If I did a TED talk on AI.....

.....this would be my script....

“Magenta and cyan. Do you remember those colours? I do. Two bright and exotic colours of my early childhood. Colours from the early 1980’s when we would all sit there as kids, type in a page of coding taken from our computer manuals (those manuals that were only printed in black and white because colour print was expensive!), wait patiently while the cassette whirred, bleeped and buzzed and hope (we would actually cross our fingers sometimes); hope these bright colours would appear on screen as patterns or shapes. Of course along the way we hoped we didn’t get an error - something some of you may remember was called a syntax error. “Syntax error, string too long” was the typical error I got back from the bulky grey box many times. I can at this point see half a sea of blank faces out there when I’m mentioning these things. “A piece of string?”, “what’s a cassette?” some are thinking. Or for those slightly older “why is he talking about cassettes and computers? They were floppy disks!” “Cassettes were for Walkmans” some people are thinking. Look, some more puzzled looks....

Funny isn’t it the advances we’ve made over the years but nevertheless I liked those simple days of simple computing and simple tech. I liked them because if nothing else they taught my generation patience. The tech also provided you with a great sense of achievement. As odd as it might seem to millennials nowadays a triangle moving around a screen flashing from cyan to magenta was actually very satisfying and in my family’s case quite a relief for my Dad. Him not seeing a syntax error on screen for the 10th time in a row and a little kid getting frustrated about it was no doubt also quite satisfying for him. But it was satisfying not really because of the end result, that flashing triangle, but the effort exerted doing all the coding. The workings out, the struggle, is what I liked and appreciated. It made it feel worthwhile and it certainly was. It was worthwhile from a cognitive perspective. I could feel it giving me a mental workout that was doing me some good. 

Nowadays that 16k of power I used in the 80’s to punch in a bit of coding probably couldn’t even man the on button of your smartphone. Tech has certainly exploded and there is no sign of it stopping but the question for me is this - with the onslaught of AI, is tech, in its current form, good for our brains? Does it still require thought in the way it once did? Early tech was primitive but because of its primitive form we still had to think and that helped our ability to problem solve. Could there be a critical moment in our evolution where our brilliance actually diminishes a little (or perhaps even a lot) because all of a sudden we are left having to rely on the tech? Will we pass the point where we question if what it gives us is what we actually need?

I’m a lawyer. Sorry about that. Should have declared that at the outset. I manage a team of 45 staff who work a pretty sophisticated case management system where many of the jobs they do are effortless. Because of that level of automation and the level of automation generally I have sadly seen a drop in skillsets over the last 15 years, since I qualified. This is right across the board in all sectors, not just mine. Staff, clients, opponents, the Courts have all seen huge level of automation and the problem I am seeing of people switching off has crept in. Yet, despite this problem academic achievement is greater now than ever before. More candidates from top universities are getting really great results, much better than I ever achieved when I was at university. The problem is many academic achievers seem to have that general lack of understanding specifically when faced with something new or when they aren’t being guided by something; and I honestly think it is because people spend half their lives, perhaps more, carried and guided through life by their technology. I try hard to stop this from setting in with my junior members of staff and in general I am fortunate because of the high calibre we employ but it still requires a good level of teaching to turn good members of staff into excellent ones. I’m certainly lucky on that front but I guess we manage it because we recognize its importance. Common sense you see and critical analysis is about awareness and you only garner enough awareness of something if you are not on auto-pilot all the time. You need to be alive and switched on to solve a problem. Tech, at the moment at least, can make people pretty lazy. 

I’m generation Xennial which is a recent thing. This concerns people born between 1978 and 1983. It’s not been recognised for very long but I’m glad it has because it makes perfect sense to me. I never felt part of generation x and I’m certainly not a y or a millennial. I get picked on at work by the youth of today for not embracing tech without questioning it first. I’m also always sceptical at first of business tech and I think it’s because I’m an Xennial. I don’t like reading from a screen or marking up a document on screen. I'm afraid it just doesn’t go in, in quite the same way and there are large studies out there that support my point. Something tangible is more memorable is what all the studies tell us. I think part of the reason why it doesn’t sink in though is because an Xennial knows of better ways to do things. To go a bit Rumsfeld on you for a moment the known unknowns you know of are known knowns an Xennial perhaps knows of because we’ve experienced both - the manual way and the the tech way. The analog and the digital. You see Xennials grew up in a time where landline phones were used to organise catch ups with friends, and people read the newspaper and watched the nightly news to keep up to date with current affairs. But then before we had our kids all the tech exploded and because of the timing we were still able to adapt and adopt the new tech. We just managed to stay in touch with the new but never forgot the benefits of the old and to us new tech still doesn’t feel quite right to us; at least not completely right all time. We see these problems in perfect Technicolor. See what I did there! Xennials seem to know what we need as a society on this particular point and to us it is so obvious. 

