I am certainly not the first one to suggest this idea, so pardon my ignorance, since I currently have little resources to do a proper research. But the idea is this…

At some point in humanity’s near future, we will cease to have the need for traditional education systems that have been in place for thousands of years.

Nowhere have I seen this concept better exemplified than in the classic sci-fi film “The Matrix” (1999). In the scene where Neo and Trinity have to take off a roof in a helicopter, the matrix’s operator Tank sends an electronic signal directly to Trinity’s brain, and, seconds later, Trinity was able to fly the helicopter without previous training or knowledge.

Here’s the clip in question: Can you fly that thing?

I am willing to take this a step further and suggest that what we now know as schools, and the method and duration of teaching, will no longer be relevant given sufficient technological advancements.

Think of it this way: Google and Wikipedia alone have given us free, unrestricted access to knowledge that is a) available to anyone at anytime, anywhere in the world, and (perhaps more importantly) b) increased the speed at which we acquire information by amounts that were unprecedented 50 years ago, let alone 500 years ago.

This trend of ever increasing speed to access information (producing knowledge) will undoubtedly increase in the future.

Moreover, though, with further technological advancements, our limited human ability to process information will also improve. Whereas now we are limited by how fast we can read (and further limitations such as language, comprehension, etc.), the effectiveness of our brain to link information together, and the ability to store this information, in the future we might have different means altogether for absorbing knowledge itself.

We might be able to directly populate our brain with pre-linked information blobs, store this information in places we wouldn’t be able to reach by traditional methods (thus enlarging our storage capacity), and even introducing at the same time pre-built memories (such as muscle memory) about this information, so that we could mimic what we currently learn from practice alone.

This is how education as we know it will cease to be relevant. No longer will you need to invest 10 years of your life to study medicine, when you could spend a much smaller amount of resources and “buy” this knowledge in one, or several (literal) knowledge transfer sessions.

In case this “free as in speech” concept catches on globally, all of humanity’s knowledge will be available to everyone for free. People will be charged solely for the purchase of “knowledge transfer hardware”. This situation will produce a truly globally-connected civilization formed by super-humans, where the knowledge of anyone on the grid is immediately and seamlessly available to anyone else.

The ramifications of this are mind-boggling…

When can we expect to achieve this state? Given we don’t annihilate ourselves before, I would set it sometime before the 23rd century, with the first simple prototypes already functioning in the 2nd half of our current century.
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