Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance Episode 1 Part 6 pps

Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance (pre-publication on-line version) 87

personality. Over the next two decades, as nanotechnology facilitates rapid improvement of

microelectronics, personal digital assistants (PDAs) are likely to evolve into smart portals to a whole

world of information sources, acting as context aware personal brokers interacting with other systems

maintained by corporations, governments, educational institutions, and individuals. Today’s email

and conference call systems could evolve into multi-media telepresence communication environments.

Global Positioning System (GPS) units could become comprehensive guides to the individual’s

surroundings, telling the person his or her location and also locating everything of interest in the

immediate locale.

To accomplish these practical human goals, we must invest in fundamental research on how to

translate human needs, feelings, beliefs, attitudes, and values into forms that can guide the myriad

devices and embedded systems that will be our artificial servants of the future. We must understand

how interacting with and through machines will affect our own sense of personhood as we create ever

more personable machines. As they become subtle reflections of ourselves, these technologies will

translate information between people who are separated by perspective, interests, and even language.

Without the guidance provided by the combined NBIC sciences, technology will fail to achieve its

potential for human benefit. Multidisciplinary research to humanize computing and communications

technology will expand the social competence of individuals and increase the practical effectiveness of

groups, social networks, and organizations.

4. Learning How to Learn

We need to explore fresh instructional approaches, based in the NBIC sciences, to help us learn how to

learn. Such educational tools as interactive multimedia, graphical simulations, and game-like virtual

reality will enhance learning not merely from kindergarten through graduate school but also

throughout the entire life course in school, in corporations, and at home. The results of past efforts

have often been disappointing, because they failed to draw upon a sufficiently broad and deep

scientific base. For example, instructional software typically lacked a firm grounding in the findings

of cognitive science about how people actually think and learn (Bransford, Brown, and Cocking 1999).

In the future, everyone will need to learn new skills and fundamental knowledge throughout life, often

in fields connected to mathematics, engineering, and the sciences. Thus we will need new kinds of

curricula, such as interactive virtual reality simulations run over the Internet that will allow a student

anywhere to experience the metabolic processes that take place within a living cell, as if seeing them

from a nanoscale perspective. New, dynamic ways to represent mathematical logic could be

developed based on a correct understanding of how the human mind processes concepts like quantity

and implication, allowing more people to learn mathematics more quickly, thoroughly, and

insightfully. The social interaction resulting from multiuser video games can be harnessed as a strong

learning motivator, if they are designed for the user’s demographic and cultural background and can

infuse the learning with mystery, action, and drama. The goal would be to revolutionize science,

mathematics, and engineering education through experiences that are emotionally exciting,

substantively realistic, and based on accurate cognitive science knowledge about how and why people

learn.

5. Enhanced Tools for Creativity

As technology becomes ever more complex, engineering design becomes an increasingly difficult

challenge. For example, it is extremely costly to create large software systems, and the major

bottlenecks reducing their effectiveness are unreliability and inefficiency. Similar problems beset

systems for large-scale organization administration, supply chain management, industrial design, mass

media, and government policy making. We can anticipate that future industries in biotechnology and

nanotechnology will present unprecedented design challenges.

88 B. Expanding Human Cognition and Communication

Investment in research and development of wholly new industrial design methods will pay great

dividends. Among these, biologically inspired techniques, such as evolutionary design methods

analogous to genetic algorithms, are especially promising. Terascale and petascale computer

simulations are excellent approaches for many design problems, but for the foreseeable future the cost

of creating a facility to do such work would be prohibitive for universities and most companies.

Therefore, a national center should be established for high-end engineering design simulations. This

facility could be linked to a network of users and specialized facilities, providing a distributed design

environment for advanced research in engineering. Good models for creating the National Center for

Engineering Design would be the supercomputer networks established by the National Science

Foundation: the National Computational Science Alliance, the National Partnership for Advanced

Computational Infrastructure, and the new Terascale Computing System.

At the same time, radically new methods would enhance small-scale design activities by a wide range

of individuals and teams in such fields as commercial art, entertainment, architecture, and product

innovation. New developments in such areas as visual language, personalized design, designing

around defects, and the cognitive science of engineering could be extremely valuable. Breakthroughs

in design could become self-reinforcing, as they energize the economic and technical feedback loops

that produce rapid scientific and technological progress.

Statements and Visions

Participants in the human cognition and communication panel contributed a number of statements,

describing the current situation and suggesting strategies for building upon it, as well as transformative

visions of what could be accomplished in ten or twenty years through a concentrated effort. The

contributions include statements about societal opportunities and challenges, sensory systems,

networking architecture, spatial cognition, visual language, and “companion” computers, as well as

visions on predicting social behavior, design complexity, enhancing personal area sensing,

understanding the brain, stimulating innovation and accelerating technological convergence.

References

Bransford, J.D., A.L. Brown, and R.R. Cocking, eds. 1999. How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and

school. Washington D.C.: National Research Council.

Druckman, D., and R.A. Bjork, eds. 1992. In the mind‘s eye: Enhancing human performance. Washington,

D.C.: National Research Council.

_____. 1994. Learning, remembering, believing: Enhancing human oerformance. Washington, D.C.: National

Research Council.

Food and Drug Administration. 1998. Guidance for the submission of premarket notifications for magnetic

resonance diagnostic devices. U.S. Food and Drug Administration, November 14 1998:

http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/ode/mri340.pdf.

Kurzweil, R. 1999. The age of spiritual machines: When computers exceed human intelligence. New York:

Viking.