The problem is humans are pre-programmed to find the easiest path. Tech of course makes life easier. A bit like water it naturally finds the path of least resistance to find the answer but I think because of this those neural pathways that help you to problem solve and analyse things are being rewired in a different way, and I’m not sure that is a good thing. I’m not rejecting tech, I’m questioning it which is something different so don’t think I’m being a Luddite about things. I’m really not. What I am doing is making a few points I see people who are getting carried away about AI don’t seem to be making. The fact is we’re no longer enjoying the journey of learning like we once did because there isn’t really much of one to go on. The journey to the answer is now usually a milli-click away. Everything is becoming a calculator or a sat nav where you don’t have to think about the arithmetic or study the map. This really bothers me and we need to now quickly question whether this is the right approach. Surely we must do this. If solving difficult problems is going to be the only thing we have left to do as humans in the future then why are we allowing tech to blight our chance to get really good at something? That seems silly to me. We need to up our game at the moment, not dumb it down. And if this is about maintaining profit then it’s a false economy to snatch at AI when we are feeling the squeeze because it's one thing to maintain profits but not if you are cutting the roots to do so. That’s a short term strategy. We collectively make profit as a society and big business needs to remember this. It takes all levels of employers and employees to make an economy tick properly. You can’t just have experts working within it. If we allow AI to dumb things down without any controls in place are we in fact watching the equivalent of the icecaps melting here and not doing enough about it? 

To take an analogy, in the 1800s medicine was in its infancy. Doctors would be held in high regard and whatever they did it wasn’t really questioned, at least not for a long time. That led to many, many advances in that period but also many problems and eventually controls were put in place where things like drugs and vaccines are now controlled in laboratories across the world and safety standards are in place to protect us. So where is the AI equivalent? - there is currently no greater threat to an individual’s pocket, their progression, their ability and their mental health than AI. AI at its ugliest is either taking your job at the checkout or it’s processing work you once were paid to do and if nothing else your opportunities to solve basic problems are now diminishing at a rapid rate. But despite the obvious threats there’s no lab controlling it. 

The saying I use most in my house, and love to use, because it helps defeat childhood anxiety, is that "every expert started out as a beginner". I have two clever, young boys who get frustrated when they can’t instantly do something. Part of the reason for this is the instant life we live in, where everything is available like that [finger click], instantly, to be consumed in one bite and when it isn’t right there, right then at the end of your fingertips, it creates anxiety. 

"Every expert was once a beginner". Remember that in the context of AI and where we are going. It’s not only true but it’s important because you can’t have one without the other. You cannot have an expert without a beginner and vice-versa. There is also a phrase I like very much which underlines the importance of the working habitat we need to work in. This is the habitat where we want to have the right balance of environmental factors to support our beginners and our experts. Enough, light, air, food and water to support every aim. The phrase is the “paradox of automation” and it describes a situation where AI has taken over to the extent that brains have begun to shutdown and de-skill themselves and experts are not coming through to take on the critical knowledge. The people in an environment where there is this kind of paradox in existence will quickly power down and out. Two quick examples that should worry us all. First, in the UK there was a health blunder where breast screening tests were missed because the computer got it wrong. In that example no human was checking who held the baton of responsibility and critical information was missed. Terrible. A really awful situation and yet where were the controls and where are the laws to control it from happening again? Second example. Air France. A plane stalled a few years ago and the pilots, who had been using autopilot too much in their careers, could not figure out what to do. The answer was actually very simple but they still crashed into the sea killing everyone on board. Serious, serious issues but no controls specific to AI and how we use it were put into place. Should those two examples not tell us that AI should come with a health warning? Tragedies that manual, human intervention would have easily avoided if we had instead laid out a strategy to protect and we had had the patience to deliver it. The fact is we don’t check things enough anymore like we used to (the mundane double and triple-checking is not there like it was) and we don’t question the tech because we accept it is more intelligent than we are. Pure robot reliance in both those examples had serious consequences and it was because the systems in place were not robustly tested. The same applies to any AI used in any business. Your business is only as good as your employees. Can they still do it without the AI? 

But let’s not get too down about this. AI is artificial after all. It isn’t real intelligence. Plus, it never should be because we fortunately hold the upper hand, for the moment at least. We are the lions of our own intellectual jungle so let’s pause and reflect right now on this opportunity to get it right. The moment to seize the opportunity is now. As employers and employees we need to stand back and make sure that there are still opportunities for my little beginners to become experts because if we don’t ensure controls are put in place soon we will create a massive skills gap that spans a generation. One where experts who managed to make the grade in the non-tech decades eventually die out and we are left with an inferior influx to replace them because the new generation never tackled a syntax error like I did. There was no opportunity to do so given to them. They just pressed the button on that calculator throughout their early careers and nobody showed them how to do their basic arithmetic so they could become experts. 

We all know as well that you learn the most from the mistakes you make. If AI rubs out our opportunities to make those manual mistakes every now and then how can we evolve as individuals standing on our own two feet with nothing there propping us up? We will suddenly only be able to do it in collaboration with AI if we are not careful and that is quite a scary thought. Struggling is the key part of any learning and in many ways that is the fun bit. Doing things manually caters for that. Always doing things the AI way doesn’t.


I say let’s take the opportunity to embrace AI but let’s make it work for us and our children. If this life is all about protecting our planet, health and well-being for future generations then let’s put this high up on our agendas. There is no point saving a planet if it’s inhabitants are not going to have happy and healthy minds. Now is a really fantastic opportunity to embrace AI but only if we get off to a good start. To do that properly we need to not get carried away. So I urge governments across the world to unite and to set an agenda for our kids so they can use AI to facilitate their learning rather than control their potential. Let’s correct this syntax error we look as though we are creating, and let’s get to work building a future for our children that is as bright as that magenta triangle I used to stare at for hours on end. Thank you.” 

If you would like me to deliver this as an actual TED talk why not leave a comment, or even nominate me direct https://speaker-nominations.ted.com