james burke

• "the other way to go with this problem, is to try and catch up by trying to match the brain and the technology better. because now the technology is beginning to simply "mimic" the capabilities of the brain by becoming semi-intelligent, heuristic, distributed, low-power, high-storage, cheap.
  
  the catch-up approach i'm talking involves the other key effect of these technologies that i haven't mentioned yet. the way the new systems are being able to bring any kind of education to anybody from a dallas high-rise, to a mud hutt outside bangalore. i won't talk about distant learning 'cause you know all about that. but maybe we also need to introduce some new educational mode you might say, the products of what we can do with the new technology to lay alongside our reductionist systems to act as adjuncts.
  
  soon, in terms of what people do with their lives the software will be doing the old reductionist things anyway that would take the pencil-chewing human beings a lifetime to learn. and it seems to me not a good way to prepare for what that's going to do to us, is to go on limiting education to the kind originally designed to train medieval priests. in which you were judged intelligent or stupid, because you passed or failed a set of tests . designed to exclude all but the very few.
  
  and that's very few as in *western* very few. any minute now, american technology will make the shabang of technology i'm talking about, a global affair. and i'm not talking about the irrelevent small affair of "which company's going to get the bigger slice of the global market" or "how you sell your gizmos in a hundred different cultures." but the scary possibility that the globaly community is not necessarily lie down and do it the western way. the vast illiterate majority out there is still a kaliedescope of diversity with their roots firmly in their cultures. and information technology is going to enhance that diversity, empower it, support it, foster it, make it valuable.
  
  in ways it could never before, when the best we could do was very crude stuff: colonize the country, make them all speak english and wear wigs in their law courts. we never managed that with you guys. but that's all we didn't manage. "