Creative Resource Sharing in the 4th Industrial Revolution

What is being called the 4th Industrial Revolution, or sometimes the 2^nd Machine Age is already disrupting human societies, and that disruption will both spread and increase. More specifically it is beginning to disrupt traditional educational goals, and will demand that educators develop new goals, and new forms of collaboration. In the coming world shaped by the 4^thIndustrial Revolution education to foster human relations will be as important as education to teach human vocations. And that shift for an emphasis on vocation to relation is the challenge educators will face in the coming decades. 

Let me elaborate. Traditional education has had one or more of five goals. 

The earliest of these was vocational; teaching students how to do a job. The first universities were vocational. They had three schools: medicine, law, and theology. The first prepared doctors, the second lawyers, and the third church administrators. In the medieval period kings and princes didn’t go to school - they learned to rule by watching their parents and the only real skills they needed were the skills of a warrior. A thousand years ago most European royalty weren’t even literate. They had lawyers and bishops to read things for them. But they were good at war. 

Then around 500 years ago this began to change. Books like Machiavelli’s The Prince appeared. Leaders needed to be more than warriors, they needed an education that specifically prepared them to lead emerging modern societies. And this is where, for the first time, we have in universities the ars liberalis, the liberal arts. Leaders of human societies needed to understand humans, and that meant reading history, literature, biography, philosophy, and politics. But note, what these emerging leaders read were old classics; the literature of the Greeks and Romans. 

But times were changing, and soon it became clear that new challenges required new knowledge. New sciences, like political science and economics began to emerge. And the old “natural philosophy” became rooted in experiment and mathematics and thus became the natural sciences. So a third goal in addition to professional training and leadership emerged for the college or university: generating new knowledge, whether about the natural world or the human social world. Universities became centers for research. 

The forth goal for education came about during the 19th and 20th century breakdown of the apprenticeship system. Especially in the United States schools took over teaching auto mechanics, commercial drivers, electricians, plumbers, engineers, and so on. Schools were called upon to train experts with specialized modern skills. At a lower level this included more mechanical skills. At a higher level it included things like engineering and architecture.  

Then there is one other historical change that has greatly affected education in the modern world, and that is the rise of democracy. In late medieval society the only people who needed a liberal arts education were the nobility and maybe very rich business people. They were the leaders of society. Yet in a democracy leadership belongs to the people. So it is the people, all the people, who need understand humans and human society so that they can act as responsible citizens who exercise their leadership by voting. 

And here we find a fifth purpose for modern education - creating citizens who can intelligently exercise their responsibility in a democracy. Now everyone must be trained for human leadership, not just an elite. Some people may be doctors and lawyers, others may be engineers or architects, others may be teachers, others may run businesses, others may be plumbers or carpenters. BUT everyone needs to understand what it means to be human so that everyone can exercise their responsibility as a citizen/leader in a democratic society. 

And this is where we are right now. Schools, from kindergartens through universities prepare some people for professions like law and medicine. They prepare some people for skills-based vocations. They prepare some people to expand the range of human knowledge through research. They prepare some people to be leaders, whether in the realm of politics or business. And they should prepare all people to be citizens who understand their fellow humans. 

The 4th Industrial Revolution is going to challenge this model of education for two reasons: First artificial intelligence will gradually replace people in both professions and skills-based jobs. Secondly being successful in human relationships will become the most important way to thrive in the 4^thIndustrial Revolution. As machines do more and more for us we will value more and more what only humans can do with other humans. 

• Example: Do you need an accountant? Hire a computer program like Quickbooks. Need a layer? Hire a computer program like LegalZoom. Do you need to repair a broken sink? Go to YouTube and you’ll get step by step instructions to do it yourself. You don’t need a plumber. Need an auto mechanic? When the radiator of my car began to leak I didn’t go to the mechanic, I just went to YouTube for instructions on how to replace and I ordered the part on Amazon for delivery to my door. 
• And all those YouTube videos? If all you teach are skills then these videos may replace you.

This isn’t going to happen overnight, or maybe for a decade, but it will happen. 

In a conference last fall I heard about a major clothing manufacturer has set up a system in which complex computer algorithms design the clothes, test the designs with virtual focus groups, generate advertising campaigns, order all of the materials and have them shipped to an automated factory in China. In the factory robots make the clothes, box them, and ship them to the stores. Soon they will be shipped in self-driving trucks. ONLY at the stores do humans become part of the process. And if the clothing is ordered on the internet no human touches the clothes until the customer puts them on. 

