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
GPT-4 transforming education, with Donald Clark
The launch of GPT-4 on 14th March has provoked concerns and searching questions, and nowhere more so than in the education sector. Earlier this month, the share price of US edutech company Chegg halved when its CEO admitted that GPT technology was a threat to its business model.
Looking ahead, GPT models seem to put flesh on the bones of the idea that all students could one day have a personal tutor as effective as Aristotle, who was Alexander the Great’s personal tutor. When that happens, students should leave school and university far, far better educated than we did.
Donald Clark is the ideal person to discuss this with. He founded Epic Group in 1983, and made it the UK’s largest provider of bespoke online education services before selling it in 2005. He is now the CEO of an AI learning company called WildFire, and an investor in and Board member of several other education technology businesses. In 2020 he published a book called Artificial Intelligence for Learning.
Selected follow-ups:
https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/
https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education
https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Case-against-Education-System-Waste/dp/0691196451/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Head-Hand-Heart-Intelligence-Over-Rewarded/dp/1982128461/
Topics addressed in this episode include:
*) "Education is a bit of a slow learner"
*) Why GPT-4 has unprecedented potential to transform education
*) The possibility of an online universal teacher
*) Traditional education sometimes fails to follow best pedagogical practice
*) Accelerating "time to competence" via personalised tuition
*) Calum's experience learning maths
*) How Khan Academy and DuoLingo are partnering with GPT-4
*) The significance of the large range of languages covered by ChatGPT
*) The recent essay on "The Age of AI" by Bill Gates
*) Students learning social skills from each other
*) An imbalanced societal focus on educating and valuing "head" rather than "heart" or "hand"
*) "The case against education" by Bryan Caplan
*) Evidence of wide usage of ChatGPT by students of all ages
*) Three gaps between GPT-4 and AGI, and how they are being bridged by including GPT-4 in "ensembles"
*) GPT-4 has a better theory of physics than GPT 3.5
*) Encouraging a generative AI to learn about a worldview via its own sensory input, rather than directly feeding a worldview into it
*) Pros and cons of "human exceptionalism"
*) How GPT-4 is upending our ideas on the relation between language and intelligence
*) Generative AI, the "C skills", and the set of jobs left for humans to do
*) Custer's last stand?
*) Three camps regarding progress toward AGI
*) Investors' reactions to Italy banning ChatGPT (subsequently reversed)
*) Different views on GDPR and European legislation
*) Further thoughts on implications of GPT-4 for the education industry
*) Shocking statistics on declining enrolment numbers in US universities
*) Beyond exclusivity: "A tutorial system for everybody"?
*) A boon for Senegal and other countries in the global south?
Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration
