Growing up in the seventies, I experienced the growth of electronic interconnected devices. I grew up in the age of man, when electronic devices were not yet controlling our lives. Of course, we had a TV, radio, washing machine, but nothing was connected and everything came not only with a manual, but also with a parts list. So with knowledge of electronics and a solder device you could repair everything. We lived in a world of open hardware. Times changed, computers became popular and in the beginning of the nineties we started connecting them to communicate with each other. Then from 1994 on forward the Internet explosion emerged, and slowly all devices would become connected to Internet. Currently, in my house I have 47 devices capable of an Internet connection, which I obviously mostly do not use. Because most of these devices use proprietary software. Then of course Social Media emerged and everything became interconnected. We now are living in the age of machine. To be able to see, change and influence your own life, you need to have at least some programming language.
We at OpenSource Science believe that every child should learn to code. We say this amidst the growing influence and power of AI. Furthermore, we know it's possible to code with AI, but who's going to control the AI, who is going to program the AI?. To be in control of AI you need to be able to understand how it functions, for this you need to know how programming works. In the Netherlands we currently need, 70000 programmers, which are not educated yet. AI is not going to solve this shortage in the near future.
When you start to learn to program, you preferably should start at a young age. We believe that the ability to program is an essential tool which everybody should more or less master. Why do we learn children to read and write? Why do we learn children Mathematics? We do that because, for centuries, we know that, those competencies are essential for a successful live. In the age of man, this was of course a good and plausible choice. Times have changed, and we now live in the age of machine, a time when different competencies are needed. In my country "The Netherlands" we learn children multiple languages, on the higher levels of high-school they learn next to Dutch, English, French and German; sometimes even Spanish. In the age of machine where universal translators are not longer Science Fiction, this is at least strange. We need to improve the education world-wide, where we modernize the curricula and move from the age of man, to the age of machine. It should be a universal right, to be able to understand computer code which makes decisions for us and has a huge impact on our lives, but for this we need to be able to code and all source code need to be open source. May the foss be with you.
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