Getting The Next Ten Years Right

tldr: CogX gave me the cognitive dissonance of trying to balance retaining a critical mindset on AI and the now familiar feelings of paradigm shift fatigue with being wide-eyed with wonder about what lies ahead and intrigued about all the ways that AI seems likely to reach into most aspects of human life.

Shortly before the current academic year began, Bayes Business School were listed as one of the sponsors for a major event on artificial intelligence (AI) being held at London’s O2. As one of the lucky staff members able to get a ticket for CogX, I tagged along for one of the three days to see what responses the gathered luminaries would give to the prompt ‘How do we get the next ten years right?’

Started in 2017, the CogX Festival was initiated to focus attention on the rising impact of AI on industry, government and society, and has subsequently evolved to be ‘a Festival of Inspiration, Impact and Transformational Change, with its mission to address the question‘ that formed the main banner for the event. CogX 2023 felt a little like a ‘Glastonbury of AI’, with star attractions put on in the vast main arena and other speakers spread over a handful of fringe stages across the rest of the O2 estate, with an absolute smorgasbord of talks on everything ranging from quantum computing and sustainable shipping to the intersection between AI, biology and superconductors, and space solar power. It also felt very much like a positioning by the event of London as a major global AI hub. See the CogX YouTube channel to pick and choose from talks delivered during those three days in September, and plenty more besides.

I’d only ever been outside the O2 before, never inside to an actual event. The visit took me back to my 1990s memories of the building of the Millennium Dome and of how much of a white elephant it had been expected to become at the time. Doesn’t seem to be the case now, 25 years on, with the venue very much in active use. While there was far from a Glastonbury-sized audience at the event, there were still enough people around to make it feel buzzy and even a little zeitgeist-y. Plenty of wide open spaces in some of the seating clusters though.

My blog posts about attending conferences typically end up as long and detailed written descriptions of the event itself and the sessions contained within. On this occasion, I wanted to try something a little different. Over the years, I’ve looked over delegate shoulders and noticed conference attendees sketching their impressions of an event rather than just writing notes. I was curious to do the same, but old habits still die hard and I ended up still hand writing key snippets in my notebook and taking photographs from the audience with my phone. However, fan of killing as many birds with as few stones as I am, I decided to put some conference sketches together after the event as well as using it as an opportunity to explore Apple’s Freeform app.

Freeform is a digital whiteboarding application that runs on all Apple devices and which was introduced across the platform ecosystem in 2022. By that time, I was already using Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams on occasion for quick sketches in meetings, Miro for more detailed digital whiteboard collaborations, and Google’s Jamboard for group activities on the open Web (note for users that Google are seemingly retiring Jamboard as a product this year).

As interactive whiteboards were my gateway into educational technologies and ultimately out of the classroom, I’ve long been curious about the interplay between writing or drawing by hand and capturing those ideas digitally. I’d not got round to properly trying Freeform out since it was launched, so a series of sketches that reflected CogX seemed as good a reason as any to give the tool a first try. I’m also attempting here to make the sketches digitally accessible too – any feedback on how to improve on my initial attempts, please add in the comments below.

This post, then, features some sketched reflections from the CogX 2023 sessions I attended and a few thoughts on Freeform to close with. The opening image at the top of the post brings together the sketch panels for the whole event, while the sections below go into a little detail from the individual talks I attended. Click here to view a larger PDF version of the same image. Use the YouTube links in the images to watch the actual talks themselves. Here’s one of the main keynotes, from Stephen Fry, to whet your appetites:

 

A New Era of Automation

After getting my orientation across the vast expanse of the conference, the first talk I went to was titled ‘A New Era of Automation’ and was focused on the impact of AI on the world of work. In line with much of the discourse of the event, the panellists spoke about AI as very much here to stay, a disruptive force for the world of work for the foreseeable future, but something that may ultimately bring significant benefits, provided we’re able to navigate embracing these tools effectively and learn from our history when it comes to the automation of work.

