Technological intelligence - the forgotten intelligence / Dr. Liat Ben David

We are living in one of the most exciting times in human history: the pace of changes in human knowledge and ability have reached a pace that touches a singular pace.

"I remember the first time I went to America," said ninety-year-old Aunt Tzipora to my six-year-old son, when we came to say goodbye to her before going to Disney World. Her eyes were covered with a look of nostalgia reserved only for those who have already experienced and seen everything. "I was sixteen years old. We traveled for a month, until I won and arrived in New York..."
"Month?!" The six-year-old jumped in amazement, "It can't be! What airline did you fly?!..."

We are living in one of the most exciting times in human history: the pace of changes in human knowledge and ability have reached a pace that touches a singular pace. Human knowledge, which nowadays is the common domain, encompasses all aspects of the reality of our lives. We live in a "global village", where sophisticated means of transportation and communication, satellites and advanced computers have turned the Earth into one environment, and all its inhabitants are able not only to meet, communicate and exchange information with each other in real time, but also to work together to achieve common goals.

Various factors help us advance our lifestyles to their current state, and they continue to act and push us forward. One of these factors is a characteristic unique to human beings: technological intelligence - man's constant need to overcome his biological limitations and his ability to expand them through technology. At a time when we are facing a singular revolution, it is appropriate and correct to re-examine these changes and assess how they should be dealt with.

Technological intelligence: one of the capabilities of human intelligence
A short survey of perceptions proves that most people interpret technology as tools, especially sophisticated tools and devices. Those who stop to think about the definition more deeply take another step and claim that technology is knowledge applied to the production of tools and the provision of practical solutions to human needs. But this definition does not include the full extent of the essence of technology, just as a musical creation or even the ability to create it does not define the full extent of the essence of music. Technology is a complex, spiral and constant process of thinking and doing, which stems from a basic need that distinguishes man: to respond to his needs and improve them, again and again and again, without fatigue, break or satisfaction. Examining the technological ability reveals that it consists of a whole set of skills, which no other living creature exhibits.
We tend to divide the set of human skills into groups - mathematical ability, logical skills, musical talent. Howard Gardner, professor of psychology and education at Harvard University, identified at least seven such groups and called them intelligences. According to him, human intelligence contains systems of skills, whose role is to locate problems or needs, pose questions in connection with these problems and create means to solve them. Each intelligence is a complete set of skills, and each of us is born with a set of these skills. In combination with the genetic diversity, a very wide variety of ways of expressing these abilities was created. Thus, for example, the ability to compose music, the ability to play and the ability to sing all three belong to the musical intelligence system, but each of us expresses these skills at different levels. A great singer is not necessarily a gifted pianist; A gifted pianist does not always have the ability to compose, and so on. We not only develop these skills, we also record them and transfer the knowledge and skills we have acquired in them to other people and to another time through elaborate symbol systems that we have developed, such as letters, numbers, characters, drawings and many other symbols.

Being dynamic systems, the various intelligences maintain mutual relations between them. Thus, for example, the ability to move belongs to movement intelligence, but there is no doubt that an excellent dancer must also have developed musical skills, such as a high ability to identify and follow a rhythm. The ability to build complex architectural structures is associated with spatial intelligence, but there is no doubt that a gifted architect uses many mathematical and logical skills, and so on.

Gardner's theory is still being tested and raises various question marks and disagreements. Whether we accept his definitions or not, one thing is certain: the range of human abilities consists of many and varied skills, which work together, enable our lives in the environment and constitute the unique system of reason for humanity. Technological thinking, with all its skills and complexity, is a critical system included in this reason.
The basis of every human ability can be found in the world of living things. Social structures, parenting, emotions and even basics of logic, language and communication.

The ability to create tools can also be found in the living world. Some species of chimpanzees produce spear-like tools that they use for hunting. The birds build a nest, the beaver makes dams. One of the fundamental differences between the process of creating tools in animals and the human technological process is the tireless human need to repeatedly improve the tools and solutions produced to expand man's biological capabilities, in an endless developmental process encoded in accepted symbols and passed down from generation to generation. The bird builds the same nest generations upon generations. Damage to the ability of a certain species to build its biological shelter endangers its continued existence. We no longer live in caves, and we expect that a society whose people still live in huts or tents will find a way to move forward, alone or with the help of other human societies. When our ability to build shelter is compromised, we look for a solution for a different kind of shelter. When we have built a certain type of shelter, we immediately look for a way to perfect it.

