23 entries
Technology & Computing
The computer lab curriculum with the shortest shelf life of any subject in school.
Changes here run from 1997 to 2026.
- Disproved16
- Replaced4
- Updated2
- Refined1
- DisprovedNot in textbooks yet
No human has traveled beyond Earth orbit since 1972, and none will for the foreseeable future
Changed in2026TaughtThe last people to leave low-Earth orbit were the Apollo 17 astronauts in December 1972. Ever since, human spaceflight has been stuck circling a few hundred kilometres up (the Space Shuttle, the ISS) and returning to deep space felt perpetually a decade away.
NowOn 1 April 2026, NASA's Artemis II launched four astronauts on a flight around the Moon, the first crewed mission beyond low-Earth orbit since Apollo 17. They looped around the far side and splashed down safely on 10 April, traveling farther from Earth than any humans in history.
- DisprovedNot in textbooks yet
Computers can't do original mathematical reasoning; no machine could win a math olympiad
Changed in2025TaughtComputers are fast calculators, but genuine mathematical creativity (reading a hard, unseen olympiad problem and inventing a multi-step proof) is a distinctly human act. A machine can crunch numbers; it cannot reason its way to a novel proof under exam conditions.
NowIn July 2025, AI systems from Google DeepMind and OpenAI both scored 35 out of 42 on the International Mathematical Olympiad, gold-medal level, solving five of six problems as free-form written proofs, under the same rules and time limits as human contestants.
- Disproved
TaughtReusable rockets land the way SpaceX's Falcon 9 does, deploying legs and setting down on a pad or a drone ship. The idea of a skyscraper-sized booster steering itself back and being plucked out of mid-air by the launch tower is a rendering, not something anyone has done.
NowOn 13 October 2024, on the fifth Starship test flight, SpaceX's Super Heavy booster flew itself back to the launch tower and was caught in mid-descent by two giant mechanical arms, the 'chopsticks', on the first attempt. No booster had ever been recovered that way before.
- Disproved
TaughtQubits are so fragile that the more of them you string together, the more errors pile up. Error correction was a beautiful theory, but in practice every extra qubit added more noise than it removed, so a useful, scaled quantum computer stayed permanently over the horizon.
NowIn December 2024 Google reported in Nature that its Willow chip crossed the error-correction threshold: as it went from a 3×3 to a 5×5 to a 7×7 grid of physical qubits, the logical error rate was cut roughly in half at each step. For the first time, adding qubits made the encoded information more reliable, not less.
- Disproved
TaughtDiscovering a new stable material, the kind that could make a better battery or a superconductor, is slow, hard lab work. Across all of history, chemists had characterized only a few tens of thousands of stable inorganic crystals, each the product of careful synthesis and testing.
NowIn November 2023, Google DeepMind reported in Nature that its GNoME AI had predicted 2.2 million new crystal structures, about 380,000 of them stable: roughly a tenfold jump over all the stable inorganic crystals humanity had catalogued before, generated in a matter of weeks.
- Disproved
TaughtA gruelling professional licensing exam (the bar for lawyers, the medical boards for doctors) tests years of specialized human judgement. A computer might answer trivia, but it could not pass the kind of exam that certifies a person to practice a profession.
NowIn March 2023, OpenAI reported that GPT-4 scored high enough on the Uniform Bar Exam to pass in most US jurisdictions, around 75%, and it cleared other professional and graduate exams too. A machine passing the bar went from thought experiment to done.
- Disproved
TaughtSoftware can edit, filter, and rearrange existing pictures, but it cannot invent a new image from scratch. Describe 'an astronaut riding a horse in the style of a Renaissance painting' and no program could produce it; visual creativity is human.
NowIn 2022, text-to-image models made this routine. OpenAI released DALL·E 2 in April, and Stable Diffusion was released openly in August: systems that generate novel, coherent, high-resolution images from a plain-English prompt in seconds.
- Disproved
Computers can't understand ordinary language
Changed in2022TaughtMachines need exact commands. They cannot handle ambiguity, metaphor, or context, so you have to speak to them in code or in rigid menu choices. Natural conversation with a computer is science fiction.
NowLarge language models write, translate, summarize, explain, and code from plain conversational instructions. ChatGPT's launch in November 2022 reached an estimated 100 million users within two months, the fastest adoption of any consumer application to that point.
- Disproved
There is no way to make breathable oxygen on Mars
Changed in2021TaughtMars's atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide and almost unbreathable. Any human mission would have to carry every molecule of oxygen, for breathing and for rocket fuel, all the way from Earth, because there is no way to produce it there.
NowOn 20 April 2021, a toaster-sized instrument called MOXIE, riding on NASA's Perseverance rover, pulled oxygen out of the Martian air, splitting carbon dioxide to produce about 5 grams of breathable oxygen. It was the first time a natural resource had ever been harvested on another planet.
- Disproved
TaughtComputers manipulate symbols; they don't understand language. A machine might autocomplete a word or churn out stilted, robotic sentences, but it could never write an essay, an article, or a story fluent enough to pass as the work of a person.
