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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 a chapter on a technological innovation that was suddenly becoming available to the average consumer: the calculator.
Many parents and teachers feared that the gadget would undermine a basic skill and a pillar of education – one of the sacred three Rs – producing generations of dumbed-down drones who could reach for a device in their pockets to avoid the hard graft of arithmetic.
But Cockcroft didn’t see it that way. Instead, he proposed embracing rather than fearing the calculator. Students should be taught with and without one – and tested accordingly.
“Cockcroft is unwilling to pretend that the oncoming wave of technological progress can be dodged,” Daniel Susskind, an economist at King’s College London, writes in his urgent new book.
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’s case for breathing, learning and grasping the opportunities it presents.
The maths comparison only goes so far, 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.
The book’s 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, “today, it feels like that sense of continuity has broken. In truth, we cannot be sure the advice we gave our children last year still works for the next.”
Susskind, a father of young children himself, tries to anticipate a future of artificial general intelligence (AGI) – when AI will outperform us at every economically useful task. (We now have access, via ChatGPT, Claude and the like, to what’s known as artificial narrow intelligence: systems that are good at performing specific tasks.)
In an AGI world – one that it’s easy to imagine is round the corner after reading Susskind’s book –whole careers but also the very meaning of work will change. Susskind urges politicians, parents and teachers to start paddling into that wave now.
He warns against the folly of “future proofing” when the horizon is so foggy. He recalls the David Cameron government’s 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.
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 30 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 “retreat to inherited practices” or kid themselves that they occupy “safe” professions; we must remember the underlying problem our professions seek to solve and reimagine how to do so in an AI-assisted age.
Susskind neatly weaves the conceptual and the practical. And while there was apparently no time in this 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.
