Inspiring message to the class of 2022.

Gershom Aitchison, host · [00:08]At Edu Inc, the valediction is a very, very important rite of passage, and one of the key elements is that the students get to share their journey and their thoughts on their journey with their peers and with their parents. It's a time for them to acknowledge the people that have helped them along the path, the people who've supported them, and to kind of prepare what the future generations in the school might have to experience and the things that they might have to overcome. And we had the privilege this year of having Colin Iles talk at our valediction and share his thoughts on what the future might look like for our future alumni. I met Colin in a podcast that didn't become a podcast when we ended up agreeing on too much, and he wanted a boxing match, but what it did highlight for us is that There was a likeness in thinking on what education should look like and the future that these kids are going to be walking into. And I think that the message he gave them was very pertinent. I certainly had to listen to it more than once to take it all out. I would like to share this message with our community so that everybody understands what the future might hold for them.

Colin Iles, guest · [01:21]Hi everyone, I'm so sorry I couldn't be with you to celebrate the journey to date and talk to you in person about the potential futures that lie ahead. Because my word, how lucky you all are. You're now living in a world where technology is enabling futures that were unimaginable just a few years ago. Let's take an example. You could be the generation that sees average lifespans increase into the hundreds of years. I'm not just talking about the potential for cures on major dread diseases like cancers and heart attacks. Actually becoming a, a reality for you. I'm talking about companies that are raising billions of dollars who are literally, quite literally trying to reverse aging. You could also be the generation that starts to go and throw away mobile phones and interact with each other using telepathy. Telepathy is already tried and tested, converting brainwaves into text, we read it or go and retranslate it back into brainwaves. This has been done. But can it be done at scale? Will you be the generation that has implants that allows you to do this? On a more mundane note, will you be the generation that sees the fridge go the way of the fax, as we find new ways to go and preserve food using microbials and genetic engineering? After all, the fridge is only there with the, perhaps the exception of beer and wine, it's only there to preserve food. It's its primary function. And if you can use microbials to help, say, lettuce sit on the side of your kitchen for three or four months without needing a fridge, goodbye fridge. And you may be the generation that sees the cost of energy, data, and even transportation move to zero, at least for basic services. You see, you're living in a world where you aren't simply experiencing one Gutenberg moment, you're experiencing multiple ones. And the Gutenberg moment, if you don't know, was when the printing press was invented and released, and you think about how that transformed the world as effectively access to information was democratized.

Colin Iles, guest · [03:30]So consider, as an example, say, how transport might change if the following statements remain true over your lives. Let's imagine that the access to the internet continues increasing at exponential rates, and why not? Companies like Starlink are trying to do that as they place satellites to go and give access to every corner of the globe. Imagine that the processing power of chips continues to follow Moore's law, so everything that you've seen over the last couple of years, which is quite impressive as our phones went from one gigabyte up to 256 gigabytes and 512 gigabytes, is just blown out of the sky because we actually now go and have phones and access to technology with thousands of gigabytes of processing data. What happens if the size of sensors continues to fall so that they're smaller and cheaper, and they give better quality, just like the cameras on your phones are improving in terms of pixels? Imagine that across every sensory data set that you need to drive a car. What about the data storage, sorry, the battery storage, energy storage? We've seen batteries reducing in price, improving in capacity every single year for the last sets of decades. In 2018, we saw an improvement of 60%, as China basically came on stream. What if that continues? They get smaller, more powerful, last longer. What happens if our algorithms continue to improve, and by using the data sets that are available to them, they're actually able to self-learn to a scale we can't even imagine today? Maybe in the next couple of years, they'll even pass the Turing test, where outputs from computers become indistinguishable from what we as humans would have produced. And does this mean in turn that we can move to a, not just a low-code environment, a no-code environment, where just by asking for things to be written in code and machine language, it gets written for us? Of course, one last thing to put into the puzzle, which could change everything, is that original energy source. And my word, are we getting good at translating the sun's energy into solar, because again, that's been reducing in cost every single year, year in, year out for the last 30 or 40 years at a 10, 15, 20% rate. So my natural conclusion isn't simply that we're going to live in a world of self-driving vehicles. This is why I'm not highlighting these sets of potential conditions. The natural conclusion is we could live in a world where, in this case, transport becomes free.

Colin Iles, guest · [06:46]Anyway, how likely is all of this to happen? I've actually got no idea. I don't think anyone does, and I think perhaps some of you have got better ideas than anything I could come up with. Humans certainly have the possibility of making everything I've just suggested occur, and we equally have the possibility of destroying everything that's been created to date, including our own planet. So you see, where I've just described how we have the opportunity to do these amazing things by using our ever-expanding knowledge of the sciences, the reality is I think our lives are going to be more determined by our own philosophies. And to me, this should be an incredible positive, because sometimes I get incredibly depressed about the impact of technology. I feel it's going to impinge on my life in a way where I no longer know what role to play. It's moving so quickly, I lose my sense of relevance. I just feel old. I lose my sense of self. But I find remembering the following, helps. While science might show us how things work, it's the humanities that show us how we work within that world. And this is critical, because I can't imagine a world where we outsource decisions about how we should operate as a species to machines. So we're always going to still have lawyers to set rules as to who's at fault when an automated accident occurs. We might use machines to make the determination at a later point, but we will be the ones that design the rules. We'll also want historians to help us still interpret the past so we can better plan for the future. I dare say we're going to need politicians as well to continue providing us with the hope, or frustration at least, that they can actually do policies that improve the lives for everybody. So whilst the world will change in many ways, I don't think we will. Humans are going to remain as fallible as we've been for tens of thousands of years.

Colin Iles, guest · [08:31]So what does this mean for you? Well, perhaps a better question of thinking forward, how can you improve the chances that you continue growing from the solid basis incredible school has given you, and actually lead a fulfilling, happy, prosperous life? I've got one suggestion. I'm sorry, I've only got one suggestion. And it's not an easy one, actually, when I think about it. But I want you to try to be as curious as you can for as long as you can. Because being curious, I think, opens up a world of possibilities. It's curiosity that's going to drive you to experiment and to try new things. It's curiosity that's going to drive you to go and explore new spaces and new worlds and new ideologies. And if you've got that ability to be curious, it also allows you to get out and run these experiments, and sometimes you're going to fail and you're going to fall over and things aren't going to make sense, you're even going to make yourselves look relatively stupid. But just like riding a bicycle, by being curious and trying these new things, you grow, you learn, you get better, you go and advance yourselves. Incidentally, I think curiosity is what helps us to avoid, hubris. It's horrible. I would never want to be someone who's being perceived by others as a dictator, someone who doesn't listen, who is unable to take advice from others, especially if I'm in a leadership position. And I think curiosity helps you to avoid that trap. It helps you to continually unlearn, to relearn, and therefore be interested in what your peers or the people that end up working for you have got to say. I think it's curiosity, therefore, that helps us to avoid becoming judgmental. And again, I don't want you to think of me as judging you or vice versa. It's much more interesting to ask questions like why and how and what could we and how could we. So it's my experience that curiosity also seems to have this impact where the people that are curious form deeper friendships, more meaningful friendships, and certainly larger friendship groups that they're able to go and associate with. And in this world where it is exponential, whether you're interested in science or social science, there can be no excuses For there being a limit to what you can be curious about, because there is still so much to discover, and as humans we're creating so many new constructs that they've also got to be understood, discovered, and rediscovered too. So good luck, congratulations on making it to this pinnacle in your lives. Wherever you go next, whatever you decide to do, I hope that from time to time you remind yourself to try to rediscover how to become curious.