#future literacy

Thinking Outside of the Evolutionary Box: How Arzeda is Re-Imagining Proteins, the Building Blocks of Life

This article is part of a series about how OS Fund (OSF) companies are radically redefining our future by rewriting the operating systems of life. Or as we prefer to think about it: Step 1: Put a dent into the universe. And Step 2: Rewrite the universe. You can see the full OSF collection here and read more about Building a Biological Immune System.

In contemplating the future, I love imagining…

Futurists advocate for future literacy. Others address health or science literacy, with reading and writing is now considered fundamental literacies.

While possible but unknown tomorrows unfold in our imagination, they still have two things in common: (1) they are uncertain; and (2) preparing for them is ambiguous. At the same time, most of us have difficulties dealing with ambiguity. 

 In this context, let’s say, the year is 20018, eighteen thousand years ahead of now. What literacies would prepare us for 20018? By that time, we could be back to an agrarian era, or become Martians, or non-existent altogether. Who knows? Breathing might become the literacy of those times. What would prepare us for such eras, seems to be our ability to deal with the ambiguity awaiting us. Shouldn’t we think about ambiguity as critical literacy? How might such literacy be developed?

Future literacy starts with cultivating the minds for the future, Howard Gardner described 6 types of mentality in his book 5 Minds for the Future;

1. The global view mind.

2. The disciplined mind.

3. The synthesizing mind.

4. The creating mind.

5. The respectful mind.

6. The ethical mind.

The Five Minds and the Future

In conclusion to his book, Gardner suggested that these 5 minds are likely to be crucial in a world marked by the hegemony of science and technology, global transmission of huge amounts of information, handling of routine tasks by computers and robots, and ever increasing contacts of all sorts between diverse population. Those who succeed in cultivating the pentad of minds are most likely to survive.

Ideally, of course, teachers, trainers and supervisors should cherish and embody these kinds of minds. In reality, however, many individuals in positions of influence are deficient in one or more kinds of minds. They should be the first to be trained first. And this is exactly how there is a huge gap between the demand for the qualities of future oriented leadership and the actual deficiency or inadequacy of them. 

Cultivating the future literacies have to be started to address, reduce and hopefully close the existing gaps because deficiencies and abstinence only reinforces further inadequacies and abstinences. This means, the situation can only be rectified if, now as well as in the future, the training of teachers and students and leaders must put priorities on the skills and dispositions entailed in each kind of mind. 

Also, people should recognize that the cultivation of the above future mindsets involve trade offs. For example, too great emphasis on self-disciplined may impede the developments of creativity minds. There may also be tensions between respect and creativity. Creativity requires that one is willing to and capable of questioning and challenging ‘orthodoxy’, but what happens if the mentors and social institutions and cultures are not open to tolerate different views, opponents views and even dissident views? We do see that such societies stiffen and suffocate innovations, human developments because at the end of the day only a person’s view or a few people’s views at the top of the social strata pre-set as the ‘only truth’ being adapted. The often repeating seen consequences are disastrous destructions and harms brought to a lot of people and the environments because nobody can express a different view and to stop the problematic ‘orthodox’ official views. There may also be tensions between respects and ethics. An ethical stance requires an individual to distance oneself from an offending peer, whom the person have sought to treat in a respectful manner. Or, as epitomized in the example of Lincoln, one’s designated role may dictate a course of action that is repugnant on a personal basis. As they mature, individuals need to be alert to these tensions so that they do not find themselves flummoxed.  

It is up to the education system as a whole in the broadest sense (including parents and all other social institutions) to develop individuals who can understand and be educated that the cultivation of these 5 mindsets are not a zero-sum game and to ensure that the ensemble of minds is cultivated.

In a sense, the balance developments of these five minds are a job of synthesis to make sure that all five kinds of minds are developed not at the expenses of one another but in complement to each other. Equally, it is a calling of ethical obligation and wise discernments to making right decisions when tensions and/or tradeoffs arise between the exercise of one mind with another arise as illustrated above.

However, it is sure that in the years ahead, societies will not survive, let alone thrive, unless societies can foster these future mindedness as part of the social capabilities to their citizens, and unless as individual citizens, we respect and cultivate the quintet of such mentalities valorized here.

It may be the case the computers can take and are taking more and more of what jobs and functionalities of jobs human beings used to and are currently performing. It may be the case that computers can achieve literacy and a measure of disciplined thinking, but as we move toward the skills of synthesizing and creating, we move toward the realms that are-and may well remain-distinctively human. 

No matter whether you agree with Gardner’s descriptions of these mindsets as part of the essential future minds or you may have your own lists of future literacy “criteria”, I believe hardly will you disagree what Gardner’s analysis that the terms ‘respect’ and ‘ethics’ only make sense within a community of vital but vulnerable human beings and to refer to a mechanical device, no matter how fast, how byte-laden and how ‘artificially intelligent’,as “respectful” or “ethical” is to commit a category error. And in this context, the crowns of respectfulness and ethics are unique to human intelligence only. This is how Gardner used the phrase distinctively human.

Because of this, probably we can say that members of human species will not be prescient enough to survive, or perhaps it will take far more immediate threats to our survival before we make common cause with our fellow human beings. In any event the survival and thriving of our species will depend on our nurturing of potentials and minds that are distinctively human.