Building an AI-Fluent Future: The Case For Accelerated And Relevant AI Education

Why is education around generative AI and the general new wave of AI tools important?

Look, I get everyone is becoming sick of those two little letters – AI.

Not a daily conversation goes by where I don’t dread someone asking or making a comment about artificial intelligence. I feel slightly burnt out from talking and reading about it but there are good reasons why we should care.

One of the biggest is the adoption curve of generative AI tools.

This is closely aligned with the learning curve too. As L&D pros, we need to be mindful of this. When adoption soars and education on the subject and use does not, we all have a shared problem.

We’ve been here before

A classic example of this can be pinned back to the late ’00s/early 10’s with the mainstream adoption of social media.

It was a thrilling time. Excitement spread across the land with the prospect of more connection than ever known in human history. Yet, what we failed to investigate as a society was how best to use, govern, and in some cases, constrain the capability of this technology.

There are some things we could have never predicted. I don’t think anyone could have accurately seen the consequences of social media with the weaponisation of information and the damage to mental health across all communities. With the ability to reflect a decade (and a bit later), could we have mitigated some of this with the same speed of education as the adoption curve of this technology? Who knows, but it doesn’t hurt to try, right?

This feels like the same tipping point we’ve reached with generative AI today.

We’re overwhelmed with excitement, fear and curiosity but a total lack of understanding. However, we can change this, and the way to do that is through conversations and by keeping education on the topic at the same pace (or as much as possible) as the adoption curve of tools.

The adoption curve of generative AI

The importance is demonstrated perfectly in the image below (an extract from my “Gen AI for L&D explained” accelerator experience currently touring with global L&D teams).

It took Facebook, the darling of the social media revolution, 10 months to reach 1 million users. It took Open AI’s generative application, ChatGPT only 5 days to reach the same milestone.

As of Feb 23, ChatGPT has already hit the 1 billion visitors mark.

The adoption curve is faster than even lightspeed. To better navigate it, we must work together to educate and empower each other with the use of this evolving technology.

That’s my presidential speech over.

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