at a relentless pace. It is becoming increasingly clear that the body of knowledge their formal schooling has prepared them for is becoming gradually irrelevant (see Table 2.1).

      How will we come to terms with a technological generation that is measured in so few years, when the educational generation is measured in decades?

      THE TECHNOLOGICAL GENERATION

      Forty years ago, a timeframe that was considered to be the span of a career in the world of work, there was an expectation that the whole of a working career may well reside within one occupation. You might change employers, and might experience redundancy, but the job skills you carried with you would largely see you through your whole career with some adaptations. A technological generation would constitute something like half or one-third of your working career.

      If you worked on the railway, for example, as a driver or fitter, civil or mechanical engineer, you could comfortably accommodate the changes brought about by technological change. These may have been changes in the powering of locomotives, from steam to diesel to electric. The building and maintenance of the civil and mechanical aspects of the railway, although changing, were based on the same foundations and founding principles, with some increasing mechanisation included. Fundamentally, the railways involved you in an almost timeless series of jobs that were changing at the margins, although the central task of moving people and goods remained the same. Or so it seemed.

      In the past few years, the move towards computerisation on the railways has removed one of the earliest and most vital roles on the system, that of the signalman. The thousands of signal boxes sitting at junctions and level crossings were manned, often for 24 hours a day. These are currently being reduced to some 10 central control boxes across the UK, connected by CCTV and remote sensors to every junction, crossing and controlling signal. This change is so profound that it is meaningless to consider ‘signal operator’ as a distinct and sizeable profession any longer.

      The process does not end there. In trains, aircraft and automobiles, the direction of travel is to remove the human element from the operational loop. It is currently technologically possible to remove humans from the train cab, the airline cockpit and the driver seat of road vehicles. The only thing stopping these developments is the psychological impact on travellers of having no human in control; this, despite the fact that ‘human error’ is a component in a large proportion of accidents.

      The car mechanic’s career, to which so many young people aspired, was catered for through myriad apprenticeship courses. These were run by garages and technical colleges. Such a career was largely about applying general principles to new car models. The essence was getting your hands dirty and showing some artistry in tuning and fettling the vehicle to maintain optimal performance. Although there were changes in systems and performance, these could be accommodated because their adoption was generally gradual and measured.

      However, the introduction of engine management systems in the past two decades has fundamentally changed the nature of the job, the skill set and the role of the car mechanic. No longer is the role one of ‘engine detective’, using all the senses to diagnose and fix the engine and components. The engine management system means the car no longer ‘talks’ to the mechanic. Today, the conversation is between the engine management system and the maintenance and systems computer. They hold an electronic conversation about what is wrong with the performance of the car and the appropriate remediation. The primary role of the mechanic is to respond to the result of this electronic conversation. Increasingly, that is simply to replace one malfunctioning or dead component with another.

      This exclusion of the mechanic from the diagnostic loop is significant as it mirrors the direction of travel of the relationship between humankind and increasingly sophisticated machines. This is the artificial intelligence (AI) dilemma we shall all face eventually – functional redundancy. At some point, machines will overtake our skill sets.

      Table 2.1 Changing jobs: job evolution driven by technology

      Case study

      As an aside, an increasingly inappropriate preoccupation in the Department for Education (DfE) is in making a curriculum that mirrors this technological future. One development is in teaching information technology coding. But, in my view, the idea of adding coding as yet another element of the national curriculum, a kind of technological modern foreign language, is totally misguided. It is the equivalent of believing that you can create a world-class car industry simply by training everyone as a car mechanic. Understanding simple logic gates and the wiring associated with them might, of itself, be valuable knowledge, but the role of the coder is relatively low level when considered against the bigger picture roles in developing AI.

      In fact, this simple, scalable, logical thinking is already a feature of current robotic technology, so it will not provide as many employment opportunities in the future. Indeed, my prior involvement in technological product developments highlighted that, when the big picture plan is developed, the simple coding task for individual elements is outsourced abroad to cheaper markets. In one case, this involved outsourcing to a former Russian nuclear submarine engineer. He had a large team of experienced coders who could turn round most well-specified coding tasks in a couple of days and for a few hundred dollars. This is not really the skill on which future high-worth, well-paid economies will be built.

      Snapshots of the future

      It was the car factory under Henry Ford that introduced the mass production process. It is now defining the cutting-edge world of robotics. The most startling thing about the modern car assembly plant is the absence of human beings on the shop floor. Human beings are not performing the primary assembly tasks anymore. Instead, they are monitoring the machines that complete those tasks.

      It is in communication technology that the pace of change is fastest and here the mismatch between the future life experiences of pupils and the limited learning opportunities presented by their education will sell them short.

      If you attended a major educational conference in 2009, be it a senior leadership event or a DfE-sponsored event with a Minister of State for Education present, there was a fair chance you would have been shown an engrossing and disturbing video that formed the quintessence of technical change. It was a peak into Pandora’s Box. It was as enticing as the old future-gazing television programmes like Tomorrow’s World. In characteristic style, the video was already two years old by the time the DfE started showing it. At least, at that time, they were trying to help put forward a dynamic view of the role of learning in the future world.

      Underneath the cutting-edge ‘the medium is the message’ online production, there was an element of both challenge and menace in the accelerating rate of change and the impact it would have on society. In what some took to be a utopian future, and others took to be the foretelling of a dystopian nightmare, the presentation was called The Machine is Us/ing Us by Michael Wesch, Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Kansas – and it went viral (Wesch, 2007).

      At the time, it was a leading analysis of the change between Web 1.0, which required HTML to construct it, and Web 2.0, which enabled people to communicate without limit on the internet through social media. Now it already represents an essentially historic document. We have moved on so quickly.

      Indeed, the presentation that characterised Web 3.0, the intuitive or semantic web, or the internet of things, which was at the edge of imagination when Wesch broadcast his seminal work in 2007, is now being overtaken by new, unimaginable and accelerating