In the last few months, two "predictive" documents found their way into our hands. The first one is the 2016 NMC[1]/CoSN[2] Horizon report for elementary and secondary education and the second is the SURF Trend report 2016: How technological trends enable customised education. Both are very interesting and well-written reports. However they're also a bit tricky in that they're not really underpinned by concrete evidence from the educational sciences and therefore, their predictions are in our opinion a bit like reading tea leaves: They're very visible, but what do they mean? As a preamble to discussing the SURF Trend report 2016 an aside to frame some background. Last year, Paul Kirschner presented a keynote at the 6th International Conference on Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK16).

The Metropolis (Released in 1927 in Germany) is a black and white science fiction movie. It is a silent movie available with a musical score and subtitles in English. The movie was directed by Fritz Lang. It shows a grim futuristic society in the city of Metropolis which is inhabited by two distinct classes: the industrialists live off the fat of the land, supported by the workers who live under the city and endure a bare-bones existence of backbreaking work. The story concerns a relationship between Freder (played by Gustav Fröhlich), a young man from the industrialist class, and Maria (Brigitte Helm), an activist who preaches against the divide between the two classes.

This week, the first meeting of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems is taking place at the United Nations in Geneva. Organizations like the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots are encouraging the UN to move forward on international regulation of autonomous weapons, which is great, because talking about how these issues will shape the future of robotics and society is a very important thing. Over the weekend, however, I came across a video that struck me as a disturbing contribution to the autonomous weapons debate. The video, called "Slaughterbots" and produced with support from Elon Musk's Future of Life Institute, combines graphic violence with just enough technical plausibility to imagine a very bleak scenario: A fictional near future in which autonomous explosive-carrying microdrones are killing thousands of people around the world. We are not going to embed the video here because it contains a number of violent scenes, including a terrorist attack in a classroom (!). You can find it on the Future of Life website.