The session suggested that if AI will ultimately handle a lot of the lower level ‘knowledge work’ in the future, universities will clearly need to focus more on developing the skills and competencies that humans are better at than machines. While I don’t disagree that modern universities could focus as much on skills and competencies as they do on knowledge, I also come to this with a longer view on automation in the workplace. From the Luddites’ loom smashing in response to the automation of their skilled artisanship (and therefore livelihoods) to the more recent Hollywood writers strike, history indeed tells us that we need to be very careful with the prospect of automating the work of great swathes of the workforce.

Human Rights in the Age of Big Tech

I stayed in the same room for the next talk, on ‘Human Rights in the Age of Big Tech’. This session felt much closer to my heart in terms of a rounded but critical view of AI. Human Rights Lawyer Susie Alegre spoke about the importance of freedom of thought, and of not being continually manipulated by algorithms. She also raised the prospect of an AI serving on a jury in future. Seeing as City’s already held a student debate with an AI as a panelist, it’s not an implausible notion. Although, as Alegre suggested, it might be better for that AI jury member to be asking questions rather than providing answers.

The Future of Supercomputing

Over in one of the smaller (yet still large) chambers of the O2, Kate Royce of the Hartree Centre, an organisation that helps UK businesses and organisations to explore and adopt supercomputing, data science and AI, introduced me and perhaps much of the assembled crowd to notions of exascale computing and talk of ‘Big Compute’. A lot of the terminology was pretty new to me (and in some cases, rather over my head), but it hinted at a future that very much includes far greater computing capabilities and capacities that we are currently using. Britain’s rejoining of the EU’s Horizon programme had just been announced, which was considered very good news to this particular audience.

Regulating Pandora’s Box

Back over in the same wing as the earlier talks I’d attended was a session titled ‘Regulating Pandora’s Box’, largely focused around the legislation that might be needed in a new world of AI. With this talk taking place shortly prior to Britain’s AI summit at Bletchley Park, the session looked at emerging approaches to legislation from around the world and wrestled with some of the challenges that governments face with trying to legislate in this fast-moving space. It dug in to where culpability lies in disinformation, the threats AI present to elections, and the likelihood that AI’s effects will differ given the wide variations in technical environments in different states.

A tough nut to crack, for sure, but an important one to tackle all the same. If this generation doesn’t put at least some rules in place for the brave new world around the corner, we’ll only have ourselves to blame when things go wrong. Our descendants will certainly blame us if we don’t.

The Future of Learning

Closest to my area of professional interest was ‘The Future Of Learning’, which included two of City’s own staff on the panel – Vice President (Digital and Student Experience) Susannah Quinsee and Bayes’s Professor of Digital Creativity Neil Maiden. The discussion spanned new skills that students might need in future, the extent to which Generative AI is seen as a major disruptor in higher education and the pace of change that the sector is living through. This panel shared a similar theme to many of the others in that – whatever the background and area of expertise – everyone’s trying to find their feet in these changing times and that no-one really has serious answers at this stage.

It’s certainly not an understatement to suggest that to get by in higher education these days, one needs to be able to operate within an almost constant pace of change. I must admit though, with Generative AI coming as the latest major force for change in this space so soon after the Covid-19 pandemic turned campuses on their heads and forced us all fully online in a hurry, I’m feeling a bit of paradigm-shift fatigue. That said, I’m sure I’m not the only one experiencing a bit of what futurist Alvin Toffler called ‘future shock’, a perception of too much change in too short a period of time.

Building a Digital World That Benefits Us All

Over in the main arena of the O2, the space where I’d recently watched YouTube videos of a reunited Led Zeppelin finally perform together again from earlier this century, the talks looked to take on big themes. I was rather taken aback by how empty the audience seating was in this space, having sat through full house standing-room-only talks at the smaller stages. Perhaps there’s not yet enough of a critical mass of citizens that want the future explained to them in a stadium rock venue.

