Our kids will share a world with Artificial Intelligence. Why is education not preparing them for it?

I wrote my first attempt at an AI simulator at the age of 14 or 15, in BASIC on a 2nd hand IBM 386 laptop running MS-DOS 4, after reading Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind. This was the early 1990s.

The internet was not really a thing in Yorkshire at the time outside of universities, and I recall sneaking into Leeds University (sorry, University of Leeds) to use a fancy new thing called Mosaic, which could be used to call up mostly text based resources from all around the world. Learning about computing in 1990s Britain still involved dull school lessons about end user tools such as lotus 123 or microsoft paint, and attempting to get computer books from london via inter-library loan.

The big shock was finding out when studying abroad in 2001 just how far ahead the USA was over the UK & Europe, and I have had the last two decades to observe the impact that has had and the high price we have paid for being late to the tech party.

Subsequent tech developments have mostly been no surprise.

However for all the current hype about AI, today's remarkable large language models (LLMs) are not really it, any more than my humble teenage chatbot was. But they are the start of a fundamental change in who we are, as well as what we do and how we do it, because it will be the LLMs and not us who will finally invent true Artificial Intelligence.

My kids are now the age I was when I started coding. It is devastating to find that the core edcuation curriculum has not much changed and is still focussed on basic end user skills, just now it's powerpoint and excel rather than paint and 123. These are not the skills we need. Yet if I talk about the skills we really do need and how big and urgent that change now is, people think I'm barking mad.

Whilst it fell some way short of the Turing Test I was pretty proud of that simple program. However nobody I showed was very interested in what I had learned or why it mattered, and they were generally happy to leave the computer geek to it and quietly hope I grew out it.

Well now we all have to grow into it.

Our future will be defined by how we respond to AI.

And today's kids need us not to be late.