Donald Clark Plan B
I’ve given a number of Keynotes and talks on AI for Learning to hardcore professional groups in the last year, such as national Police forces, the Military, Health services, Tax authorities and Lawyers. They are different, as they have focus and know exactly who and what they have to train. They train real people to do real things in real jobs. So they are often open to try specific technologies for specific purposes, like AI or VR, which you rarely see elsewhere.
There is an assumption in academic, HR and L&D conferences, for speakers to assume everyone works in an office. I saw this recently when a ‘futurist’ was talking about the ‘Future of Work’ as if absolutely everyone had the option of working at home. It was slide after slide of home working stats and studies. Itb was as if the working class did not exist – police, health workers, construction, delivery drivers, factory workers, shift workers… the list is very long.
When it came to the technology bit, the speaker was clearly all at sea. It was reductionist, reducing the effects of AI technology to the simple proposition that it will never replace humans, only augment our abilities, all the ‘c’ words were spoken of in earnest tones – creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communications…. the usual 21st century skill nonsense. Yet there seemed to be remarkably little of any of these in the analysis. She boldly claimed that AI will not take any human jobs and that it will only ‘augment’ roles.
