Looking at the changes taking place in today’s world from the perspective of digital intelligence, we can’t help but ask what should be done about education?

Education faces new challenges

The purpose of looking back at history is to recognize reality and grasp the future. Throughout the history of the evolution of human civilization, human society has always been pulled by human needs and empowered by curiosity to find the best solutions along three paths: first, the collection, processing, transmission and utilization of matter and energy, for example, human beings learned to master and use fire, invented the wheel, domesticated a series of wild plants and wild animals to ensure the energy needed for their survival and development, and then invented the steam engine, Internal combustion engines, generators, to large aircraft and ships, high-speed railroads, large excavators, large shield machines, large-scale power transmission systems, which is the expansion and extension of human physical force; Second, the collection, processing, transmission and use of information and ideas, such as the ancients in stone, tortoise shells and animal bones on the carving, and later invented the pen, paper and printing, and now people are using computers to search for and process all kinds of information, the use of the network to transmit information, which is the expansion and extension of human brain power. This is the expansion and extension of human brain power; thirdly, the extension of human life span and the enhancement of the quality of existence (including the quality of spirituality), for example, in the early days, human beings collected herbs to cure illnesses and pains, and later on, they invented surgical operations, made chemical synthesized drugs, invented various vaccines, and also created more and more rich cultural and artistic works and entertainment products, which is the expansion and enhancement of human health and the quality of spirituality. Over thousands of years, human society has achieved a series of significant results along these three paths.

It is precisely for this reason that Western Europe was the first to escape the “Malthusian Trap” after the realization of the first industrial revolution, and that the productive capacity of society and the standard of living of its inhabitants continued to rise, triggering the second and third industrial revolutions around the globe in the years that followed. Over the past 200 years or so, the mode of production, lifestyle and consumption of human beings has undergone radical changes. Among them, education has played an irreplaceable role in transmission, and at the same time a series of major changes have taken place in the form and function of education itself.

More than 500 years ago, human society started the age of navigation, and the earth began to be drawn as a circle on the map of mankind, which led to a series of competition and evolution of nation-states, a series of ideological changes and institutional innovations to promote the progress of the times, a series of major scientific discoveries and technological inventions, and a series of brand-new business modes, enterprise management modes and social governance modes, which led to the industrialization and modernization of human society. Human society began to embark on the road of industrialization and modernization, and mechanization, electrification and informationization have been continuously upgraded.

Along this path of technological revolution and industrial change, by observing the development trend of the future, we will find that human society is ushering in another new major change after the Age of Sail, whose important features are digital intelligence, green low-carbon, and human-machine interaction. Correspondingly, human society is entering an unprecedented era of great intelligence, great energy and great health. As a result, the three evolutionary paths once formed in human history are now achieving organic integration.

Take the car for example, in the past, the car was just a transportation vehicle to transport passengers or goods. However, the future new energy intelligent networked car can not only generate electricity using the photovoltaic equipment on the roof and windows but also meet the needs of people working together in the car using the network. The bottom of the car can store energy, and of course, it is still an important means of transportation. This represents a complete reversal of the concept of the automobile formed more than 100 years ago when mankind began to enter the era of automobile civilization.

In terms of production organization, people around the world will be able to save and share program code and data on platforms like GitHub in a loose but orderly collaborative relationship with each other, with no clear individual to lead the business and no superior to give instructions. More and more individuals are relying on such platforms to join off-site collaborative production teams, creating and sharing wealth and value on the platform. In this sense, global value chains will evolve into global value networks.

Artificial intelligence and automation equipment are making the manufacturing industry more personalized and flexible, and at the same time making the production process more homogeneous. Unmanned factories and lightless workshops will emerge in large numbers, while the productive service industry will become more developed, and the “smile curve” will become more pronounced. As for the 4D printing of this new production and consumption model, it will have a revolutionary impact on the traditional manufacturing industry. The individual user will be both the consumer and the product designer and producer.

In the era of General Artificial Intelligence, every user of the Big Model will also become a developer and trainer of the Big Model without realizing it. It has become commonplace for people to use online navigation maps when traveling. In fact, every user of online navigation maps is also a map maker. Another example is the Distributed Renewable Energy Internet, which allows every household to be both a user of the electric utility and a provider of energy to the grid.

