“Human vs Machine Literacy”

The “Turing test” taken from Wikipedia the free encyclopaedia.

Pearson commissioned a study – ‘2027: Human vs. Machine Literacy’ the global campaign Project Literacy and Professor Brendan O’Connor, University of Massachusetts Amherst , call for society to commit to upgrading its people at the same rate as upgrading its technology, so that by 2030 no child is born at risk of poor literacy. They highlight:
•    Machine literacy already exceeds the literacy abilities of 1% of the UK population who are non-literate
•    In the UK’s most deprived areas, more than a third of adults lack the literacy expected of an 11-year-old.
•    There are more software engineers  in the United States than school teachers  demonstrating more attention is being focused on teaching algorithms and AI than people.
•    1.7 million British adults can not currently read a road sign.  Yet 10 million self-driving cars are predicted to be on the road by 2020″ .

The report suggests that “smartphones will read and write better than 1.7 million British adults in the next decade”. Progress in improving human literacy rates has stalled since 2000  —  leaving 758 million  adults worldwide and almost 2 million Brits  illiterate (with 5 million having literacy levels below those expected of an 11-year-old) — a new report predicts that technological advances will soon enable over 2 billion  smartphones to read and write. At the current rate of technological progress, devices and machines powered by AI and voice recognition software will surpass the literacy level of over one in twenty British adults  within the next ten years.

Here’s the link to their project video, it’s an interesting perspective:      https://youtu.be/1aGnDz_ruog

 


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