So let me detail for you which human professions are eliminated in this system: designers and artists, marketing professionals, accountants, seamstresses, graphic designers, and quite probably sales people as well. 

Of course this system isn’t up and working. But it will be sooner rather than later. And the people it will put out of work won’t just be in the US. They will be in Asia and Latin America and Africa. So if we are just educating people just to do mechanical jobs, we may be educating people to be jobless in the future. 

But education has never been just giving humans skills has it? All of us in education know that job training is only part of it. We aren’t creating workers to be replaced by robots. We are creating citizen-leaders who will take on the critical responsibility of leading society. We are creating humans who know how to collaborate with their fellow humans, care for their fellow humans, and indeed love their fellow humans. This human vocation, these human to human skills, can never be replaced by a machine, no matter how intelligent. And this human to human vocation will be the key to our future. 

What humans were created to do, and most desire to do, is to relate to their fellow humans. And that tells us where the future of education lies. It lies in the liberal arts and their study of what it means to be human. It lies in the task of preparing of preparing men and women to be citizens who care for one another and society. The future will be on learning how to foster relationships rather than merely carry out a vocation.

And this, above all, requires three new forms of collaboration. 

The first is rebuilding the collaboration between spirituality and secular society. It will be a collaboration in which the enormous value of secularity in building modern societies is re-introduced to the spirituality, the sense of God and the transcendent, necessary for the citizens of these societies to realize the fullness of their human purpose. 

The second is learning to collaborate with the new smart machines. According to work done at Stamford those who succeed will be those who learn how to human creativity, ideation, and intuition compliment emerging intelligent machines. Think of your smart phone. It is already full of artificial intelligence, but it can’t actually do anything useful without you. Think of i-Movie. It is a very intelligent application. Feed in some video and it will come up with a movie. A bad movie. Because only you can identify what is interesting, what makes a compelling story, what represents and happy ending. Humans have to provide the creativity, the new ideas, and the intuitive feel for what has emotional impact.

The third form of collaboration and that most important to us, will be between educational institutions across different nations and cultures. We can’t learn to be human, or teach what it means to be human, from within a single cultural or national context. We have teach each other across cultural and national boundaries. We have to learn from each other across cultural and national boundaries. And that means collaboration in teaching and learning. 

And this is why our team from Southern Methodist University is here in Manila today. We are creating a educational tool called “The Virtual Visiting Professor.” It will make learning resources available to both teachers and students worldwide. More importantly our virtual visiting professors will come from across globe. Teachers and students will be able to learn from scholars and practitioners from a variety of different cultural and social contexts. 

In fact, our first group of virtual visiting professors is made up of theological school teachers from here in the Philippines, whom we have been recording for the last four days. You will hear from some of them later. 

In the next 12 months we’ll add virtual visiting professors from Africa, and Latin America. In the next several years we hope to have hundreds of virtual visiting professors sharing their passion and expertise across the globe, including with those of us in Western colleges and universities. Because those of us in Western universities cannot understand what it means to be human unless we learn from Asians and Africans and Latin Americans. We cannot teach our students how to better understand their own humanity unless we engage our students with multiple cultures and viewpoints. 

Of course this is a huge challenge. Unlike other material on the internet we won’t just offer lectures, but other resources that teachers need in the classroom such as readings, discussion questions, and learning objectives. And instead of focusing on international experts we’ll be looking for local teachers who remain close their students and situation. 

As importantly we won’t just be creating one-off resources, but bringing scholars and practitioners into a collaborative network in which individuals and institutions continue to contribute to the resources available. We will partner with institutions here in the Philippines and across the globe so that our first resource scholars here in the Philippines, our first Virtual Visiting Professors, will continue to develop material to share across the globe, and as we add virtual visiting professors from other continents will find new colleagues for collaboration. 

And finally we won’t limit our resources to those who have access to the internet. We are presently developing and patenting an inexpensive hardware device that can make all of our program content available anyplace where the sun shines to power the batteries. 

The 4th Machine Age is coming to all of us. And it will challenge all of our understandings of what it means to be human and to live meaningful human lives. To keep our humanity in the coming age of robots and artificial intelligence we will need to offer each other, across the globe, the knowledge we are passionate about, the questions and concerns that animate us the most, and the practical experiences that we can share to help one another. 

Only when we ask together what it means to be human will we find answers that meet the challenge of the future. But we can rest assured that if we ask that question the critical question of what it means to be humans in relationship together we will find that the future is glorious for us all.