Could you remember your best friend’s phone number or recite your favourite poem? I think these days, few of us could. Being proud owners of shiny pocket computers, needing to recall a simple phone number really isn’t a thing.

In today’s fast-paced world of time-saving tech, the old grey cells don’t need to work in the same way anymore. Our phones allow us to recall a vast range of information at the swipe of a finger (or Siri command); reminders pop up in our busy schedules and the weekly shop can be ordered and delivered in an instant. In fact, for Gen Z there is something rather passé about making phone calls at all. BeReal and Snapchat keep everyone right on the pulse and for the rest of us, an array of Web Chat, WhatsApp, Chat GBT and even the humble SMS mean needing to recall a phone number (or even write your own blog!) might be considered a largely wasted effort.

For those uneasy with the startling pace of change, the robots themselves are keen to reassure us. At the AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva this summer, AI enabled humanoid robots stood alongside their human inventors to reassure an assembled public that they had no intention of replacing humans, programmed and controlled as they are, by human brains. How long that will be the case is a subject for conjecture, and rightly one which world leaders will discuss this week at Bletchley Park. But what about the day-to-day impact on our brains of all these effort-saving innovations? Amid all the talk of machine learning have we lost sight of own human programming abilities— the workings of memory and the enormous potential of our own inbuilt computers

Together with universities, other GDST schools and with educational experts around the world, we are informing the discussion of what the students of the 21st century need from their education to grow into happy, healthy and confident young adults. And amid so much talk of exam reform we are providing the tools and techniques to help them adapt and thrive, whatever the world throws at them.

AI is a revolution that is here to stay. We should embrace its opportunities while teaching our young people how to harness its power to enhance, rather than inhibit, the development of their own beautiful human minds.

So, although the jury might be out on whether the world is heading for a Pandora’s Box of its own making, I believe the future is looking exceedingly bright. Let’s focus our time and energy on our very human attributes and use our empathy, creativity and intelligence to their fullest potential, to properly understand the power not just in our pockets, but in the place where it all began – our very human heads.

Originally published in the  ISC Blog

Photo by Alina Grubnyak on Unsplash