Campus Technology Insider Podcast November 2024
Listen: Technology and What Makes Us Human
Rhea Kelly 00:00
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
What makes us human? That is the question that kicked off our 2024 Tech Tactics in Education conference this fall, posed by our keynote speaker Eric Rodriguez. As a technology leader and former education regional director at Intel, Eric explored the relationship between technology and empathy in his talk titled "Humanizing Technology: The Path to Future-Ready Education." For this episode of the podcast, we're presenting the recording of his keynote. I'll let Eric take it away from here.
Eric Rodriguez 00:52
Hey everyone, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. I am very excited to be with all of you today. My name is Eric, my name is Eric J. Rodriguez. I'm joining you from a wonderful studio in Scottsdale, Arizona, in the Cicospace studio. Thank you again for opportunity to be with all of you today. I'm very excited for a day full of learning and inspiration and connection between everyone. I'm very excited today because today is also marking, actually, we're about to celebrate the 41-year anniversary from this particular event that really refined what it was to be human, right? Not too long ago, 41 years ago, tomorrow, September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov was a leader for the Soviet Union. And his role at that time was that he was in charge of the early warning system for nuclear warheads that were coming to hit the Soviet Union. And so his job was basically going into a room probably no bigger than the studio I'm in today, with several of other soldiers that were serving the Soviet Union at that moment. And the role was basically to notify and notice if there was a missile being launched around the, around the Earth, about to hit the Soviet Union. So for weeks, for months, he had just gone and done his job and nothing had happened. But September 26, 1983, he goes into his night shift at that moment, and a few hours after he starts his shift, his, his division gets an alert. The computer system indicates that a missile has been launched from the United States and will be hitting the Soviet Union in the next 15 minutes. And of course, himself and everyone else in that room at that moment, not only they start to panic, but they start looking at him for his leadership, and say, Hey, you're the one that's in charge here. You have less than a few more minutes to notify the superiors of what's about to happen. But Petrov does something very different that moment. He recognizes what the technology is telling them, but he just takes a step back and says, You know what? There's something wrong here. There's something wrong that even though this computer system is telling me a missile is about to, has been launched and is about to hit my country and hit my family and destroy my community, something is wrong. And so he takes a pause, and while everyone else is yelling at him, saying, Hey, notify, you know exactly what you need to do. Why are you not doing what you need to do? He just takes a minute. So a few minutes pass, and he's thinking this through. He's starting to reflect on about what the major decision he needs to do as a leader, and what decision he needs to make, and implications of that decision. As he's thinking these decisions through, a few minutes later, he gets four other notifications. There's been four more missiles launched from the United States and about to hit the Soviet Union, also in the next 15 minutes. And so you could just imagine that room, imagine everyone looking at him, the amount of pressure that was put on this, on this man, 41 years ago. And of course, again, he takes a moment and says, You know what? I understand this technology is telling me what is happening, but I feel the reality is something different. His gut, his human intuition, is telling him to do something different. He starts to question himself and say, You know what, if I make this decision on notifying my superiors, I could start World War III. If my decision, if there's actually missiles being launched, then at the end of the day, we'll be the only ones destroyed, and we have, we'll have not destroyed the world. If the missiles have not been launched, and my intuition is right, then I possibly save the world. What he decides to do for the next few minutes is not make that call. And you could just imagine the room, the tense room, and at that time, right for the next few minutes, and just them thinking, we're going to die. My family's going to die. And he starts thinking about the person that he had just married as well. And he starts thinking about all the implications about the decision he had just made. But he's also very hopeful about his human intuition. It so happens when those first 15 minutes lapse, nothing happened. A missile did not hit the Soviet Union. A few minutes later, the other four alerts also disappear, and nothing had happened. You see, what had happened that morning was that the United States had a low cloud during sunrise. The clouds were very low during sunrise, and so the satellite that the Soviets had at that moment in time did not, was not programmed to detect that anomaly. And so when it, when it saw that image, it showed an image of basically like a rocket being launched. And so it made that determination based on the programming conditions that that satellite had, and it created the right, the proper alerts for the leaders at