AI: We can no longer bury our head in the sand

In his 2013 book, “The Future”, Al Gore proposes that we have entered a period of change like none other human history has seen before. We have entered a new period of revolution: work is being transformed by artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. The tasks and jobs that AI and robotics cannot replace in the next decade, and the new jobs that will emerge, are the ones that require high levels of creative thinking and emotional intelligence. It is even likely that people will have to create their own employment futures; that is, to be entrepreneurs. Yet, we persist to educate young people for an industrial era. We aren’t equipping young people with the skills and dispositions they need to thrive in a digital and gig economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has served not only as a reminder but has perhaps accelerated the rate of change Gore and others have been warning us about. In a post pandemic world (increasingly dominated by AI) the way we work, interact, meet and do business will be different. Harvard experts say COVID has simply, “accelerated already existing trends, like the development of a cashless society, the increase in remote work, and the decline of brick-and-mortar retail. And, they expect, some of these will become a more permanent part of the post-pandemic’s “new normal””. Like Thomas Friedman in his 2016 book, “Thank you for Being Late”, the Harvard experts are suggesting that the rate of change has exceeded our ability to cope.

According to new research, uninspiring workplaces, stress, and a lack of room for individual concentration are all contributing to the risk of a ‘creativity crisis’. “Innovation is critical to growth, particularly as the speed of business cycles continues to increase”. That said, while 84% of corporate executives agree on the importance of innovation, only 6% are satisfied with innovation performance within their organization. If you want your employees to excel at problem-solving, it’s essential that you create an environment that encourages innovation and creativity in the workplace (McKinsey).

The OECD Education Chief, Andreas Schleicher, recently stated in a piece with the Strait Times, “I feel entrepreneurship education is much more important now than it was a generation ago because it teaches those skills and personal attributes which are important to the modern labour market. The art of being enterprising - solution-focused attitudes, spotting opportunities and dealing with uncertainties - all these will enable young people to identify and seize future opportunities”.

The ability to think creatively, to think like an innovator and think like an entrepreneur will underpin the ability of an individual to thrive and create their own future in the new economic environment. And yet, the proportion of people who scored at the genius level of creativity has been shown to rapidly decline through childhood.

In 1968 George Land developed a creativity test which was used to select the most innovative engineers and scientists to work for NASA. The assessment was successful, and he decided to try it on children. “What we have concluded,” wrote Land, “is that non-creative behaviour is learned.” The same test was given to 280,000 adults (of an average age of 31). The results were confronting.?Creativity levels in the adult population had dropped to 2%.

Sir Ken Robinson, in his seminal?TED Talk in 2006 reinforced the findings Land had made decades before. His message: Every person is born with the ability to think creatively but our industrial model of school education conditions creativity out of all but the few. The few successful entrepreneurs become so in spite of their education, not because of it.

If the people we educate in our schools and institutions, are to successfully compete in a globally competitive labour market we need to transform how education is delivered, challenging many of the preconceived norms associated with schools. We need to abandon that current education system that was founded on generating success in a past industrial era and build a new model that preferences creativity, innovation, imagination and future-oriented thinking.??

Young people need to be equipped with the ability to think creatively, to think like innovators, to become, if they choose to do so, entrepreneurs. They need the heart and desire to tackle the global issues we are facing and seek to make a positive difference to the communities in which they will live and work.

Research by the Brookings Institution (referenced in Bill Lucas’s paper, “Rethinking assessment in education: The case for change, 2021) has shown that across the world skills and dispositions associated with ‘21st century skills’, such as creativity, are gradually beginning to filter their way into schools, including the Australian curriculum documents. The following table highlights that while creativity (and other dispositions) are mentioned explicitly in the curriculum documents of 36 countries, none have developed a pedagogy to support their development in the minds of young people.

A 2022 survey of 194 leaders in the corporate sector elicited further supportive data about the importance of creativity in the new economy. The data showed that employers are not as interested in a person’s qualifications as they are in their character and the skills and dispositions they possess. The most highly valued creativity dispositions included: flexible, adaptive and agile thinking, collaborative and empathetic, openness to experience, question posing, question responding, and engaging and persisting.

So, what’s the answer?

Well, the good news is that St Paul’s School foresaw what was coming and redesigned the approaches to learning. We currently looking to scale that work for any school who has seen the light and doesn’t want to wait for governments to catch up.

Next month we will release another teaser of what we will be offering schools from the beginning of 2024.