When a horse wants to move from one place to another, it uses its legs. Man is not satisfied with his legs, and he uses his technological intelligence in order to expand his biological ability to move in space through means of transportation that he uses, from using other animals through tools that he develops, from the chariot to the car, the ship, the plane and the space shuttle. Furthermore - being a skills system that maintains mutual relations with our other skill systems, the need to improve and perfect also appears in our other skill systems. While the male songbird has been wooing the female with the same song for millions of years, we are expanding our biological musical ability through the development of musical instruments, amplification devices and complex recording devices to continue singing about how much we fell in love, either through a new song or through repeating a written song hundreds of years ago and we can repeat it thanks to our ability to read and write. All this requires complex thinking and doing processes. Defining a need, examining alternatives, designing a solution, implementing it, documenting it using symbols that will be understood and perfected by other people - and continuing to improve it by defining the next need.

Technology in itself has no value, that is - the products of technological thinking are neither good nor bad. We give them meaning through the use we make of them, just as the meaning given to language, movement, music, and interpersonal relationships is given by the purposes and interpretations we attach to them. This understanding emphasizes the importance of applying morals and values ​​in the decision-making processes of technological development and implementation. Every beginning scientist and engineer knows the important ethical statement - not everything I can do, I necessarily also have to do.
The knowledge revolution of the late twentieth century represents one of the fastest processes that changed human life as a result of technology and science applications. Since the XNUMXs, we have witnessed a huge development in all areas of life related to the development of knowledge-intensive technologies, which are about to eliminate or at least significantly minimize the limitations of space, time and orders of magnitude. We are able to talk to astronauts in space, intervene in the processes that take place inside the nucleus of a single living cell and produce technology that is the size of an atom. Correspondingly, the social organization has changed - geographic territoriality is being replaced by thematic territoriality, which has certain characteristics, language and code of conduct. The advantages of such territoriality are clear: immediate access to information, knowledge, places and people opens up new possibilities for human society to solve problems, make decisions and satisfy needs. As the twenty-first century progresses, the reality is established where the rate of human development reaches a singular rate - a period in which the rate of change is so rapid and significant that our lives undergo a fundamental and irreversible transformation in a short and increasingly short time. Our ability to combine our knowledge, skills, thinking and creative processes allow us an existence that is difficult for us to cope with the pace of its development. In such an era, understanding the systems of human reason, including technological reason, has far-reaching consequences for the concept of education.

Technological intelligence: Implications for education

A person who died only less than a hundred years ago would be stunned and probably quite frightened if he went back and entered a hospital, an airport or a supermarket today: he would not recognize anything there. He will only be able to relax when he enters a class at school: "Finally," he will say to himself, "I actually do know this one!" Because despite the changes in all other areas of life, in the field of education the basic system has hardly changed since the industrial revolution. Its main purpose was and remains the industrial production of an educational product. The perceptual revolutions, based on creativity and constant striving for change, which led to the progress of humanity in all other fields, "skipped" the concept of education. This gap, between what the other areas of life have to offer and our ability as a society to prepare our child for it through an education system adapted to it, must be at the center of the intellectual discourse.

At the statement level, it is indeed there. Every budding politician, be it at the local authority level or at the national and even international level, speaks seriously about the importance of education. Every successful scientist, engineer, industrialist and high-tech person declares that education is the most important area to invest in. Such and other reforms are being launched with new fanfare in the mornings. Leading educators also claim that the place of knowledge accumulation and the presentation of achievements in the ability to control items of knowledge and their application are taken by processes of developing thinking and doing skills, based on a flexible and dynamic ability to solve problems and make decisions. But on a practical level, it happens too little, too slowly, and above all - from educational concepts that are suitable at best for a linear pace of life, and not for an era where the rate of change is so fast that by the time we know there is a new version of some feature - it has already become obsolete.

For cultural-historical reasons, the development of technological intelligence in education is still seen as second-class education. We still insist on instilling items of knowledge and using traditional and theoretical teaching methods and means in their essence, without stopping and thinking bravely as well as what of all this is still required - and why. We have not yet cracked the puzzle of the combination between the real need to instill a knowledge base and education and the needs of prosperity in the reality of life in the twenty-first century. The result is an educational system that is several generations behind the other living systems. The public education system must reexamine not only the various methodologies and technological means it uses, but its basic assumptions, its goals and, in fact, the paradigms on which it is based. In an era of singular development, the time has come for the education system to also reach the twenty-first century.
* The author is the CEO of the Wolf Foundation