the moment in time. Of course, the story does not come to light on September 27, 1983. It comes to light actually two decades later, right? Because you could just imagine at that moment in time, someone not following the instructions of what a computer system and all the processes that were put in place of what they had to do. You could just imagine the amount of pushback and the reputation he had built inside of that military space as someone that could actually deny what he was supposed to be doing. He was interviewed later in the 2000s because the story comes to life later on, and they asked him about this moment, and he actually remembers it very differently. Today, we remember that moment as the moment of the person that saved the world in 1983. But he remembers the next 20 years of his life being very depressed because of what had happened as well, right? He understands he saved the world, and he's very happy for that, but how he was treated for the next 21 years were very upsetting for him as well. But I share that story with all of you today, because today and we're in this midst of this intersection of technology and humanity, we've always had this conversation, And 41 years ago, Petrov was an example of how our human tuition, even though this world is becoming technologically and digitally more prevalent around us, our ability to be human today is greater and needed more than ever. And so that's what I'm very excited to talk to you a little bit more about today, about this work that we've been working on, right? About humanizing technology. That even though technology today, again, thanks to Moore's Law, and we'll talk about the pace of change, is again prevalent, and it's just normalized around us, our ability to engage our students and engage the next generation and engage our fellow colleagues in the education sector is more of a human experience more than ever. And so that is the path that we could build for a future, future-ready education, which is a more human-centric education system. And again, I'm so privileged to be with all of you today because I know that I stand on the shoulders of giant teachers. I know I stand on the shoulders of giant educators and of individuals that brought to life a very unique education experience in my life and inspired me to become an engineer and today to do what I get to do as a keynote speaker around the country. With that said, I've been on a mission, and my mission has been on really finding that intersection of technology and the human experience. I love this picture that I'm sharing with all of you today, because this was actually taken about 10 years ago in Swaziland, and we had to do this project on bringing, bringing technology to rural communities. And if you would have seen, you know, this room right before this picture was taken, I'll move back just so you could see it a little bit more. You know, this picture was taken, you could see me right there, probably in the back, right before the moment that this picture was taken, I was literally right there in the front teaching the students how to use this laptop. And as soon as the photographer gets in front of us, I get pushed out, and my little arm is still in there trying to reach out to the laptop. But I love this picture because you could see the enthusiasm of the students to not only be part of what technology can mean for their lives, but also for their community. The technology we implemented was not in a community had internet, was not in a community had actually several basic services that sometimes in certain countries where we have normalized. But we knew what we were bringing to the community, and at that time, because I was working at Intel, it gave me an opportunity to understand the implications of what technology could have in communities as well. And so we made sure that we brought not only the proper technology, but also the right content for the students while we were there to help the teachers and the educators. And so it was in that moment that I started realizing, too, that it's not just how technology is impacting me in my life and the communities around me, but where technology could take other communities as well. And this became the first of multiple schools that the country started to implement this type of infrastructure because of the work we started late 10 years ago. And so that's what started basically my mission that I'm on today. But today, I want to have a conversation with all of you, right? I started this conversation with not only a story of Petrov, but his human intuition of the impact that that technology could have. But even today, when we're starting to bring technology to all of our classrooms and understand the implications of technology could have in our education systems, I want to ground us though first. I want to ask all of you what it is to be human. In this world of becoming much more digitized, in your opinion, what is making, what makes us human? All right, folks are starting coming in. So you have heart, brain, choice, the choices we make. I love that, right? We learned that from Petrov's story. Emotion, heart, compassion. I love that. Empathy, fear, relationships, reasoning, curiosity. I love that. Rationalization. These are great. And by the way, we'll keep having them come in, because I love this. And at the end of this presentation, I'll make sure what is sent out to everyone is not only this entire deck, but also these slides as well, with all your answers. These are great. Biology.