With all the fervour and frantic manoeuvring around NEET, paper leaks and suicidal trauma, Gen Z is already a spent force in yesterday’s barricaded battles of hunger strikes and political accountability. Gen Alpha has arrived!
Traditionally, Indian academic institutions have adapted rather slowly since Independence to engaging Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z. Even as they grapple with issues of inadequate changes to curriculum, metrics of tests, assignments, professional training and engaging with employability, the post 2010 era heralds Gen Alpha – a generation that has never lived in a world without smartphones and AI adaptations, coupled with voice commands of Siri and Alexa. They have grown up in a world where AR and VR are giving way to pneumatic, haptic devices, where social experiences have transitioned from Facebook to Instagram, X, Telegram, Pinterest, et al, and transcended beyond the counter-culture of the last decade.
Their impatience for instant information is insatiable, with all-permeating AI generating cross-referenced, curated content within milliseconds. With an average of 2.5 million Alphas born every week around the world, conventional education and learning institutions in developing economies must brace for one of the most challenging times in history.
The metaphoric world scape is changing. Clouds are synonymous with data, Netscape with landscape, Facebook with community centres, super-highways are enabling transit or access paths and engines are drivers of curated information. The iPad and iPhones are lifestyle devices for the alpha. According to Northwestern University’s School of Communication and Centre for Media & Human Development, 69 per cent of children under eight have access to a mobile device. They have never lived in a world devoid of these enabling devices. While this will be the most technologically advanced, intelligent and wealthy generation of all time, Gen Alpha, it will also be the most connected and disconnected from human contact of all times. This generation will experience a dizzying pace of innovation and technological advancement. There will be a mind-bending dependence on AI to guide and dictate life’s mundane aspects and seek information without the burden of remembering, recalling or recollecting memory as previously felt necessary, with an increasingly invalidating lens of NEET as a prep-step to professional life.
The irony, however, is that while the alpha physical being feels that a data-spewing device is an extension of its being and that when the screen is on, it holds its entire attention, this generation is unable to focus on a single strand of thought. While the animated screen is alive with text, visuals, animations, graphics, and video content laced with pop-ups and banners, the distraction levels they offer have been the highest in recorded or experiential history of computing devices.
Political fencing over policy and process must shift to adaptive learning and leveraging the massive potential of the world’s largest Gen Alpha
The rapidly changing landscape of learning is directly influenced by technology trends. This is a given. New technologies influence the way we access information that has a measurable impact on how we assimilate, process, programme, analyse and apply it towards the learning process. Academic institutions and professional colleges are directly in the crosshairs of tech trends ranging from the didactic interpretation of written content, memory, and rote to the appreciation of analytics. Examination, as the least imaginative means of elimination using standardised tests, has no future.
With a growing world population, we are seeing resource-based urgencies among nations, an increasing interconnectedness through technology coupled with rapid access to information, and a prescription of uniformity in standards in the way we program, present and perceive the changing world around us, which is clearly more of an impediment that is not sustainable. With the advent of Open Universities and online learning platforms, India is also witnessing a growth in the number of educational institutions churning out mediocre graduates on an unprecedented scale, with no real skills to adapt to a shifting paradigm in employability and entrepreneurship.
With an average of 2.5 million Alphas born every week around the world, conventional education and learning institutions in developing economies must brace for one of the most challenging times in history
Political fencing over policy and process must shift to adaptive learning and leveraging the massive potential of the world’s largest Gen Alpha. The planners must accept the exponential changes in learning creatively, with many global futurists predicting a tech tsunami in the coming five years that far surpasses what the last century has witnessed. As India strives to rise on the echelons of elite global economies, it must invest in its workforce with urgency and utmost commitment to meet the challenges of the coming decades or risk irrelevance. It calls for visionary generational leadership to step up a comprehensive rethink, with a litmus test of testing those policymakers first who will prevail upon the needs of Gen Alpha and beyond.
While TIME magazine predicts human-like AI bots by 2045, some others believe it will happen a decade earlier, with our brains connected to the Cloud by 2035. While the first wave of automation displaced about 3 per cent of jobs, the second wave is now forcing a rethink of 30 per cent of the workforce at the front end, while shoring up the back end with jobs requiring different skills, training and growth trajectories than the standards of uniform, archaic learning modules of today. Elon Musk predicts that digital intelligence will exceed the combined intelligence of all humans within roughly five years, wiping out all conventional coding, automated service and data mining jobs. While we quibble over quantum minutiae, how prepared are we to meet this inevitable singularity facing humanity?
The author is a Silicon Valley-based, world-renowned Indo-Canadian museologist, designer, founding director of several stellar award-winning museums around the world and the author of the seminal book Museum Futures: Gen Alpha