Moore's Law applied to education: foreseeable changes

Sudden growth

Moore's Law, stated in 1965 by Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel, came from an observation explaining that the number of components (transistors, resistors, capacitors, diodes) that could be integrated into a circuit doubled every two years. This prediction will eventually reach its limit, but it is still valid to this day, beating the predicted deadlines more than once. Engineers were limited to silicon on a surface, but we are coming to carbon in a volume and soon we will touch electron spins and photons in quantum computers.

If we look instead at computing power and memory capacity, Moore's Law, which could more simply be stated as exponential growth, continues to apply.

By extension, it affects various activities, such as Internet traffic, the extent of networks, the installed memory, the number of pixels of the screens, the number of cameras feeding the network, etc. From there to infer effects on our activities, it's just a step.

This law describes a phenomenon that starts out almost imperceptible and is suddenly very important. If we look at it on the right scale (logarithmic), it is quite regular and predictable.

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Any industry that is not evolving at the pace of Moore's Law is ripe for disruption.
Aaron Levie co-founder of Box

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In the Stone Age, the knowledge created and the time spent passing it on and learning it was marginal.  Handling fire, discovering knitting or agriculture, putting together a sufficiently strong wheel, these advances took millennia to reach a stage of mastery. What about medicine, administration or economy? We are not talking here about time spent passing on superstitions but applicable knowledge.

Until the 19th century, education was reserved for a very small minority of people; during the twentieth century, education was democratized up to primary and then secondary school. Twelve years of study to acquire the basic knowledge needed to function in this society is now a minimum standard.

Moore for Education

Seen from the perspective of Moore's Law, the amount of knowledge transmitted increases exponentially: if there are 10 of us, we have 55 possible lines of communication, but if there are 100 of us, that's over 5 000 lines of communication. Imagine the number when there are 7 billion of us.

Moreover, the number of structuring discoveries is related to several factors, the most important of which is obviously the number of living people.  7 000 000 000 networked people obviously make more discoveries than 500 000 isolated people scattered over five continents.

In this chart, I had fun correlating the number of people on earth, the number of discoveries (the same discoveries are constantly being re-learned), and the time to learn them, at an average of 2 days per discovery.

That holds up pretty well until 1960.  From then on, continuing education seems an obvious necessity.

If you add connections and communications between people, the acceleration is probably even faster. The number of messages exchanged today has absolutely nothing to do with the days of the telephone, fax and postal mail.

As for speed, before mail was sent electronically, by plane and train, it was sent by ship and horse. There is also acceleration of transmission: from a few meters per minute to almost the speed of light.

Changing education in time

Thus, the idea of school as a stage in life is bound to change to that of a place of lifelong learning, a "source" would probably be a more appropriate concept. We will remain connected to learning centers all our lives. At the rate things are going, this need, not to say distress, to learn in order to keep up with the times, if only to keep one's cell phone working or one's job, is becoming evident to many people.
All training and communication modalities are called upon to increase their efficiency. Taking 12 years to get over 20% functional illiterates should give us targets for change. Some learning can be achieved in terms of days and months, not years, nor in pain or boredom, nor at the cost of a house.

The amount of knowledge to be acquired calls for a better structuring, among other things by taking advantage of technologies. Cross-curricular" learning is an idea that deserves to evolve further. Some knowledge is more necessary and used than others depending on the field and the environment.

Continuing to extrapolate, we can also predict that, if it is already impossible to acquire an encyclopedic culture, we will see ever greater specialization and mutually dependent organizations. We will have to learn all the time and consider the effect of our decisions on those with whom we are in relationship. And we are in relationship with many people. This is one of those cross-cutting skills that is needed.

It's changing faster and faster, but that change is predictable.  I don't know at what square in the chess game the king realized he could no longer honor his promise in grains of rice or wheat, but I'm sure he saw it coming.

Still, it would be ironic if in education we didn't take into account this change in our function.


References:

When Exponential Progress Becomes Reality - Niv Dror - Medium
https://medium.com/@nivo0o0/when-exponential-technological-progress-becomes-our-reality-74acafd65e26

The grain of wheat and the chessboard or the power of numbers - Color Science
http://couleur-science.eu/?d=2014/08/21/16/48/55-le-grain-de-ble-et-lechiquier-ou-la-puissance-des-nombres

Gordon Moore - Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Moore

Wheat and chessboard problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem