Our kids will share a world with Artificial Intelligence. Why is education not preparing them for it?
I wrote my first attempt at an AI simulator at the age of 14 or 15, in BASIC on a 2nd hand IBM 386 laptop running MS-DOS 4, after reading Marvin Minsky’s Society of Mind. This was the early 1990s.
The internet was not really a thing in Yorkshire at the time outside of universities, and I recall sneaking into Leeds University (sorry, University of Leeds) to use a fancy new thing called Mosaic, which could be used to call up mostly text based resources from all around the world. Learning about computing in 1990s Britain still involved dull school lessons about end user tools such as lotus 123 or microsoft paint, and attempting to get computer books from london via inter-library loan.
The big shock was finding out when studying abroad in 2001 just how far ahead the USA was over the UK & Europe, and I have had the last two decades to observe the impact that has had and the high price we have paid for being late to the tech party.
Subsequent tech developments have mostly been no surprise.
However for all the current hype about AI, today’s remarkable large language models (LLMs) are not really it, any more than my humble teenage chatbot was. But they are the start of a fundamental change in who we are…
