July 2017


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I was recently invited to speak at the Rotary Club San Fernando South on the topic “The future of UWI in the Cyberspace of 2050.” Trying to imagine a future over thirty years away is always extremely risky and, some would say, close to impossible.

If it is one thing this past fifty years has taught us, is that the speed with which things change and are replaced is far more rapid than anything the world has known before. It means there is no way anyone can realistically paint a portrait of 2030, far less 2050.

What we do know is that the citizen of tomorrow has to be flexible and savvy to be able to survive.

The vision that the UWI team and I now share is that survival is by far the most important objective for any education system. We believe that our citizens must be educated and trained to meet and beat every challenge that comes their way.

But for us to get to that level of self-determination, we need to have a vision.

I took the risk of giving a forecast of the technologies available in 2050 based largely on some of today’s emerging technologies. One thing we can say for sure is that if we maintain the current trajectory, and if the world survives to2050, the technology of that time will be unimaginably more advanced.

I will comment on just two aspects but we know these advances will bring new social challenges. Time and space do not permit me to delve too deeply on this aspect.

Transportation will be superfast, spanning hitherto inaccessible physical spaces, from the deep ocean to immediate space. There may be wars fought over extra-planetary real estate. Star Trek-inspired teleportation technology (“beam me up Scotty”) may well be at the point of commercial deployment. This technology is based on local disassembly and precise remote reassembly at the molecular level. It is not as farfetched as one might think, as ongoing experiments have opened doors to its possibility. If this technology comes to be, it would certainly disrupt the paradigm of physical transportation. It could revolutionize medical treatment and, as for any powerful technology, could make crime fighting significantly more challenging.

If that is not thought-provoking enough, if the technology is successfully applied to the teleportation of live humans, religions everywhere may all be driven to a state of disarray. How does one “beam” the essence of life?

Look at communications. In 2050 we should be able to simultaneously transmit to all five senses. Currently we communicate sound and sight. Over the past 10 years haptic technology, or tactile feedback, has allowed us to communicate touch. Haptics feedback has already successfully been used in remote surgery. I am pretty convinced that, based on what has already been experimented with or gone through preliminary field tests, by 2050 we would be able to communicate using smell and taste, and would have perfected touch or tactile transmission, pushing virtual interaction to its limit without the kludgy tools used today in virtual reality tools and games. Experimentation into the transmission of emotion has already begun at the MIT Media Labs. Movie experiences would be far different from what it is now.

Communication would be further enhanced by nanotechnology implants that tie into the human brain. If this comes to be, then it should also be possible to programme, de-programme and re-programme knowledge and skill into an individual – or transfer knowledge, skill and even personalities to computers and machines (androids and robots).

Even now, with the democratization of knowledge consequent to the proliferation of online courses, as one Australian University Vice-Chancellor stated in the Ernst & Young 2012 report, “Our major competitor in ten years’ time will be Google…if we’re still alive!”

However, the use of these bio implants would automate education at the knowledge transfer level. My colleagues in the education sector should take serious note of this possibility. I am secretly hoping that our young, keen computer scientists at UWI might also feature prominently in the global technological landscape based on work I have seen. For instance, they have just produced a suite of apps called AgriNeTT to help farmers manage their finances, monitor crop production, view soil and land information, check the suitability of land for planting specific crops and to monitor the daily prices of crops.

Automated learning would revolutionize distance learning so that it would not have the high dropout rates as at present. By and large, most of the current models do not fully accommodate students as social beings. Furthermore, in that world where knowledge transfer would supposedly be more accessible and effective, existing universities would have to re-engineer their processes and policies to do the following:

1. Provide a focal point for certification and recognition of academic achievement, regardless of how attained. The emphasis will be on the ability to apply knowledge – a competency/skills-based paradigm as opposed to a credit-based paradigm.
   
   
2. Focus much more on being creators of new knowledge. Teaching and research also would have to encourage more critical thinking among our students
   
   
3. Provide a richer student experience. As said by Evans Cameron, CTO for Education at Microsoft in 2012, “If there’s anything that will be significantly different 25 years from today, it’s that people won’t go to school for knowledge. They will go to school for an experience that they couldn’t otherwise have gotten online.” That experience will include “— not just facts and figures, but also analysis, interpretation, and curation of knowledge” (Ernst & Young 2012 Report).
   
   
4. Universities will have to align more strongly with industry and commerce as well as governments to build mutually beneficial partnerships. These alignments and partnerships, captured in the Triple Helix for sustainable development, would engage what we call the innovation spectrum, typified on one end by joint R&D programmes for improving product and process and, on the other, by commercialization of new research ideas. Students would naturally be involved in this process.
   
   
5. Operate in the global space by partnering with universities worldwide. The gap establishing the “best” universities would have widened. As one Australian V-C noted, “There will be 15-20 independent, global brands … the rest will be playing for the silver medal.” Experts suggest that the select group will include the usual suspects – the Ivy Leagues of the world.

The UWI’s Strategic Plan has identified the potential realities and has set its sight on significant growth, with the objective of “Revitalising Caribbean Development.” Its implementation plan includes a range of initiatives: joint projects with industry – we will soon sign an MOU to provide for a “hack space” of sorts in the Faculty of Engineering, creation of posts of Professors in Practice for placement of industry captains in the university system, online delivery to be significantly expanded, and plans for the expansion of our Centre of Export Entrepreneurship and Innovation to leverage all of UWI capability to provide a conduit for moving student, staff and stakeholder ideas to reality.

Close your eyes and try to imagine 2020, 2030, 2040, 2050. It can be an exciting vision if you choose to be part of creating it. I encourage everyone to try this exercise. It was, for me, a bit more difficult than I first thought it would be. But it helps, because when you visualize the future, it allows you to set your strategy to enable our young ones to better prepare for it.

EDITORIAL TEAM

Campus Principal: Professor Brian Copeland
Director of Marketing and Communications: Dr. Dawn-Marie De Four-Gill
Editor : Vaneisa Baksh

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