Opinion | Olympic Medals or Kota Factory? Time to Let Young Minds Choose

The Olympics are over, and India, with a population of 1.4 billion - with the largest number of youth in the world - has ended up with six medals. While news headlines will scream about the need to change the sports establishment by including more people who deeply understand sports, one critical factor we all need to introspect on is the general parental attitude that's dismissive towards play, mistakenly rooted in tradition. Many do not realise that the future economy, with AI-driven automation, will demand a deeper exploration of human potential through complex learning and adaptation, something our playgrounds enable.   

Olympics Are About Exploring Human Potential 

Exemplified by the modified Olympic motto in Latin, Citius, Altus, Fortius - Communiter,  meaning "Faster, Higher, Stronger - Together", the Olympics, from their very beginning in 776 BC, were about celebrating the frontiers of the human spirit and potential. The top athletes, while being born with genetic features suitable for sports, still spend more hours training for peak performance to literally infuse intelligence in each fibre of their muscle, learning to harness those billions of neurons to fire precisely, to fully exploit their mind-body connection, to finally reach their highest human potential. Usain Bolt, the famous sprinter, had a resting heart rate of around 33 BPM, while Michael Phelps, who won 23 golds, had a resting heart rate of about 38 BPM. A normal heart rate typically is around 60 BPM. They both spent insane hours on the track and in the pool, starting as young as seven years, striving for a zone of higher mind. This zone was described as "the flow" by famous psychologist Mohali Csikszentmihalyi in 1970, as it melds together action and consciousness. 

Developing Complex Human Intelligence

Games are a crucial element in exploring and growing multiple dimensions of complex human intelligence in young kids. The unstructured and playful nature of games allows for exploring the innate intelligence that the human body represents, demonstrating unique learning opportunities for the brain. Famous learning researcher Hilary Takeuchi took fMRI scans of brains, showing how creativity is related to brain activation via joyful experiences in play. Other scientists have shown that joyful experiences can influence plasticity, meaning the brain can increasingly adapt to new things, a critical human attribute.

The human body has an estimated 10-20 billion neurons in the cerebral cortex and 55-70 billion neurons in the cerebellum, roughly 76 times that of the 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, games are considered to be so central to human development that it is formally recognised by the UN as a specific right for all children, under Article 31. 

The Scourge Of Tuition Centres

The Indian education system is primarily driven by rote learning-driven exams, rather than by playful games. An Indian parent's self-esteem is often dictated by how well or badly their kids are doing in exams. Even today, as early as seven to eight years of age - an age when kids are supposed to be developing their human potential with play - children are buried deep inside tuition centres around India.

It's ironic that early advancements in artificial intelligence have come from exploring and learning from games, like Chess and strategy games like Go. This was profiled in the documentary AlphaGo. At the "Improbably AI lab" at MIT, young researcher Pulkit Agrawal is exploring physical intelligence via robots that can learn and navigate complex natural terrains like steep hills on their own with algorithms leveraging playful curiosity. His lab's agile robots learning to kick the football are a fun sight and also signal how hard this simple step is for AI to master. Figure AI recently announced that their skilled humanoid robots will soon work on the BMW shop floor. Another startup called Skild AI, led by Deepak Pathak, recently raised $300 million to build robots that are learning to adapt to new environments. 

Let Kids Play For The Future Of Work

The Olympics are a great indicator of a society's progress in search of higher human potential. We should reflect on what we are training our kids' brains for, the past or the future. The upcoming Intelligence Economy, which is going to create a new economic value of $15.7tn (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, much like our games.

The future value of our output will revolve around our core human potential to harness the state of "flow" more often. India is the only country in the world with 300 million young human brains, with unexplored human potential and untapped intelligence. Bereft of exposure to the playground, can they really explore their unique physical and creative human potential, so critical for the upcoming opportunity? It is an important question to ask as they may eventually define the future of not just our nation but the future of the human race too, given the sheer strength in numbers. 

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is a great start. However, the anxiety induced by parental pressure, portrayed poignantly in the web series The Kota Factory, is harmful. ChatGPT has ensured that rather than knowing the answers, it is important to know what questions to ask. It's ironic that we are limiting our young human brains in these Kota-styled factories even as actual future factories are going to be manned by humanoid robots that are learning through games.

It's time to free our young minds to play and explore the world outside and within, as suggested by Rabindranath Tagore. This might result in more medals for us and enable India to excel in the AI-driven future of work. Can we resolve to hit the play button for our kids instead of the pause button?

[Umakant Soni is chairman of AIfoundry, co-founder of ARTPARK (AI & Robotics Technology Park), and a passionate advocate for inclusive development]

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author