Duration: 5 minutes 45 seconds

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Dr Catherine Ball

STEM is fundamental to everything that we do and every way that we live. Science, technology, engineering, and maths are incredibly creative, they imbue the human spirit in the way we advance, how we live, work, and play, from the use of antibiotics in humans, to the development of Wi-Fi, to the invention of cochlear, all of these great Australian inventions that often get forgotten, we need to not only teach STEM in schools, we need to celebrate STEM the way we celebrate sports. And I'm really looking forward to seeing that cultural shift and cultural change in Australia over the next few years.

The future is already here, it's peaking through in so many ways, everywhere around the world, but it's just not scaled yet. And so some of the emerging technologies that we are seeing that I think are gonna be fundamental in the next decade are scaling now at speeds which are catching us completely unawares. Generative AI is a really obvious, easy case study for me to mention here. Artificial intelligence, other than the fact that it's not artificial and it's not intelligent, we just put that to one side, has been around for nearly 100 years, and it's actually a lot more scary than Arnold Schwarzenegger in a "Terminator" movie, it's maths, it's all maths. So, if you really wanna scare people, you just say, you know, "maths is controlling the world", right? And can we also just get rid of that stigma around maths? This is really exciting. Maths is gonna be the reason we are gonna be on Mars by 2040, you know? So, some of the projects I'm working on now are looking at how we get to Mars on these new nuclear powered, deep space ships that will take six weeks to get from Earth to Mars. Can you imagine? I'm gonna go on a four month holiday, just gonna pop to Mars.

In terms of the human body, we are gonna see some amazing advances in terms of personalised medicine. I thoroughly believe we are on a pathway and an exponential trajectory to end cancer probably in the next 10 to 20 years. When we look at how we are working out how the stars work, we are also spending a lot of time working how our stars work, how do our cells work? DNA to RNA and protein function, we're going to be building digital twins of ourselves, biologically. So, you'll actually have a digital doppelganger, which will be a representative of you, you'll be able to grow your own organs, you'll be able to replace things that are broken. And stem cell research is just gonna change everything. Great person to follow around some of this thought leadership is Pete Diamandis who's of the XPRIZE and also Singularity University. And there's a great Australian scientist working in the eastern seaboard of the US called David Sinclair, and he's working on ageing and how we should really treat ageing as a disease. So, our children that are under 10 now will probably live to 120, 130. But the key here is they will be good years, they will be 120 or 130 healthy, good years.

Teachers literally hold the brains of the future in their hands, they are the people that are preparing the next generations to do all the things, they are the first futurists really, when you think about it. They're looking to see what skills, what projects, how they're gonna develop curricular, how they're gonna teach, how they're gonna work with new technologies to teach. So you really are, I'm afraid teachers, you are already futurists you're already thinking like futurists. And in fact, if I've seen anyone manage a class of 26 different personalities, you are actually already incredibly good systems engineers. So the key here is project based learning, the key here is staying in touch with some of the really exciting lighthouse type projects. For example, having humans living on Mars by 2040, have you done a Mars hab project yet? What could that possibly look like? Most of the kids that you teach might have been on Minecraft, how would you use a piece of software like that to build a Mars hab in that software for example, or a similar software or however you work? And then how do you physically build one in your playground and have a Mars hab? I mean, what would that look like?

So, if I was approaching a student these days I wouldn't say, so what do you want to be when you grow up? I would say, what problem do you really wanna solve? What thing really bakes your noodle? What really grinds your gears? What really upsets you? Or you wanna change or you feel passionate about? Because it's gonna be guaranteed for you that there's gonna be a pathway for you to be able to affect that problem from a number of different directions. You could be into the arts, you could be into languages, you could be into global geopolitics, you could be into ocean science, you could be into maths, please be into maths, you could be into physics, you could actually not know what you are into. But if you recognise the problem that bothers you, you are already on a pathway to fixing it. Project-based learning is the way teachers can really help kids find the areas that they love most. And also, all Nobel prizes now are won by teams, all great big leaps are now run by teams. Everyone, whenever we talk about it from NASA, through to resources companies, through to ocean research, billionaires, all of these people put together really interesting teams. So if you can teach your students how to be part of a team, how to learn where they fit in their niche inside that team, you are giving them a golden ticket to opportunities and opportunities, time and time again, through their 20s and 30s and 40s. And they'll always remember you for it and they'll always be grateful for it. So, to find your inner Yoda, you do or you do not, there is no try.

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