There are ideas that make you think, there are ideas that make you raise your eyebrows and then there are ideas that make you go, "Whaaaat??". Even though we are already nineteen years into the 21st century, we still are not habituated with bizarre ideas that change our lives.
That's after a century of advancements that in hindsight seem like no-brainers but were definitely once considered magical. By now, I guess we should have come to expect the unexpected and utterly impossible seeming ideas to become reality.
One such idea that I have been thinking about recently is the idea of uploading skill and knowledge to the brain. You've probably seen this in the movie "matrix" where different skills such as martial arts are uploaded into Neo's character. Within a few moments, he goes from knowing nothing about martial artist to becoming an expert.
Would such a thing be possible for us humans in the future? Scratch that. I definitely think that this is going to be possible. But the more important question is that, would this make education obsolete?
Everybody Knows Everything
Imagine a distant future, probably fifty to a hundred years down the road. People are able to upload any skill or knowledge directly to their brains, the same way we transfer data from a pen drive or internet to a computer.
If there is something you need to understand or learn, you simply upload it, instead of spending countless hours on it, like humans once used to in the early 21st century. Literally any skill can be purchased and each one has its own price. Some skills are cheaper and some are more expensive.
If this sounds impossible to you, think again. There are already so many companies in the world that are trying to establish a symbiotic relationship between the human brain and electronic devices, the most popular perhaps being Neuralink, headed by Elon Musk.
It is only a matter of time until this is achieved and once done, this technology will provide a digital aspect or a digital accessory to the brain itself. Once that is done, we would easily be able to connect to anything digital, like the internet for example.
Once that is done, everyone will know everything because we would simply be able look it up on the internet and it will be much faster because we could simply "think" about it and it will be known. The same could happen with skills as well.
Once the brain gains a digital aspect, virtually anything would be possible. In my opinion, that will be the end of educational institutions as we know it. Why would you send your kids to school/colleges to learn things for two decades which could be done within minutes!
That would bring a monstrous change to our societies and our whole species like never before. The scale of it is quite terrifying actually but I think it is something that is inevitable. How we deal with it, is anyone's guess.