London Futurists
Anticipating and managing exponential impact - hosts David Wood and Calum Chace
Calum Chace is a sought-after keynote speaker and best-selling writer on artificial intelligence. He focuses on the medium- and long-term impact of AI on all of us, our societies and our economies. He advises companies and governments on AI policy.
His non-fiction books on AI are Surviving AI, about superintelligence, and The Economic Singularity, about the future of jobs. Both are now in their third editions.
He also wrote Pandora's Brain and Pandora’s Oracle, a pair of techno-thrillers about the first superintelligence. He is a regular contributor to magazines, newspapers, and radio.
In the last decade, Calum has given over 150 talks in 20 countries on six continents. Videos of his talks, and lots of other materials are available at https://calumchace.com/.
He is co-founder of a think tank focused on the future of jobs, called the Economic Singularity Foundation. The Foundation has published Stories from 2045, a collection of short stories written by its members.
Before becoming a full-time writer and speaker, Calum had a 30-year career in journalism and in business, as a marketer, a strategy consultant and a CEO. He studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University, which confirmed his suspicion that science fiction is actually philosophy in fancy dress.
David Wood is Chair of London Futurists, and is the author or lead editor of twelve books about the future, including The Singularity Principles, Vital Foresight, The Abolition of Aging, Smartphones and Beyond, and Sustainable Superabundance.
He is also principal of the independent futurist consultancy and publisher Delta Wisdom, executive director of the Longevity Escape Velocity (LEV) Foundation, Foresight Advisor at SingularityNET, and a board director at the IEET (Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies). He regularly gives keynote talks around the world on how to prepare for radical disruption. See https://deltawisdom.com/.
As a pioneer of the mobile computing and smartphone industry, he co-founded Symbian in 1998. By 2012, software written by his teams had been included as the operating system on 500 million smartphones.
From 2010 to 2013, he was Technology Planning Lead (CTO) of Accenture Mobility, where he also co-led Accenture’s Mobility Health business initiative.
Has an MA in Mathematics from Cambridge, where he also undertook doctoral research in the Philosophy of Science, and a DSc from the University of Westminster.
London Futurists
Innovating in education: the Codam experience, with David Giron
In this episode our guest is David Giron, the Director at what is arguably one of the world's most innovative educational initiatives, Codam College in Amsterdam. David was previously the head of studies at Codam's famous parent school 42 in Paris, and he has now spent 10 years putting into practice the somewhat revolutionary ideas of the 42 network. We ask David about what he has learned during these ten years, but we're especially interested in his views on how the world of education stands to be changed even further in the months and years ahead by generative AI.
Selected follow-ups:
https://www.codam.nl/en/team
https://42.fr/en/network-42/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) David's background at Epitech and 42 before joining Codam
*) The peer-to-peer framework at the heart of 42
*) Learning without teachers
*) Student assessment without teachers
*) Connection with the "competency-based learning" or "mastery learning" ideas of Sir Ken Robinson
*) Extending the 42 learning method beyond software engineering to other fields
*) Two ways of measuring whether the learning method is successful
*) Is it necessary for a school to fail some students from time to time?
*) The impact of Covid on the offline collaborative approach of Codam
*) ChatGPT is more than a tool; it is a "topic", on which people are inclined to take sides
*) Positive usage models for ChatGPT within education
*) Will ChatGPT make the occupation of software engineering a "job from the past"?
*) Software engineers will shift their skills from code-writing to prompt-writing
*) Why generative AI is likely to have a faster impact on work than the introduction of mechanisation
*) The adoption rate of generative AI by Codam students - and how it might change later this year
*) Code first or comment first?
*) The level of interest in Codam shown by other educational institutions
*) The resistance to change within traditional educational institutions
*) "The revolution is happening outside"
*) From "providing knowledge" to "creating a learning experience"
*) From large language models to full video systems that are individually tailored to help each person learn whatever they need in order to solve problems
*) Learning to code as a proxy for the more fundamental skill of learning to learn
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
