How to futureproof your kids？
Is your child already thinking about what subjects to pursue at school? Or are they younger? Perhaps you’re wondering whether to enroll them inMandarin Lessons after reception class? Or should that be coding?What’s best? Free time is finite and concentration spans are limited, yet the options almost infinite. How to choose wisely?
On a glorious early summer’s day this year I had breakfast with a senior executive from one of the world’s digital behemoths. We nibbled croissants and discussed the way the future might pan out, particularly the fact that more and more of us are using our voices to control our computers. The pace of change is so startling, he said, that voice commands will soon overtake the keyboard as our main method of interacting with the web. In a matter of years, in other words, man will principally be talking to machine.
Stop for a second and think about what that means. In the past few years, voice recognition technology (using computational methods called “deep neural networks” or DNNs) has improved so hugely that it is now highly reliable, can understand accents and languages, and has such a thorough semantic understanding of the world that it can deduce what you mean even if you do not express yourself perfectly as you speak.
Couple this with the increasing proficiency of algorithmic language translation and it leads to a dramatic conclusion: if you are now learning a language to communicate in a purely functional, impersonal way, then you are expending a lot of effort on something that is soon likely to be redundant.
EQ vs IQ
While researching this series, I conducted an informal “futureproofing” survey, putting to the experts – from consultant doctors to computer scientists – a series of binary questions that articulated some of the conundrums today’s parents face. The first was “Mandarin or mandolin?” – by which I meant, given the pace of technological change, will it stand your child in better stead to learn a language or an instrument?
页:
[1]