PHASE I

I am old man, a sick man, past retirement age and still working in a macro-economy of knowledge workers creating micro-learning courses with micro-learning credentials for the ever-changing human strategists who need to consume learning objects at rapid pace to maintain viable working status in a nearly fully automated manufactured Ontario. It doesn’t feel like it was long ago that Ernesto Peña recommended reading Hariri’s 2017 article, Reboot for the AI revolution. Maybe it feels that way because it is gloomy, rainy, just like it was in April 2021. It was not exactly dystopian, but an honest projection of change in the face of beneficial automation. Automation that secured health and safety on the roads with AI-driven automobiles, advanced machine-learning tools that could also predict the questions that I no longer could from large data sets. AI put many of us out of physical work and we hailed its advance. We forged new economic, social, and educational systems, precisely the way Harari suggested we should.

Formal traditional education institutions were challenged by their network of employment partners to give up on non-employability skills in academia for the greater economic good. Here are the historical artifacts, news outputs and policy papers, that were considered beneficial documents to help improve society by promoting learning for all and rapid economic recovery after the first pandemic:

• Ontario Invests in Virtual Learning Strategy
• Micro-credentials from Ontario’s post-secondary schools
• Higher Education for Lifelong Learners: A Roadmap for Ontario’s Post-Secondary Leaders and Policy Makers

When we were all sent home in 2020, the government of Ontario first invested $50 million to create virtual learning for everyone. High School education was funded only in areas that supported future training and development provisions supported by the FinTech and physical object corporations. I was as guilty as everyone for the outcome, clicking on the thumbs-up icon every time I saw some future-supporting digital education initiative that eCampusOntario announced. Why wouldn’t we support the building of a connected micro-credential ecosystem?  Access and Empowerment were the catch terms of the 2020-2021 re-adjustment. “eCampusOntario is a not-for-profit centre of excellence and global leader in the evolution of teaching and learning through technology.” The advent of standardized micro-credentials after the first virus ended aided deployment of seemingly benign propaganda. We learned new skills in small bytes, old undesirable jobs were made obsolete, and we moved along. After the fourth pandemic, it was clear that education technology supported by government funding was merely a marketing mechanism to encourage employees to spend all of their earnings on government-sponsored products like solar panels, the energy from which is diverted to the networks that deploy AR learning objects in the millions every day. Augmented indeed.

PHASE II

In a similar alternate future, I lost my money in a poor investment strategy with education technology and was converted to the Graphic Debtor’s Prison file format and deployed as a pop-up ad to educate learners about the importance of critically assessing the materials always available in front of them. This is that future:

CREATE YOUR OWN: https://thrilling-tales.webomator.com/derange-o-lab/pulp-o-mizer/pulp-o-mizer.html

Hariri, Y. N. (2017). Reboot for the AI revolution. Nature International Weekly Journal of Science, 550(7676), 324-327.