Will tomorrow's children attend eugenist schools? | Laurent Alexandre | TEDxParis

Will tomorrow's schools be eugenicist? Are they condemned to incorporate advances in neuroscience in order to adapt to the emerging war of the brains and to reduce the growing disparities in IQ that are to come?

A surgical urologist and neurobiologist, Laurent Alexandre also holds degrees from the Paris Institute of Political Studies, HEC, and the National School of Administration. An internet pioneer, he is the founder of Doctissimo.fr. The author of "The Death of Death" and "Defeating Cancer," he is currently interested in NBIC breakthroughs. Moreover, he is the director of DNAVision, a company specializing in DNA sequencing.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

Hello.

Schools in 2014 are as archaic

as medicine in 1750.

(Applause)

Schools have not evolved
for many centuries.

There are some minor differences.

In my time, the board was black;

today, it's white.

(Laughter)

This inaction is unsustainable today,

for three reasons.

First, a war of the brains has begun.

We wanted a knowledge economy?

We've got it!

And in a knowledge economy,
the neuron is the only fuel;

innovation, IQ.

In the world of algorithms,

unbelievable inequalities are created
between the most innovative,

gifted people,
and less talented people.

An absolutely caricature-like example
sums up this situation well.

WhatsApp; 55 employees,
around for four years,

and worth $19 billion.

Peugot; more than a 100 years old,
more than 100,000 employees,

is worth $12 billion!

55 little geniuses with stratospheric IQs

create more economic value in four years,

than more than 100,000 employees
in a company more than 100 years old.

The second reason why the status quo
is completely untenable

is that after a failed launch in the 60s,

robotics and artificial intelligence
are really reaching maturity now.

The neuron is 550 million years old.

The transistor, 60 years old.

The transistor, the microprocessor,
is 10 million times younger

than our neurons.

In 40 years, or something like that,

the transistor will have surpassed
the abilities of the biological brain.

This race is lost.

Between ENIAC,

- at the end of the war
founded by the great Turing -

and its 350 operations per second,

and the TN2, which carries out
33 million billion operations per second,

and a million billion operations by 2019,

there is an extraordinary leap.

This explosion of digital power

today allows for the emergence
of a 2nd generation robotics,

of which Google is the world leader.

Google, which bought up eight
of the finest global robotics companies.

The Google Car
is just a special type of robot.

Silicon Valley is very optimistic
about artificial intelligence.

Ray Kurzweil, the head engineer at Google,

explains that in 2045,

artificial intelligence will be
a billion times more powerful

than our eight billion
brains put together.

In 30 years.

This alarms a lot of people.

Bill Gates, who's not known
for joking around,

estimates that in 2035,
that is to say in 20 years,

as near as the death
of François Mitterrand,

half of our jobs will have been automated.

Stemming from the convergence
of artificial intelligence and robotics.

He even cites nurses,

whom he predicts will be replaced
by machines by then.

A huge fear is emerging.

Education is not adapted
to allow our kids to compete

against second generation machines.

The third reason why the status quo
is unthinkable in schools

is that the society of tomorrow
will no longer accept inequalities in IQ.

On average, in this room,

you have an IQ of 130.

The French average is 100.

Everyone thinks that's normal.

In reality, it's intolerable.

IQ gaps will be the last
of the major inequalities,

even more so than differences in money.

And intellectual differences
are the mother of all inequalities.

Between the most
and least talented people,

there is a 14 year difference
in life expectancy,

an income gap from one to 15,

huge differences in social classes,
degrees, and access to culture.

In 1750, we accepted that a poor child
died in the street, without care.

Today, that's unacceptable.

Today we accept enormous differences
in intellectual abilities.

The society of the future
will no longer accept that.

Ultimately, the NBIC revolution,

that is, nanotechnology,
biotechnology, information technology,

and cognitive science,
that is, artificial intelligence,

neuroscience, and robotics,

are in the process of turning
society on its head,

and upending the work market.

School, as we currently know it,
is completely unprepared

to allow our students
to compete in a world

where smart machines will be ubiquitous

in the coming decades.

What is society to do?

What will society decide upon?

In my opinion, society
will demand that schools use

all the resources of NBIC technology
to respond to these challenges.

Tomorrow, schools will use MOOCs,

which are a type of second
generation online teaching,

and cerebral strengthening technologies,

which we call "neuro-enhancement."

