The Fourth Education Revolution: Will Artificial Intelligence Liberate or Infantilise Humanity?

摘要

In a consideration of "super-intelligent" children Seldon addresses the awful possibility of borrowing the practices of animal husbandry to improve human beings; supposedly, better specimens would be encouraged to breed younger and more often. Having bred pigs by means of artificial insemination in an early phase of my career I found myself explaining to adolescent pupils how so many women in California had opted to become pregnant by the same means and had selected semen from white, blue-eyed, tall men with IQs in excess of 120 that public health concerns arose about the extent of inbreeding in the population there. It was a similar situation to concerns in the UK about families where cousin marriage has long been common practice. How, I enquired, would my students react if, having found the ideal partner at a disco, they then discovered that he or she was a half-sibling? Their reaction was, without exception, that of complete and utter revulsion.