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ISSUES facing the education sector in Pakistan and related challenges like cognitive development and lack of critical thinking are compounded by the day.
In addition to the problem of millions of out-of-school children, millions of adults who cannot read or write and the less-than-optimal learning outcome for those lucky enough to go to school owing to an outdated system of education, there is that elephant in the room called malnutrition leading to stunting among 44 per cent of children in Pakistan. The numbers vary from province to province with some districts in Sindh and Balochistan doing worse than Sub-Saharan Africa and the largest number of stunted children being in Punjab.
Stunting not only arrests physical growth, it inhibits development of the brain and related cognitive abilities. Stunted children develop far fewer neuronal connections in their brains compared to healthy children and this leads to a lifelong disadvantage in terms of learning, and earning in later life. Simply put, these children will not be as smart as they could be and will on average earn 46pc less in adulthood.
This is not an issue of poverty alone. While stunting is rampant in lower-income families, upper-income households are not immune to it either. It is not just the quantity of nutrition available to the expecting mother and the child, but also the right mix of micronutrients and diet as a whole, especially during the first 1,000 days, from conception to the child’s second birthday. After this window closes, the cognitive developmental gap is unbridgeable. Feed the child as much as you like, if the first 1,000 days are missed, risks of obesity and diabetes increase but not the number of neuronal connections.
Look up and AI beckons towards automation with its robotic hand.
Every political party’s election manifesto has to have the required section on job creation as one of its top priorities. Some have promised 10 million jobs over five years which nicely translates to 2m every year and seems to cater to the entire fresh lot that becomes eligible each year. But what about the carryover ‘bulge’, as we love to call our youth cohort from yesteryears? What about the hundreds of thousands of employees of state-owned enterprises who will have to be declared redundant if the economic reforms and governance part of the manifestos is to be taken seriously? What skills and trades will they be retrained in for alternative careers post their golden handshakes? Remember, we are not the sharpest pencils in the box as the stunting situation has remained unchanged over the last 50 years.
So this is the brink of the precipice where our stunting-induced lack of natural intelligence has brought us. Peer down and stare into the black hole of illiteracy, misogyny, bigotry, and an absolute refusal to introspect. Look up and artificial intelligence (AI) beckons towards automation with its robotic hand.
The low-end jobs will be the first ones to go. How long before self-driven vehicles render thousands of professional drivers jobless? Many would say ‘not any time soon here’. One would beg to disagree. Remember we have a penchant for ‘importing’ what we cannot even dream to develop. We had colour TV transmission much before anyone in the region. While our neighbours were tottering about in silly old locally made vehicles, we had Chevrolets and Mercs.
Even if for argument’s sake we accept that technology and AI-related changes will not be evident at home anytime soon, what about the energy-rich and human-resource poor economies that have so far been our happy hunting grounds for employment? When they turn to automation, our labourers whose remittances make up the bulk of our foreign exchange reserves, would return home. What jobs await them and how much foreign exchange can we earn by exporting leather jackets, surgical instruments and sporting goods?
While we are still aghast at the alacrity with which reforms are being rolled out in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and wonder if we will now get as many cinemas as the seminaries, they have invested a whopping $45 billion in one go in the Softbank Vision Fund for tech-related development including AI. Good for them and for us as well because we will surely ask them as their Muslim brethren to share some of that AI with us and we will then rename it after some invader from foreign lands who beat our ancestors into submission centuries ago.
A consensus is emerging that AI will eventually surpass the human genius in most fields and that the human beings and AI beings will have to find ways of coexistence just like many races and tribes have over the millennia. There is an extremely short period of time in which we have to improve our natural intelligence to be able to collaborate with AI. We do not have the petrodollars to get others to do our thinking.
The writer is a poet and analyst.
Published in Dawn, June 7th, 2018