It will tolerate legal doping.

It will accept, in the future,
intracerebral implants

to enhance us.

And it will accept intellectual eugenics

via embryonic selection.

In the world of tomorrow,
teaching will no longer be about knowing.

Teaching will be about the brain.

We will have the convergence
of education, medicine,

information technology,
genetics, and neuroscience.

And the teacher will become
a "neuro-hacker."

There's still some work left to do.

(Laughter)

They'll become a "neuro-cultivator."

This bringing together of education
and school will become natural.

Education will begin before birth.

The brain is an extraordinary
organ with high plasticity.

The environment, school, and stimulation

are fundamental in developing
our neuronal and synaptic wiring.

Unfortunately, the genetic aspect
of our intellectual abilities

is important.

It's a bit more important
than we imagined a few years ago.

Recent studies such as this one

tend to show that about 60%
of our intellectual abilities

are of genetic origin,

while a whole third is linked
to familial influences,

the educational
environment, and school.

Silicon Valley, as usual,
is at the forefront of this battle,

for better or worse.

Here you have a patent filed by "23andMe",
Google's genomics subsidiary

- whose CEO is the ex-wife
of Google cofounder Sergeï Brin -

for "designer babies" à la carte
and genetic selection of gametes

to make more beautiful babies.

It's even more troubling
to our moral norms

that China has launched a huge program

to sequence the DNA
of the extremely gifted,

led by an exceptionally gifted
person, who is shown here,

with the goal, admitted
in the international press,

of using these results

to increase the average IQ
of the 21st-century Chinese person.

Will society resist
using these technologies?

When we know that Bostrom,
the English academic,

demonstrated that,
using these technologies,

we could increase a country's average IQ
by 60 points in phase one,

and then 120 points in a second phase.

Which would make Bill Gates
or Jacques Attali

just within the average
in a first phase,

and intellectually deficient
compared to the norms of the time

in a second phase.

(Laughter)

Of course, this all seems very far
from our own experience.

Eugenics is not for us.

However, we have already
gotten caught up in the works of eugenics;

we are already eugenicists.

We are already
in a eugenicist civilization.

Here in France, 97% of children
with Down's syndrome

are detected and are aborted.

Only one in 30 trisomic fetuses
survive past screening.

And in the USA, 28% of Americans,

say they are ready to use
genetic scanning technology

to have smarter babies.

What will the parents
of the remaining 72% do?

But the transgression doesn't stop there.

Silicon Valley is ready
to go even further.

Again, Ray Kurzweil,
the lead engineer at Google,

explained to us last March
at TED Vancouver,

that in 2035, 20 years from now,
we will have intracerebral implants

to connect us more quickly
to knowledge and to be more intelligent.

And he warned us that we need
to prepare ourselves

to have a hybrid thinking,

a mix of our biological brain

and artificial intelligence
connected to our cortex.

This creates an upheaval
in our moral and political norms;

it's the end of "Humanity 1.0",

and the arrival, to borrow
the phrase of Google's CEO,

of a "Humanity 2.0".

All of this could lead
to a neuro-dictatorship,

to a neuro-nightmare.

That's why, if the NBIC
schools of tomorrow

will undoubtedly use,
alongside teachers,

educational engineers,

neuroscientists and geneticists,

it is especially necessary
that we have neuro-ethicists;

"brain ethicists".

To make sure that neuro-education
does not turn into neuro-manipulation.

What must be done?

I don't know.

What do we have to do?

I don't know.

I have two convictions, though.

The first is that
we don't prevent Silicon Valley

from manufacturing machines
that are smarter than us.

As the cofounder of Google,
Sergeï Brin, says,

"We will make machines
that reason, that think,

and that do things better than we do."

In that context, are we going to leave

people stuck with average,
or modest cognitive abilities,

completely outdated in the face
of second generation machines,

resulting from the convergence
of artificial intelligence and robotics?

I don't believe that's possible.

My second conviction

is that if we collectively
and politically decide

in the years and decades to come,

to block technologies that allow us
to reduce differences in IQs,

we would be judged very harshly
by future generations.

In reality, we are all
terrible neuro-conservatives,

who are perfectly content
with intolerable IQ gaps.

Thank you.

(Applause)