In 1979, the government asked Wilfred Cockcroft, a now largely forgotten maths lecturer from the University of Hull, to write a report about a crisis in the teaching of his subject to children. It was wide-ranging and meticulous, and included\u00a0a chapter on a technological innovation that was suddenly becoming available to the average consumer: the calculator.<\/p>\n
Many parents and teachers feared that the gadget would undermine a\u00a0basic skill and a pillar of education \u2013 one of the sacred three Rs \u2013 producing generations of dumbed-down drones who could reach for a device in their pockets to avoid the hard graft of arithmetic.<\/p>\n
But Cockcroft didn\u2019t see it that way. Instead, he proposed embracing rather than fearing the calculator. Students should be taught with and without one \u2013 and tested accordingly.<\/p>\n
\u201cCockcroft is unwilling to pretend that the oncoming wave of technological progress can be\u00a0dodged,\u201d Daniel Susskind, an economist at King\u2019s College London, writes in his urgent new book.<\/p>\n
A former Downing Street policy wonk who is now also a researcher at the Institute for Ethics in AI at Oxford University, Susskind casts himself as the Cockroft of the 2020s. In an era of confusion and hand-wringing (if not outright panic) about the implications of AI, he makes the technologist\u2019s case for breathing, learning and grasping the opportunities it presents.<\/p>\n
double quotation markHe warns against the folly of ‘future\u00a0proofing’ when the horizon is so foggy<\/p>\n
The maths comparison only goes so\u00a0far, of course; even accounting for the hubris of the AI industry, its achievements have already wrought changes that now make the calculator seem about as consequential as the corkscrew. But while the scale of the disruption is new, the historical context is, to some extent, reassuring.<\/p>\n
The book\u2019s title neatly taps into the techno-angst of the modern parent about a future of extreme uncertainty. If traditionally we passed down wisdom with an open-minded but fairly clear sense of how it might apply to a new generation, \u201ctoday, it feels like that sense of continuity has broken. In truth, we cannot be sure the\u00a0advice we gave our children last year still works for the next.\u201d<\/p>\n
Susskind, a father of young children himself, tries to anticipate a future of artificial general intelligence (AGI) \u2013 when AI will outperform us at every economically useful task. (We now have access, via ChatGPT, Claude and the like, to what\u2019s known as artificial narrow intelligence: systems that are good at performing specific tasks.)<\/p>\n
In an AGI world \u2013 one that it\u2019s easy to imagine is\u00a0round the corner after reading Susskind\u2019s book \u2013whole careers but also the very meaning of work will change. Susskind urges politicians, parents and teachers to start paddling into that wave now.<\/p>\n
He warns against the folly of \u201cfuture\u00a0proofing\u201d when the horizon is so foggy. He recalls the David Cameron government\u2019s rush to teach kids how to code, just a few years before it emerged as one of the things that AI does best. Instead, schools should teach children to learn with and without AI, while also doubling down on the basic skills that we should never lose sight of.<\/p>\n
He envisages a future of personalised learning, in which AI-trained teachers will deploy the technology as assistant tutors rather than attempting to cater to\u00a030 children as a blob. Graduates entering white-collar industries that stand to be most disrupted should harness AI to free them from the drudgery of, say, reviewing legal documents in a basement and instead hone their craft earlier in AI-simulated trials. Middle-aged careerists should not \u201cretreat to inherited practices\u201d or kid themselves that they occupy \u201csafe\u201d professions; we must remember the underlying problem our professions seek to solve and reimagine how to do so in an AI-assisted age.<\/p>\n
Susskind neatly weaves the conceptual and the practical. And while there was apparently no time in\u00a0this slim work to consider the more immediate ethical implications of AI (its reliance on stolen creative work, its environmental toll) and the questionable personal qualities of so many AI bosses), as a call to action in the face of an unstoppable tide, his book is at once challenging, compelling and refreshingly optimistic.<\/p>\n