It is 100% certain that human learning can not match the speed of machines and artificial intelligence. Could training a new generation of kids to be inattentive a sure way to ensure their inevitable redundancy?
Should we not be asking how can we out-sit (as opposed to out-run) the coming exponential growth of IT calculations and memory?
Does over emphasis on early literacy and numeracy destroy Children's imagination and capacity to develop their own ontologies?
Human Sensing as Lifelong Skills
In stillness, one could learnt to look and not just see. Listen and not just hearing. Tasting and not just eating. Digesting and not just consuming. Breathing and not just inhaling/ exhaling. Feeling and not just touching.
These are the lifelong skills, that kids could learn as guides in the land of the blind, where the one eyed is king... because it's in the looking and not seeing. For cultivating capability of insight, one needs the 3rd eye. This is where the machines may not so readily compete. So far, their eyes are only for surveillance.
To see through the muddy tides and chaotic flux, one needs to understand the meta-rationalities driving the ebbs and flows of the tides. Even madness has its rationalities. They may be just concealed, and there are rationales for that too...
Is there a risk these days that kids have ontologies dictated to them through very early literacy and numeracy programmes?
If so, what happens when ontological flexibility and freedom is perhaps what gives children resilience against turbo flux?
At 6-7yrs, I spent much of that time watching flux, namely sitting by the banks of the Mekong, whilst the adults prepare for ways to escape the regime upheaval post 1975-Saigon.
How might this seeming non-productive, yet mindful and stillful activity become possibly my competitive and collaborative edge?
In Saigon, or rather Cholon, I never needed Vietnamese. But I would role play as a wet market Vietnamese woman, flogging my doll's thighs as chicken drumsticks. I would approximate Vietnamese intonation into my gibberish.
Only when I was in the Mekong, did I really picked up Vietnamese. Either one pulls off as some Vietnamese peasant, or one needs to shut up. Being an extroverted and inquisitive child, coupled with the fact that my niche responsibility was to buy those glutinous rice in banana leaves breakfast for everyone, because my aunty the cook dreaded crossing those palm trees log bridges without hand rails, it was my job to really shop in the wet market early morning, though I was no more than 7yrs.
I did volunteer rather excitedly, as I did to come to Mekong. I mean no school!! Who would have guessed it would become one of the most formative and educational experiences in my already diverse life experiences.
Afterall, at that age, I persuaded and led my first engineering project. With close to 15 siblings and cousins, we built our first bridge with kids size hand rails that would allow us to cross the ditch. All these from firewood. Instead of jumping and slipping, thereby getting muddy, we could cross to the neighbouring fields.
How exciting and exhilarating was that? Among some of my cousins (I had no friends outside of cousins), their dad being a gifted carpenter and prototyper, they went on to become engineers. And those who lived long like me in the Mekong, I have no doubt they would go on to develop a highly nuanced. environmental ethic.
Still the Mekong was stronger than our structural foundation work. It was mud after all. Our bridge lasted a total of 2 days. As for me, this was the beginning of transmedia production, virtual reality (more from having privileged back stage access to the travelling Chinese Opera production at 3yrs, realising real people were behind the magic), plus artificial and emotional intelligence are all part engineering, part art, part dreaming, and part realising.
Plus most importantly, we had next to no guidance in terms of developing our ontologies.
Andre, thanks for grabbing my attention to your work. I will certainly take your thoughts on board. I welcome anyone who have thoughts and ideas to add to this project. Uncertainty is the only constant variable of certainty. Change is the one thing that is constant. No doubt, what final "form" that these ideas and thoughts would take me, you, us is that we are indeed in one country, multiple systems.
What I will also say there's this perception that there are finite ideas and only certain ones can be monetised. Me, I am not so worried about that. I think my own compass is being true, relevant to me. If that's relevant to others, great. But the point is that no film director, nor artist, nor writer will come up with identical works. The same is to be said about academic papers.
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