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The Creative, Complex World of 2034: Emerging Technologies

Melanie Borrego
Western Oregon University















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Todays youth face an exciting yet uncertain future in the America of tomorrow. They
will no longer be bound by location, but it will be more difficult to escape connectedness.
Education will be individually customized and mobile but will continue long past a degree. Work
will take place in large part in home or temporary offices with teams assembled from locations
around the globe. Homes will lose living rooms and gain offices. The informational tools which
will become indispensable (language translators, data collection and project management
software of all kinds, primary document sites, etc.) will not only put personal information at risk
but also continue to morph and change rapidly, requiring constant caution and consistently
updated skills. Those who can keep up may reap great rewards, but what of those who cannot?
As Sophocles once said, Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse
(Schlain, 2012, p.4). Ahead for Americans is a thrilling yet complex world which will have to be
thoughtfully navigated. Education, the work world, personal livesall will be dramatically
different than they are today. While learning will become more personalized and more effective,
there will never be an end to it, transforming the fundamental goals of an education. Success at
work will require a more thorough understanding of other languages and cultures as working and
competing with people from around the world becomes routine. Information tools which will
become indispensable include open source educational materials of all kinds, language
translators, analytical and project management software, primary document online repositories
and personal and professional learning network aggregators, all of which will be supported by
ubiquitous internet access in even the most remote of regions.
In the past few years, there have been sophisticated breakthroughs in many areas of
digital technology. The personal 3D printer, wearable computers, and direct retina display are
just a few. The number of data points collected by ones cell phone is already enough for
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software programs predictive analytics to predict the onset of depression by modeling changes
in sleep behaviours (sic) and social relationships over time (Afeyan, 2014). Siri and Jelly Bean
mark the beginning of the virtual assistant or Natural User Interface (NUI), who may ultimately
serve as students personal tutors or translators.

Recently, Microsofts top scientist Richard F. Rashid demonstrated a computer program
that displayed his words as he spoke. In the pauses between each sentence, the software
translated his speech into written and then spoken Mandarin, which was heard in his own
voice a language he has never uttered. These scenarios point to a future in which
virtual assistants will be equipped with more advanced capabilities that will help people
navigate a world where collaboration across borders and overseas is increasingly the
norm. (NMC Horizon Report, 2014, p. 49)