NowIn June 2020 OpenAI released GPT-3, a 175-billion-parameter language model that produced paragraphs of coherent, on-topic prose from a short prompt. In OpenAI's own tests, human readers could barely tell its short news articles from ones written by people, doing little better than a coin flip.
- Disproved
TaughtBatteries are too heavy, too slow to charge, and too weak. Electric cars are glorified golf carts with 60 miles of range, and the internal combustion engine is not going anywhere.
NowLithium-ion pack prices fell roughly 90 percent between 2010 and 2023. Electric vehicles passed 18 percent of new car sales globally in 2023, and several major markets have legislated end dates for new combustion-engine sales.
- Disproved
Renewable energy will always be too expensive to compete
Changed in2020TaughtSolar and wind are noble ideas but hopelessly costly. They only exist because of subsidies, and fossil fuels will remain the cheap option indefinitely.
NowThe International Energy Agency stated in 2020 that solar is now the cheapest source of electricity in history. Photovoltaic module costs fell by roughly 99.9 percent from the late 1970s, and in most of the world new solar and wind undercut new coal and gas.
- Refined
TaughtMoore's Law: processor speed doubles roughly every two years, without end. Just wait and your computer will be twice as fast.
NowTransistor counts still rise, but clock speeds stalled around 2005 and Dennard scaling ended. In 2016 the industry's own roadmap, the ITRS, published its final edition and stopped organizing around Moore's Law. Gains now come from more cores, specialized chips, and packaging.
- Disproved
Go is too complex for computers to master
Changed in2016TaughtChess fell to brute force, but Go has more legal positions than atoms in the observable universe, and it depends on intuition and shape judgement no algorithm can capture. Experts estimated a machine was decades away.
NowDeepMind's AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol 4 to 1 in March 2016. A year later AlphaGo Zero learned the game entirely from self-play, with no human games at all, and surpassed every previous version in days.
- Disproved
You won't always have a calculator in your pocket
Changed in2012TaughtMemorize your times tables and learn long division by hand, because you will not always be carrying a calculator around with you.
NowRoughly 70 percent of humanity carries a smartphone. It contains a calculator, a graphing tool, a computer algebra system, and a camera that will solve a written equation by looking at it.
- Replaced
Save your work to a floppy disk
Changed in2011TaughtBring a floppy disk to computer class. A 3.5-inch disk holds 1.44 MB, enough for your essay, and you should always keep a backup copy on a second disk.
NowSony, the last major manufacturer, stopped making floppy disks in March 2011. The format survives only as the save icon, a picture of an object most students have never touched.
- Replaced
TaughtCursive handwriting is a core skill. You will need it for every letter, exam, form, and signature for the rest of your life, and sloppy penmanship will cost you.
NowThe 2010 Common Core standards in the United States dropped cursive as a requirement, replacing it with keyboarding. Most adult writing is now typed. A partial reversal is underway, with more than 20 states legislating cursive back in, and California mandating it again from 2024.
- Updated
A powerful computer fills a room
Changed in2007TaughtSerious computing power means a mainframe: a machine the size of a room, run by specialists, that you submit jobs to. Personal computers are for word processing and games.
NowThe phone in your pocket is a supercomputer by the standards of most of the twentieth century. A modern smartphone outperforms the Cray-2, the fastest machine on Earth in 1985, by orders of magnitude, and the iPhone's 2007 launch made that the default condition of ordinary life.
- Updated
Never trust Wikipedia, use the encyclopedia
Changed in2005TaughtWikipedia is written by anonymous strangers and is unreliable by design. Use Encyclopaedia Britannica in the library, which is written by experts and fact-checked.
NowA 2005 Nature study found Wikipedia's science articles had roughly comparable error rates to Britannica. Britannica ended its print edition in 2012 after 244 years. Wikipedia is now standard reference infrastructure, though it remains a tertiary source you cite through, not from.
- Replaced
TaughtComputer class means BASIC or Pascal. The Advanced Placement Computer Science exam is taught in Pascal, so that is the language you learn to think in.
NowAP Computer Science moved to C++ in 1999, then to Java in 2004. Python overtook everything as the introductory language, and by 2024 was the most popular language on GitHub. Pascal and BASIC have effectively vanished from schools.
- Replaced
Reference books are how you find things out
Changed in1998TaughtResearch means the library. Use the card catalogue, find the Dewey Decimal number, consult the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, and copy the quotation onto an index card.
NowSearch engines answered the retrieval problem. Google launched in 1998, and card catalogues were withdrawn through the 1990s and 2000s. The Library of Congress stopped printing catalogue cards in 1997 and OCLC ended its card service in 2015.
- Disproved
TaughtThe internet is a research network for universities and hobbyists. Nobody will put a credit card into a computer, and no serious commerce will happen online.
NowGlobal e-commerce runs in the trillions of dollars annually. More than five billion people use the internet, and the largest companies in the world by market capitalization are almost entirely internet businesses.
- Disproved
No computer will ever beat a chess grandmaster
Changed in1997TaughtChess requires intuition and creativity that machines fundamentally lack. Computers can calculate, but a world champion will always see what brute force cannot.
NowIBM's Deep Blue beat world champion Garry Kasparov in a match in May 1997. Today a free chess engine on a phone plays far above any human who has ever lived, and no top player would take the game.