The modern economy is a credit economy. A new credit system and data assets will be built around data, arithmetic and algorithms, and data will become an important asset for countries, companies and individuals. As an individual, it is necessary to learn how to build your own data assets and how to turn it into a kind of credit. The future society needs not only IQ, but also EQ, and more importantly, “digital intelligence”. As the saying goes, “Except for God, all people have to use numbers to speak”.

Since human society entered the age of Homo sapiens, it has relied on the energy given by the sun and the various resources generated by the earth to live in the real world created by its own thinking. For example, people have created more and more tools and machines to realize their dreams of building houses, building bridges, digging tunnels, navigating the universe, and drilling and mining in deep oceans and deep places, as well as using printing presses to produce books, and networking computers and printers to present and disseminate the fruits of their thinking. But in times past, no tool or machine could by itself create new ideas, nor new laws, nor new money. But in today’s era of great change, artificial intelligence becomes the first tool and machine in history that can actually create something new. If in recent years Bitcoin has still been a digital asset created by humans based on a network of computers, in the future we may be faced with an entirely new challenge of hundreds of billions of computing devices, millions of AI systems interacting and transacting to create new types of currencies that can’t be created or understood by human intelligence. This is the scenario envisioned by Val Hraley in Above Homo Sapiens.

Indeed, the limited learning and memory capacity of the individual human brain is being challenged by the unlimited learning and creation capacity of AI and the unlimited propagation capacity of the global network, and the speed of iterative updating of big language modeling AI technology is very impressive.ChatGPT made a leap in computational power from version 3 to version 4 in a matter of months, and from the time of ChatGPT’s introduction to the launch of Sora, it took only a year. time. In the field of art and design, AI drawing tools can process and analyze large amounts of data, potentially identifying patterns or connections that human artists have overlooked or are unaware of, which will open up all sorts of new realms in the way art is created and how it turns out. How human intelligence can achieve co-evolution with AI has become a very important proposition of the times.

At present, the first to be impacted and replaced are those engaged in simple and repetitive labor, easy to “be standardized” manufacturing and service positions, and the deeper impact is to give rise to a fundamental change in the field of education. The strength and depth of such changes will exceed the birth of modern universities in Europe, more than the birth of the compulsory education system, more than the promotion and popularization of the classroom system in the world. Only those educational and scientific research institutions that can accurately recognize and properly respond to the changes can really make a difference in this unprecedented challenge.

In this regard, the results of this year’s Nobel Prize winners in Physics and Chemistry have already appeared, and at the same time become a clear evidence. This is not only a breakthrough progress in basic science, but also shows that artificial intelligence has become an important tool to promote the development of basic science. In the past, the discovery or development of a brand new stable inorganic crystal required months of painstaking experiments, and now with the deep learning tool GNoME released by Google DeepMind, researchers have discovered 2.2 million new crystals in a short period of time, which is equivalent to the accumulation of knowledge of human scientists in this research field for nearly 800 years. It can be envisioned that future AI systems may do imaginative new things in researching controlled nuclear fusion, discovering new protein structures, and inventing new synthetic materials. This will inevitably lead to deep worries about AI technology. Therefore, human society should both install a strong and stable power system and create a safe and reliable braking system for the development and utilization of AI technology. Technological innovation and how to master the new technology, the formation of these two systems are embedded in the country’s economic and social development opportunities, business organizations to create wealth, as well as the growth and development of outstanding talent, the opportunity to show their skills. At the same time, we should also believe that artificial intelligence can not completely replace human intelligence, human emotions, imagination, creativity, those top scientists, artists, and even skilled chefs, are difficult to replace artificial intelligence. On the contrary, such talents will be more scarce in the age of digital intelligence. This is also an important topic for education to face.