Despite the incredible breakthroughs in other areas, one of the most ground-breaking
advancements in recent years has been the isolation and marketing of graphene, the worlds first
known 2D material. Stronger than diamond, 300 times stronger than steel, and a better conductor
of electricity than copper, graphene is less than an atom thick, currently the thinnest material
known t exist, and despite its strength, is flexible. Eventually, scientists say, graphene may mean
the end of silicon. Now, rather than having different technologies for different needs, for
example, a laptop for storage, a desktop for heavy graphics use, a smart phone, or tablet, layers
of graphene stacked together could make the same device do the work of all, morphing its shape
into the form the user requires at any given moment. Graphenes discovery, after over a century
of scientific searching, earned physicists Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov of the
University of Manchester the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics.
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Some of the most profound changes will come in education, not the least because it is the
industry which has been waiting the longest for it. While a doctor who practiced 150 years ago
could not step into an operating room and perform surgery today, a teacher from the same time
period would likely not have the same difficulty upon entering a classroom. This has begun to
change in the last ten years, and the pace of these changes is picking up steam.
What does the proliferation of digital technology, particularly mobile technologies, mean
for education? By 2035, students will conduct much, if not most, of their work at least partially
online. They will collaborate with advisors (some of whom they may never actually meet face to
face) to create weekly, monthly, and yearly learning goals, the mastery of which may be
demonstrated in any number of ways: apprenticeships in the community, starting a non-profit or
for-profit business, building a robot, isolating DNA, participating in various competitions, and
delivering a real-time and online presentation on the process, writing, filming, and editing a film
in response to reading a classic text, testing out of certain subjects via online assessments for
which they prepare by completing MOOCs, use holograms to complete science experiments or
technical projects, or a host of other kinds of integrated learning that technology makes feasible.
They may meet for presentation days or science lab with other students if they wish, work
together at the local library or community centers, but older students, at least, will no longer be
evaluated based on the number of hours they have attended class, and will not be required to
report to an actual classroom.
These changes will carry up to the university level. While many of the best known
universities will continue to successfully offer a residential experience to young students from
18-22, there will be far more institutions of higher education catering to non-traditional students
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whose needs are different. In order to offer a lower cost degree program to those already in the
workforce, for example, some universities will offer competency-based learning similar to the
online programs offered through Western Governors University (WGU), where students are all
enrolled in six month terms at a fixed tuition rate and can complete as many units as they are
able to take in that time. Currently, a new consortium of universities offering such programs is
being built. Eighteen universities, including Brandman University, Excelsior University,
Northern Arizona University, Southern New Hampshire University, and The University of
Wisconsin make up the first cohort of the Comepetenc Based Education Network (CBEN)
(Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014).
Students will be able to apply a number of different technologies to create learning
artifacts. There will be learning games (some taking place in virtual worlds, some in more
immediate, physical ones) scheduled every day which students can elect to play. Some of these
games will be short term, but others will be long-term, intricate games with an entire semesters
worth of skills built in, or social issues games where they must solve a complex problem.
Students will not be required to remain in one classroom or even to spend the day on school
grounds. Parents will have the option of requiring younger students to remain on campus during
the day, though the majority of them will also work from home much of the time. The entire
process will be guided by a team of learning coaches and content experts whose training is
interdisciplinary, and the sole teacher standing in front of her class to deliver a lesson, todays
version of education, will be gone. The student will move on to more difficult work as they meet
their learning goals (demonstrate competence) and they can graduate when they are ready,
whether that is 10 or 20 years-old. They will be expected to continue their education and perhaps
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attend these learning centers again with their own children, to help coach and guide a new
generation.
Finally, the primary purpose of an educationto learn contentwhile not disappearing
entirely, will shift to focus on helping students build the evaluation skills necessary to sift
through the flood of information with which they will need to deal.
Megan Ellinger, a user experience analyst for a research organization based in
Washington, DC, noted that it is becoming more difficult to find truth. The negative
learning behavior and cognition I see occurring by 2020 is rooted in our society's ability
to assess information at a deeper level and to determine what is fact and what is fiction,
she wrote. Its an issue that is not unique to future generations, but one I imagine will
become more challenging as we generate more collective intelligence. (The Pew
Report, 2012)
This warning is one which we must heedwhile the internet brings us open source materials,
low or no cost textbooks (http://www.opentextbookstore.com/catalog.php), websites which allow
students to view original texts (The British Library:
http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/virtualbooks/index.html), hear authors speak
(http://thebigread.org/) about their work, even watch science experiments
(http://www.stevespanglerscience.com/lab/videos) or ask a question of a scientist
(http://newton.dep.anl.gov/aasquesv.htm), it can also encourage group-think. Wikipedia is a
powerful encyclopedia, but it privileges what is already known over what is newly discovered
(Messer-Cruse, 2012). In many ways, group think (often found in crowd-sourcing) is a new,
more efficient way to decry those many feel are elitist, and dismiss their often lucid and well
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supported arguments. Who will students believe? Who should they cite in a research paper, and
why? Sorting through arguments to decide which deserve their attention will be a major
educational objective. The point of an education will be to teach students to teach themselves, to
become autodidacts. This change will inform all areas of our lives.
The workplace, too will have undergone drastic transformations. Huge corporate offices
and the resulting overhead will be largely gone. Telecommuting, whether from home or small
regional centers will be the norm, and because most new homes will be built with an office space
(likely with walls that double as computer screens and are manipulated by gesture and voice
commands, at least until direct retina screening becomes common) workers will not be tethered
to any one location. Using incredibly powerful devices from book sized tablets to virtual reality
devices which will be small enough to attach to eyeglasses, parents will tend to business from
kids soccer games, doing the dishes, standing in line for a play, or camping in the woods.
Workers will always be connected, even more than they are today, especially because many will
be unable to find jobs which pay enough to support families and will create their own businesses
as freelance subject matter experts in one area or another, contractors who may earn a good deal
of money but will have to purchase their own insurance and pay heavy taxes. The confluence of
self-employment and the connections facilitated by technology will lead to an always in
mentality when it comes to ones career.
Some people will take this connectedness to the extreme and will become literally one
with their technology, but most will still want the option (rarely exercised) of unplugging.
While people will be less connected to place, they will be more connected to work. Life and
work will be difficult to separate and employer expectation more difficult to manage.
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Because of the changes in school and in work, home life will be fundamentally altered as
well. Parents will need to be more involved in facilitating their childrens education. More than
choosing a school or going over homework, parents will assist in the selection of their guidance
teams, their teachers, many of whom may be in business for themselves, and help fashion
learning goals for their children. They will need to monitor and assess their progress regularly.
This will be a boon to those students whose parents are interested in their success, but it may
harm children whose parents who are either unable or unwilling to offer this level of assistance.
More learning and work will be done in the home, leading to new home designs. Where
homes were once built with formal living and dining rooms, new homes will be built with office
and learning spaces with an eye towards good lighting and pleasant backdrops for video
meetings. We will spend less time shopping, cooking, and cleaning thanks to smart houses that
will self-clean, develop shopping lists, keep track of inventory, and do some of the cooking.
Housing developments will be built near existing airports so that working parents can commute
to far-flung locations when necessary and still be home for dinner. Airports will build office
suites so that employees of international firms can rent rooms on site as needed and maximize
their time together.
What ties all of these innovations together is a trend which has been noted in the New
Media Consortiums 2012 Horizon Report: People expect to be able to work, learn, and study
whenever and wherever they want to. Many of the new tools available online will require
additional legislation to protect privacy and those who create will have to have their work
protected in some way, requiring sweeping updates in intellectual property lawsand this is just
the tip of a very large iceberg. With great promise comes great responsibilitythe technological
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changes society is currently experiencing are indeed vastbut are they cursed? There will
certainly be a dizzying array of tools and toys in 2035, but the lives people lead will not be any
less complicated than they are today.

References

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