Computing with our Ears

Well, I'm in Copenhagen now - quite an adventure. Someone said to me the other day that men usually have midlife crises by buying sports cars and having an affairs. I've gone to do a post-doc in Copenhagen instead! What will it bring? I don't know - but that's what makes it interesting. 

Implementation research is the real focus of the work I am doing here, which is a off-shoot of the design-based research which now dominates a lot of methodology in education departments. Frankly, DBR has become the new "grounded theory" (that's not a good thing). I'm looking at implementation of digitalization in the curriculum. But implementation is a real issue, because what is the point of any research in education if it doesn't actually make things better? And that's both hard to do, and intellectually very challenging. After all, implementation is usually thought of as a journey from a present to an imagined future: but both the present and the future are constructs... and there is never a linear journey.

Its obvious that universities are getting left behind by technology. For some reason they've managed to keep on teaching the same old stuff with new fangled tools, patted themselves on the back for reluctantly bringing in a few digital platforms in a pandemic, but carried on doing the same old stuff. Technology, meanwhile, moves on - much of it completely under the radar of the universities.

AI provides a good example of what's happening. Universities are in a panic to "do" AI, and tech corporations are only too happy to give them simple tools like chatbots to help them tick the box. But none of this addresses what AI is, and what is happening to technology. 

AI is anticipatory technology. Indeed, all of the new technical developments we are seeing are anticipatory in one form or another: quantum computing is in many ways similar to our convolutional neural networks which can process images so effectively - they are both fractal and both anticipatory. New powerful simulation tools and visualisation tools, which make increasingly complex calculations on microscopic particle systems are also fractal and recursive in the same way. And with new hardware possibilities like Field Programmable Gate Arrays, and indeed the quantum computer programming environments, the specification of fractal and recursive hardware through software, is becoming a reality, which will mean physical artefacts with anticipatory powers.

But the really important point is that we, as biological systems, are also anticipatory. So where is the interface between artificial anticipation and biological anticipation. That is the real question facing education and its institutions. And this isn't a question that sits above any curriculum or topic. Increasingly, it will become the topic. 

Part of me feels a deep sense of hope in what is happening in technology. Anticipatory technology is not new - indeed it is ancient. Musical instruments are the most powerful anticipatory technologies we possess. We've never quite mastered how to harness their power to help us manage our society (although maybe the Greek theatre was precisely an attempt to do this). Stafford Beer intuited something like this in his experiments to use biological systems for management. But the musical world and the quantum world are very closely related. As the latter becomes manifest, the former will reveal itself it a new light. That might give us a fighting chance of organising ourselves differently.