In the last few years we have witnessed incredible progress in robotics, biotech, artificial life and intelligence and cognitive neuroscience including connectomics from Harvard. Robots are already socially and emotionally intelligent to a certain extent as can be seen in the the stunning work by Cynthia Breazeal from MIT. Robots, AI and A-Life will increasingly narrow down the specific features, benefits and skills of us humans. What are our competitive advantages relative to these technological developments? My guess at this point in time this will boil down to (among other things) creativity and innovation and other right brain skills.
As all these technological developments will increasingly democratize and empower us as individuals - like almost all key technologies in the past have democratized eventually - we'll in my view probably end up with the situation in which children and adolescents will increasingly be exposed to these powerful tools. Not only as prevention or correction but simply as an 'awareness right'. In practice, we'll see that fMRI scans (benefiting from the current research on connectomics from the neuron level upwards) and personal DNA profiling (like in 23andMe) will democratize. Children and adolescents will know quite early in life what their skills, talents and dispositions are or can be. This will probably drive a deeper sense of human identity, self awareness, human potential as well as self realization. And educational system (offline as well as online) will somehow integrate these insights in the long run.
In short, the psychological trend of the last 20 years in which magazines, TV programs, books and educational systems test their users/readers (and successfully as this spreads around and around while users love it) will broaden into the fields biotech and cognitive neuroscience. With a strong focus on what makes us uniquely human relative to the advances in robotics, AI and A-Life.
I am thrilled by this prospect as this will probably enhance a lot of lives in the future.
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