EDUCATORS and parents should ask themselves: are we preparing our children for their world or ours?
In his brilliant book, “Factfulness,” Hans Rosling noted that our knowledge is usually outdated, “often several decades old.” He said many people “had a worldview dated to the time when their teachers had left school.”
A parent of an elementary school student asked me recently: why do we have to buy notebooks and pencils or ballpens for our kids when “in real life” they write on laptops or smartphones? The parent also noted that most of the lessons taught to young students are “useless” in this age of Google. “We’re teaching them stuff that may come in handy if there’s no computer technology in the entire world. So are we preparing our kids for a post-apocalyptic world?” Which is, I think, a polite way of asking, “Are we nuts?”
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Meanwhile, the biggest news on TikTok this week is ChatGPT, “a new cutting-edge” Artificial Intelligence chatbot. ChatGPT will make Google-search obsolete. ChatGPT allows a student with a wi-fi connection to “do” his or her homework in a matter of seconds.
According to Kevin Roose of the New York Times, ChatGPT can also — among many, many other things — “write jokes (some of which are actually funny), working computer code and college-level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnoses, create text-based Harry Potter games and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty.” Roose said ChatGPT “appears to be ominously good at answering the types of open-ended analytical questions that frequently appear on school assignments. (Many educators have predicted that ChatGPT, and tools like it, will spell the end of homework and take-home exams.)” And yes, it can solve math problems and explain the solution.
ChatGPT and its other versions are just getting started. They will continue to improve.
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More good news.
National Review’s Jim Geraghty on Monday reported about “A Fusion Breakthrough That Could Change the World”:
“Across the bay from San Francisco, the Lawrence Livermore National Labs have been conducting fusion experiments at the National Ignition Facility, a giant lab the size of a sports stadium…. If you smash two atoms together at exceptionally high speeds, they merge, and in the process release energy; for decades, researchers have been stymied by the challenge of generating a reaction that releases more energy than it consumes. That, reportedly, is what the Department of Energy has done for the first time.”
But Geraghty also mentioned the following caveats noted by the Washington Post:
“Creating the net energy gain required engagement of one of the largest lasers in the world, and the resources needed to recreate the reaction on the scale required to make fusion practical for energy production are immense. More importantly, engineers have yet to develop machinery capable of affordably turning that reaction into electricity that can be practically deployed to the power grid.
“Building devices that are large enough to create fusion power at scale, scientists say, would require materials that are extraordinarily difficult to produce. At the same time, the reaction creates neutrons that put a tremendous amount of stress on the equipment creating it, such that it can get destroyed in the process.”
In other words, Geraghty said, there’s “a long way to go, and this is just the first step, but it is a key first step.” Still, the “potential of this breakthrough is spectacular. A few months ago, Andrew Follett wrote here at [National Review] that the development of fusion-energy production would effectively end the arguments about how the U.S. and the world can develop sufficient energy without producing carbon emissions that would exacerbate climate change.”
Follet wrote:
“Fusion would be a game changer, as it lacks the public-relations problems that environmentalists have attached to conventional nuclear reactors: The process would generate essentially no hazardous waste and wouldn’t even require hazardous fuel. Operational fusion power would probably be so efficient that it would permanently put most other forms of generating electricity out of business, as it would likely be ‘too cheap to meter.’ ”
In August 2021, Geraghty said, aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin laid out the far-reaching civilizational effects of achieving fusion energy:
“The reason we need fusion is to destroy the Malthusian belief system, which, in my estimation, is the preeminent threat to human civilization today. If one accepts the idea that resources are limited, then all nations are fundamentally enemies, and the only issue is who is going to kill whom in order to claim what’s available. At bottom, this was the source of the major catastrophes of the 20th century. It could cause far worse in the 21st. This mindset, however, is false. We are not threatened by there being too many people. We are threatened by people who think there are too many people.
“Fusion power can save us by utterly refuting the limited-resource thesis….”
From his lips to God’s ears.
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