The Olympics are over and India, with a population of 1.4 billion – the most youthful in the world – has won six medals. While news headlines will scream about the need to change the sports system to include more people who understand sports in depth, a key factor we all need to introspect on is the general parental attitude towards sports, which is wrongly rooted in tradition. Not many understand that the future economy, with AI-driven automation, will demand a deeper exploration of human potential through complex learning and adaptation, which our playgrounds enable.
The Olympics are about discovering human potential
This is exemplified by the revised Olympic motto in Latin, Citius, Altus, Fortius – CommunitorMeaning “Faster, Higher, Stronger – Together”, the Olympics, from their very beginnings in 776 BC, have been about celebrating the limits of the human spirit and ability. Top athletes, while born with genetic characteristics suitable for sport, learn to harness the intelligence in every fiber of their muscles, to fire those billions of neurons with precision, fully utilizing their mind-body connection, ultimately reaching their highest human potential. Famed sprinter Usain Bolt had a resting heart rate of about 33 bpm, while Michael Phelps, who won 23 golds, had a resting heart rate of about 38 bpm. A normal heart rate is usually around 60 bpm. They both spent crazy hours on the track and in the pool from the age of seven, striving for the realm of the higher mind. This realm was described in the 1970s by renowned psychologist Mohal Csikszentmihalyi as “flow”, because it merges action and consciousness together.
The evolution of complex human intelligence
Games are a key element in the discovery and development of many dimensions of complex human intelligence in young children. The unstructured and playful nature of games allows for the discovery of the innate intelligence present in the human body, demonstrating unique learning opportunities for the brain. Renowned learning researcher Hilary Takeuchi took fMRI scans of the brain, showing how creativity is related to brain activation through pleasurable experiences in games. Other scientists have shown that pleasurable experiences can influence plasticity, meaning the brain can adapt faster to new things, an important human trait.
The human body has 10-20 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex and 55-70 billion neurons in the cerebellum, which is about 76 times more than reptiles. A child’s neural pathways are influenced in their development through exploration, thinking, problem-solving and language expressions, all of which are part of play episodes. In fact, play is considered so important to human development that it has been formally recognized by the United Nations as a specific right for all children under Article 31.
tuition centers crisis
The Indian education system is primarily driven by rote learning-based exams, not playfulness. The self-esteem of Indian parents is often determined by how well or poorly their children perform in exams. Even today, as early as seven to eight years old – the age when children should be developing their human potential through playfulness – children are pushed into tuition centres across India.
It is ironic that early advances in artificial intelligence came from discovering and learning from games like chess and strategic games like Go. This was shown in the documentary AlphaGo. At the “Improbably AI Lab” at MIT, young researcher Pulkit Agrawal is exploring physical intelligence through robots that can learn and navigate complex natural terrains like steep hills with algorithms that leverage playful curiosity. His lab’s agile robots are learning to kick a football, a fun sight and also an indication of how difficult this simple step is for AI. Figure AI recently announced that their skilled human robots will soon be working on BMW shop floors. Another startup called Skilled AI, led by Deepak Pathak, recently raised $300 million to build robots that learn to adapt to new environments.
Let kids play for the future of work
The Olympics are a great indicator of society’s progress in the pursuit of higher human potential. We must consider what we are training our children’s minds for, for the past or for the future. The upcoming intelligence economy, which is going to create new economic value of $15.7 trillion (PWC Research) by 2030, is a great opportunity for India. The future of work is going to be creative, dynamic, complex and challenging. It will force us to learn new things just like our sports.
The future value of our output will revolve around our core human ability to harness the state of “flow” more frequently. India is the only country in the world that has 300 million young human brains with untapped human potential and untapped intelligence. Deprived of playground exposure, can they really explore their unique physical and creative human potential, which is so crucial for the opportunities ahead? This is a crucial question because they may ultimately define not just the future of our nation, but the future of mankind because of their strength in numbers.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is a great start. However, the anxiety caused by parental pressure is poignantly depicted in the web series Kota FactoryHarmful. ChatGPT has made sure that instead of knowing the answers, it is important to know what questions to ask. It is ironic that we are restricting our young human brains to these quota-style factories, while the real future factories are going to be run by anthropomorphic robots that are learning through games.
It is time to set our young minds free to play and explore the world outside and inside, as Rabindranath Tagore suggested. This could lead to more medals for us and India excelling in the AI-powered future of work. Can we pledge to press the play button instead of the pause button for our children?
(Umakant Soni is Chairman of AIfoundry, Co-founder of ARTPARK (AI & Robotics Technology Park) and a strong advocate of inclusive growth)
Disclaimer: These are the personal views of the author
