The wheels of AI are already in motion

All eyes were on the first AI Safety Summit taking place at Bletchley Park this week. Bringing together businesses, civil society groups and experts in research, the Summit aimed to discuss the risks of AI and consider how they can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action.

Rightly, much of the focus within the games industry about AI has been on its impact on workforces. And this was something overlooked during the AI Summit.??

We know that the world of work is changing faster than the talent pipeline can keep up with. In 2014, Nesta’s Nex Gen skills report determined that 65% of primary age students will end up working in jobs that don’t exist yet.?But in recent years, fears of robot replacement have been accelerated by the increased visibility of generative AI. In 2020, the World Economic Forum estimated AI will replace 85 million jobs worldwide by 2025 and Goldman Sachs estimates 300 million job losses over a 10 year period. But, as with all new inventions, from machine learning to the printing press and the windmill, the obsolescence of old jobs paves the way for new – 97 million, suggest the WEF.??

If the wheels of AI are already in motion, then Governments, researchers and businesses must turn their attention to a new focus: preparing the workforce for these new roles.??

We believe this begins in the classroom and should begin today.?Preparing students for future jobs when we don’t know what those jobs will be requires teaching them the thinking skills they need to become adaptable, innovative, imaginative problem solvers. The way to do this is by harnessing the power of creativity.??

Often when we think about teaching creativity, we think about subjects such as Art and Music, instead we must begin to think about creativity as cross-curricular ‘divergent thinking’ - the ability to come up with ideas or artefacts that are new, surprising and valuable.?We know that the current generation of AI is able to produce novel, human-like output rather than just describe or interpret; but it is limited to copying the existing work of humans. This means creativity combined with computational thinking could be an essential part of learning how to ask generative AI the right questions – allowing us to turn risk into opportunity.??

Ukie’s education initiative Digital Schoolhouse is already beginning to bridge this gap through our innovative Computing workshops that teach children the basics of programming in a playful, offline way – using everything from dice to dance moves to teach computational thinking. But whilst the programme has reached almost 200,00 students in 77 Schoolhouses across the country, there’s still much more to be done to bridge the gap between the creative and the technical in our curriculum.??

In our Video Games Industry Manifesto, we propose a way to ease the binary choices for students into either technical and artistic subjects by the introduction of a Digital Creativity GCSE – allowing an academic option that brings together both skills.? We also tackle the problem of retraining by proposing expansion of the apprenticeship levy for use in training and reskilling, allowing those already in the workforce to be more agile and flexible in career moves.??

But this is only the beginning.??

As AI becomes more visible in the public sphere, it’s more vital than ever that we are educated in what it is and crucially, how to use it. And we can look to the video game industry, and wider creative industries, as a case study of how AI does not need to exist in opposition to human creativity, but rather as a tool for us to harness.??

Whatever path we do choose to take, it is vital that Governments work together with both educators and employers alike to prepare our young minds for the future of work.??

Find out more about Ukie’s asks of Government in the recently published Video Games Industry Manifesto.??

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