Trivium 21c

We are living in interesting times…

The future is glimpsed through a glass, darkly and, indeed, there may be dark times ahead. A concatenation of unfortunate events are all that is needed for the future to not be as predicted. One minute all is good, the next you are knocked over by the proverbial 48 bus that is running late. Even the most reliable of predictions are destroyed by the discovery of ‘the black swan’.

We must prepare children for the future, they need the skills for living in the 21st century, for a world that looks like… (insert some utopian dreamscape) and suddenly that world looks different, and sometimes, disappointingly similar to the one that already exists. The problem with trying to be ahead of the curve in modernity is that modernity itself is an ephemeral thing that likes to surprise and confound. And often to be ceaselessly boring and familiar.

But picture the leader who has just equipped his school with iPads because they are so 21st century and children need those skills reading this article, in which the author Bob O’Donnell writes:

While some naively predicted that tablets would one day replace PCs, the worldwide tablet market never reached the same level as PCs, and with very few exceptions, tablets never became the general purpose computing device that many envisioned. Instead, worldwide tablet shipments peaked in the fourth quarter of 2013—just two years after PCs did—and have slowly declined ever since.

 If tablets are in decline is it any wonder that marketing to schools might be a useful idea, got to sell them somewhere: “But if we pretend to predict the future and get people to think ‘they are very twenty-first century’…” The various bits of wireless telegraph on the back of the horse picture above were so very twentieth century in 1916, though I’m not sure if someone tried to get every child to use the technology but I’m hoping they did…

It is not technology itself one should castigate, it’s the conceit used to sell it ‘it’s the future’ they say, just as the technology might be consigning itself to the past.

O’Donnell continues:

…the future of computing seems to be about a set of platform and device-independent services. Specifically, voice-based interactions, driven by large installations of cloud-based servers running deep learning-based algorithms are what’s hot these days. This kind of computing model doesn’t necessarily need the kind of local horsepower that traditional computing devices have had.

Of course, he doesn’t know, he is just making a prediction, he goes on to say that for Apple:

…the post- device era is a sort of dystopian nightmare…

Some devices will survive for mundane activities or… well, what do I know? But if you want to really teach kids to be ahead of the curve you would need a crystal ball, there is no certainty and nowadays even crystal balls are looked at as being technology from a bygone age.