The widespread use of artificial intelligence requires an increase in computing power. According to Kevin Kelly’s prediction, by around 2035, human society will create a mirror world corresponding to the physical world. With the rise of generalized AI, the demand for computing power across society will grow exponentially. Computing power needs to be networked to meet the huge market demand. Computing networks will consume a large amount of power and energy, but traditional fossil energy certainly cannot support it, not to mention the constraints of the carbon neutrality goal. What should we do? Human society must realize the energy transition. This means that a series of disruptive innovations will occur in the fields of energy, power, materials, construction, manufacturing, transportation, farming, food processing, heating and cooling, and a large number of new materials, new industries, new business forms, new products, and new services will emerge. Only those countries that truly understand the revolutionary changes and huge development potentials brought about by digital intelligence and carbon neutrality will be able to move forward in this unprecedented historical process; and only those industrial and commercial organizations that are sensitive to the development trends of digital intelligence and carbon neutrality, seize historical opportunities in a timely manner, and take the initiative to carry out dynamic innovations will be able to gain the first-mover advantage in development.

What should education do?

In the future society, all kinds of products and services will have to meet people’s material needs for greater safety, convenience, comfort, health, novelty, and rich spiritual pursuits, and at the same time be conducive to realizing the harmonious coexistence of human beings and nature. This will certainly give rise to a series of new ideas and institutional systems, new scientific discoveries and technological inventions, new business models and management models, as well as new international public goods and global governance systems. This will require the integrated application of human intelligence and artificial intelligence. The World Economic Forum once listed complex problem-solving ability as the top skill for human beings in the 21st century, which includes Complex Problem Solving, Critical Thinking, Creativity, People Management, Coordinating with Others, Emotional Intelligence, Judgment and Decision Making, Service Orientation, Negotiation, and Cognitive Flexibility.

Talents are still the foundation of a country’s innovative development ability and comprehensive competitiveness. In the face of the great changes in the economic structure, industrial structure, and social operation mode, how should education respond?

We can only find the answer by accurately grasping the future development trend while truly following the essential law of education and returning education to its essence. That is, education should promote the all-round development of human beings, stimulate their creativity, give full play to their subjective initiative, liberate people and students to the greatest extent possible, and prevent people from living more and more like machines while machines evolve more and more like people. To this end, it is necessary to build a new quality education in the age of digital intelligence, guiding students to strive for healthy physical and mental growth and development in the context of the new technological revolution and industrial change, thereby enhancing total factor productivity, continuously strengthening new quality productivity, and promoting economic development and social prosperity and progress. In the age of digital intelligence, the best learning is self-learning, the best school is a powerful global education network, the best education is self-education and lifelong education, and the best students are self-disciplined and innovative students.

First, cultivate a new quality of learning style and thinking mode. Relying on artificial intelligence technology and network systems, students should be liberated from patterned, standardized, and indoctrinated learning, and a comprehensive, diverse, and interactive learning process should be realized. Under the guidance of teachers, relying on the big language model for learning, questioning, human-computer interaction of asking and answering, and cyclic progression, students can shift from passive acceptance to active exploration, cultivate students’ divergent and creative thinking modes, and realize “teaching for all” and “teaching according to students’ abilities” in the age of digital intelligence.

Second, shape a new quality of school form and curriculum system. It is necessary to change the school education model formed since the Industrial Revolution, especially the classroom lecture system, break through the physical and spatial boundaries of classrooms and campuses, create intelligent classrooms and open schools with a benign interaction between the virtual world and the real world, establish a curriculum system based on the systematic integration of high-quality educational resources from all over the society through the information network, enhance the accessibility of lifelong, informal, and personalized education, and form a modern education system in which family education, social education, school education, and self-education interact coordinately.

Thirdly, construct new quality evaluation standards and evaluation systems. It is necessary to promote the in-depth integration of education evaluation with digital intelligence and information network technology, and construct an intelligent new quality education evaluation system and evaluation standards. Establish an evaluation system that combines multimodal data, psychological measurement models, and data science, effectively improve outcome evaluation, strengthen process evaluation, explore value-added evaluation, and perfect comprehensive evaluation. Matching teacher construction and teacher training has also become a more important task. The change in education starts with the change of teachers.