Nevertheless, I was happy to be present amongst the broad brush stokes that were listened to by the audience in about 5% of the available seating. ‘Building a Digital World That Benefits Us All’ was a panel reflection on where we are now as a species that has learned to live with the Internet, but which doesn’t yet include all of us in life online. Given the rise of the coming AI era, the panel extolled us to imagine better futures, involving building our societies around regeneration rather than extraction. There was also an important point about the drive towards a stronger focus on equality, diversity and inclusion, and that ‘diversity is not something we do to not be the bad guys, but in order to learn from more perspectives’. Looking around at the state of the world these days, this is a sentiment that could certainly be more heeded.

The Future of Creativity

The final session I attended was by a voice artist I’ve never heard of called Reeps100, titled ‘The Future of Creativity’. He spoke about ways that he’d used AI as a creative tool to develop or build on work that he had produced himself and presented some examples. Although I’m purposefully not describing what he showcased as something that he ‘collaborated with AI’ on (it remains important not to anthropomorphise these tools, I feel), the work was nonetheless pretty impressive and he raised some very interesting points about the creative potential that making more effective use of these tools suggests.

I remain curious about the possibilities that tools like Generative AI can present for creative arts like music – not as a replacement for more established forms of music making, but more to hear what the creative possibilities are for music that could only be made with the use of AI, so Reeps100 certainly gave me some good food for thought. After all, recording music instead of keeping it to just live performances, electrifying instruments and the use of synthetic sounds via sampling and synthesisers were all considered heretical at various points in the history of music. Once creative types start making interesting works with this new tool in the toolkit, perceptions are likely to change.

Using Freeform

I didn’t use Freeform to capture my thoughts on the day itself and build a sketched reflection of the conference, as I’ve seen others do. I can’t therefore speak for the utility of using it as a means of capturing moments that matter from a conference. However, I did use it as a place to put the photographs I’d taken at the event and the notes I’d scribbled in my notebook. In this case, using Freeform was not an alternative way to capture the salient points and moments from a conference, but a different way to reflect on the event and represent it in a publication.

The first time I opened Freeform, I was struck by how little was actually there. Like any blank page, this made it a little daunting to know what to do with, at first. There’s a simple menu on the side that provides different ways of organising your boards, of which you won’t have any until you start making them. The main panel provides a thumbnail visualisation of the different boards that you might have created, with familiar options for creating new boards, ordering them or searching through them at the top.

On a board itself, there’s a limited palette of input options along the top, consisting of a drawing palette, a means of adding digital ‘sticky notes’, a menu for adding from a pre-set collection of shapes, a free text box, and access to a photo library. There is the familiar Apple icon for sharing a file in the top right corner and a button for turning the background grid off on the whiteboard itself, but not a lot else. As a believer of the benefits of designing within constraints, this minimal feature set was probably to my advantage as I didn’t get distracted by the broad array on infinite possibilities that some platforms can offer. It also makes for a significant contrast with tools like Miro, which are feature stuffed.

I set the board up first on a MacBook, then shared it with myself on the iPad version so that I could input some handwriting into the sketch. I find this a more natural way to ‘sketch’, although given my handwriting, it might not be that readable for others. I added a selection of photos to the board. The rest was largely a handful of shapes, lines for dividing off different sections, icons from the palette, a few digital sticky notes and the odd image. On the first attempt, the syncing didn’t work, but I got it right a second time. Although the Freeform functionality was very limited, I didn’t need it to have much more than it did, making the adoption curve very swift.

It’s certainly shown me a new way to reflect on and revisit the key themes from a conference as well as some experience of using the app, so I now have a better sense of what I can do with it and use it for. I’m quite happy with the sketches of the event, too. Not sure that it’s going to save me much in the way of time when it comes to writing something up about a future event though – it has probably taken me at least twice as much time in the writing as I would take with crafting with a regular blog post. So much for efficiencies and time savings!