About this keynote
Firstly, thank you to Thomas and John Cullerne at Winchester College in the UK for asking me to kick off the college’s new academic year with a keynote on the impact of AI on the Future of Education, Learning, and Work, a triple whammy that quite sensibly looks into the future of the students “whole life” learning journey and let me discuss the connections between them all in depth.
Established in 1382 and part of the Rugby Group of schools, which include Bradfield College, Eaton, Wellington and others, Winchester College is one of the most prestigious private schools in the world with alumni that include the current UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who, in his own way is now trying to forge the future of the UK.
Against this backdrop, and against all the history in the hall I was presenting in it was clear to see just how far humanity, and technology, has come in what, in the college’s terms at least, is a blink of an eye.
For centuries the world changed little and slowly as the college expanded and grew, and even in the latter half of the 20th Century the changes that the college was preparing its students to face were manageable. But today, in a world dominated by AI’s that are now reaching near human levels of knowledge and performance this bastion of learning, like so many others, is struggling with the realities of a national curriculum that binds it to the past, and that now has increasingly little in common with the future as the gap between the two widens exponentially.
Historically it’s never an easy task to prepare students for careers that span fifty years, but today in a world that seems to change from month to month, with those changes being increasingly seismic, and as we sit on the cusp of creating the world’s first true Artificial General Intelligences (AGI) that task looks more and more daunting. And that’s why I was asked in, to show the whole faculty the future and the technologies, and their capabilities, that they and their students now have to be aware of, know how to out compete, and most importantly know how to use for their benefit in a world that increasingly has nothing in common with the past.