Fourthly, practice a new quality of education governance and school management. It is necessary to explore the paradigm of education governance based on big data and artificial intelligence technology, and make timely iterations and improvements according to the laws of students’ physical and mental development and the needs of economic and social development. Through the analysis of economic and social development and educational big data, a scientific basis is provided for educational administration and school management, making the allocation of educational resources more transparent, fair, and efficient, and making the monitoring and evaluation of schools’ educational performance more immediate, realistic, and scientific. Realize the digital and intelligent reengineering of school management and business processes, and promote the modernization of the educational governance system and governance capacity.

Higher education and vocational education are currently the most severely tested. As for higher education, in the age of digital intelligence, the traditional forms of education, scientific research, and production are undergoing obvious changes. In the era of Newton and Watt, it was from observation and calculation, to scientific discovery, to technological invention, and finally to products; now it is directly from data to scientific discovery, and then to products. This is because there is a second cognitive pathway that has emerged in human society, that is, machine cognition. This machine cognition does not simply repeat human cognition but greatly enriches human cognition. The university of the future should be a brand-new educational institution that transcends discrete knowledge points, gets rid of a single thinking mode and thinking system, and uses the strongest principles and the greatest flexibility to cultivate talents and promote innovation. Therefore, it is necessary to build an interdisciplinary, cross-major, cross-field model of higher education, shifting from focusing on students’ knowledge memorization to focusing on cultivating students’ imagination, ability to raise questions, and comprehensive analysis and research ability. Of course, college and university major settings should neither be rigidly defined nor changed overnight but achieve adaptive homeostasis to realize a dynamic balance between change and stability, effectively allocate educational resources to avoid waste, and actively adapt to the needs of the development of the times.

This means that global higher education will undergo an epoch-making transformation. This is the fourth transformation in the history of higher education. The emergence of classical European universities, represented by Oxford and Cambridge, provided strong intellectual support for the first industrial revolution; the rise of modern European universities, represented by Humboldt University, played an important role in the second industrial revolution; and the rise of higher education institutions represented by new universities in Silicon Valley of the U.S. last century gave birth to the third industrial revolution dominated by information technology. This time, the fourth industrial revolution, dominated by digital intelligence and green low-carbonization, will give rise to a series of new university networks with global influence.

Vocational education must also break away from the educational model that has developed since the second and third industrial revolutions. In the past, vocational education enabled students to “know what they are doing”, but now it must enable students to “know why they are doing it” and also teach students to be able to perceive and respond to future development trends. The continuous emergence of new industries, new business forms, new types of work, and new products in the future will lead to a significant acceleration in the iteration speed of the demand for vocational positions and vocational skills. Now, we should blur the boundaries between applied higher education and skills-based higher education, improve students’ general knowledge and skills level and comprehensive cognitive ability, and cultivate graduates’ ability to comprehensively and iteratively update their knowledge and skills for the future.

In other words, we should open a new era in which higher education and vocational training accompany a person’s entire career, so that learning and training can become both a process of upgrading vocational competence and literacy, and at the same time a healthy way of life for people. In this sense, we should establish a national vocational training voucher system that combines the government and the market, so that every three to five years in one’s career, one can receive a real-name vocational training voucher from the social security system with financial support from the state, and with the voucher one can independently choose the vocational training institution and the content of the training, thus realizing the effective connection and accurate matching of educational resources and vocational training demand. This allows for the effective docking and precise matching of educational resources and vocational training needs. Take this as an opportunity to establish a modern lifelong vocational education and training system that is compatible with the new round of scientific and technological revolution, industrial change and occupational demand, create a steady stream of talent dividends, and provide talent and intellectual support for the country’s high-quality economic and social development.

Talents need both scientific cultivation and rational use. Proactive compliance, accurately grasp the economic and social development trend of the digital age, promote the modernization of the national governance system and governance capacity, the construction of appropriate employment mechanism, the formation of a relaxed social environment, to achieve the optimal allocation of human resources and maximize the efficiency and effectiveness of the building of a learning society and an innovative country, in order to truly cultivate talent, make the best use of talent, and in order to solve “Joseph Lee’s riddle”, answer the question of “how can we make the best use of talent? Only then can we build a learning society and an innovative country, truly cultivate talents and make the best use of them, solve the “Joseph Lee’s riddle” and answer the “QIAN Xuesen’s question”, and stimulate to the maximum extent the endogenous motivation and innovative vitality of the whole society.