Education

Best conversation I had all month happened in the ten minutes after a school meeting, standing around, the way the good ones usually do. My son’s maths teacher was showing me what the class is working through at the moment, and the topic on the screen was vector coordinates. Points in space, described by numbers. Year 8 stuff. I could not help myself. I said, do you know this is more or less how the whole of modern AI works? Every word, every image, every sentence you have ever typed into ChatGPT gets turned into exactly this, a list of coordinates. Just not two of them or three. Thousands. Meaning becomes a direction in a space with more dimensions than you can picture, and similar things end up pointing the same way. Your Year 8 class is doing the toy version of the thing that ate the technology industry. ...

I sit on a school board, which means I am occasionally asked what children should be learning, and I have been giving an answer I no longer believe. The answer was: learn to code. Learn the technical thing, because the technical thing is where the leverage is. I have said this at dinner tables, to nephews, to parents who wanted reassurance, and I said it with real confidence because for twenty five years it was simply true. It was true for me. ...