Tomorrow's world
July 2008
Professor Baroness Susan Greenfield is a neuroscientist, writer, broadcaster and a member of the House of Lords. She is currently Professor of Synaptic Pharmacology at the University of Oxford as well as Director of the Royal Institution and Chancellor of Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh. Her work includes the book ‘Tomorrow's People: How 21st Century Technology is Changing the Way We Think and Feel’ and it has attracted much attention in the media - where she has been mainly represented as being fearful of what the future and technology might bring for the human race. Here, through an interview with Futurelab Learning Researcher, Richard Sandford, we delve a little further into her views...
VISION: In your work, particularly at the end of your book ‘Tomorrow’s People’, you seem to give the impression that you are worried that technology - and in particular screen technologies - will remove our ability to think for ourselves. Would that be fair?
SG: As a broad-brush generalisation, yes. I’m aware that much can be gained from working with screen technologies, but what concerns me is if children are interacting with the screen in an unsupervised way. It’s not so much that I think screens are bad, but that I think we’re not harnessing them to their full potential. I’d like to draw a distinction between process and content - currently it seems that there’s too much emphasis on process at the expense of content and meaning. Focusing on how you reach a particular goal is very different from understanding the significance of that goal in a world where you can draw on huge numbers of resources. As for the emphasis on screen technologies; they’re the most pervasive interface technology at the moment, although other 3D technologies - such as brain implants, nano-technological devices, smart technologies and interactive computing in clothing - may dominate in, say, 10 years’ time.
VISION: In your speech to the House of Lords on 20 April 2006 on ‘Education: Science and Technology’ (text available from www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld199697/ldhansrd/pdvn/lds06/text/60420-18.htm), a concern seems to be that children don’t have the knowledge and skills required for successful living in the 21st century. Given that the world is changing incredibly rapidly and that we now have unprecedented access to information, how do you think education needs to change in order to fit learners’ needs?
SG: The first thing is that, as far as I’m aware, there’s no consensus on what we want children to learn. We need to decide what we want to do, what will best equip young people to be citizens of the 21st century. Most people would feel unhappy about us adopting the values of the 20th century. I think things have changed so much that we really need to address the issues of what will make for the best education in today’s world. What do we want people to learn? What do we want them to be? My own bias, being a 20th century person, is that I like to think of individuals gaining fulfilment, reward and satisfaction out of seeing connections and understanding things. My own view is it’s a very rewarding aspect of human nature to be able to do that.
VISION: What do you imagine parents want from their children’s education?
SG: If I was a parent, I’d want my children to feel fulfilled, I’d like him or her to be a worthwhile member of society, so that whatever they did or were trying to do was useful to people. I’d also like them to have a sense of their own identity; to be individuals. But what kinds of skills will give people that? It’s too much of a leap of faith to think, if you just train children to interact with computers efficiently, that all those things will happen automatically; I don’t think they will.
VISION: Your work talks a lot about technology being a potential threat to our sense of individuality. You have this concern that the personal ego is something precious that we should hang on to and protect from threats; as something that is under pressure perhaps from change.
SG: Your sense of privacy is closely tied in with your sense of identity because your sense of identity, your private ego, is something that no one else can hack into or encroach upon. It’s something that you show to the world as much or as little as you want, in the version that you want. But if that becomes transparent, as schizophrenic patients often experience, then people feel very unhappy because their individuality is threatened. We need to look very carefully at how we can preserve that notion of privacy.
VISION: My final question is: Where does the brain end?
SG: It depends on what criteria you use. I very much believe in the embodied brain, not the disembodied brain - as something that interfaces with the rest of the body, and interacts in the cohesion that we call a person. But I also agree with the concept that, since we are connected to a network via screen technologies, that individual’s ideas are distributed and developed among the different nodes. So, in a sense, one could say that that brain has extended throughout that network.