Introduction

This is not the talk I'm giving. This is the talk I was supposed to give in November or October.

But I mean, basically it's like English is a programming language, so we're all building GPTs. So that feels kind of stale now, but I,

The Role of Education in Technology

We're currently in Relay Graduate School of Education. It teaches teachers how to be teachers and upskills them.

And upstairs we had about 50 public school educators basically building on something called PlayLab, which is designed for public education, what are effectively GPTs, building apps across a whole bunch of different things, not unlike Joshua's.

And it's cool and it's interesting, but that's not the talk I'm giving. Can I do this? It's not going to work.

I was going to say something else about this. Let me just see what I was going to say.

Future Prospects and Uncertainty

They're on the cusp. We can kind of like... see that the future is ahead of us.

Overview of the Talk

OK, so this talk doesn't really have a title. But I've basically taken a big step back.

And I'm going to talk about these three things. Let's see if I can. OK, so if I was only going to do 30 seconds, it would go something like this.

Key Themes

Technology happens. It just has.

Agents respond to feedback.

People know this movie? And AI is the maturing technology of the information era.

So this is actually somewhat of a technical term. These talks have been getting progressively less technical. It's a technical term in the context of Carlotta Perez.

Does anyone here know Carlotta Perez?

Technological Revolutions and Economic Theories

So she's been my guide. She's been my guide over the past, I don't know, however many years studying the history of technology. And she's written this wonderful book called Technological Revolutions of Financial Capital. And she's an economist, so she kind of like charts it.

And we've all seen up and to the right. And this is kind of our story. This is what's happened with technology.

I don't know if people can see this. Let's see. This is a good slide.

The Information Technology Revolution

People talk three or four industrial revolutions. She talks about five.

We're currently in what I said earlier, the maturing phase of the information technology revolution.

So this is what that looks like on a chart like this. So that's technology.

Personal Background

I'm an ed tech person. My background, I used to be a teacher. I work at Array Education, which is an innovation studio.

I helped start Relay Graduate School of Education. We work across early lit through early career, very interested in AI. That employer has nothing to do with what I'm saying tonight, just, I guess, giving context on my background.

Current Innovations in EdTech

I mean, there's so much going on.

I think what Joshua's doing is very cool. and Marco as well.

And, uh, but like not doing a market map, if I was to explain the situation to someone who's been asleep for a while or an alien, it would include these things. Uh, it would actually include this.

Impact of Technology on Learning Environments

The school is very important. The school has been kind of the form factor that we put the information technology through, um, all sorts of stuff I was thinking about earlier as I was putting this together. Uh, but basically I think what I'm saying here is, uh, our skills and our learning environments respond in response to technology.

And actually, I mean, you kind of have to talk about the brain. The brain is kind of this crazy thing.

And if you actually put this thing back, it goes something kind of like, So we're up to date now.

Skill Emergence from Technologies

And basically what I'm saying is skills emerge from technologies. If you think about reading and writing, they're using the technology of the alphabet. The alphabet's this crazy technology. It reduces all phonetic sound into 26 symbols.

I'm not a very technical person. I learned computer science very late in life. And it struck me that basically you're still using the alphabet with code. And it's just obviously so powerful.

The Concept of Agency in Education

and so okay so if technology is going to happen skills are part of this whole technology mix okay so agency i was going to say um look i i spent most of my career working on agency enhancing education so like getting high schoolers to work on entrepreneurship and other things like that we talk about agency as a north star so it's interesting to talk about agency in this context which is basically ai or like AI agents. I'm very bullish on agents, as you will see here.

The Role of AI Agents

This is the classic agent. You tell it what to do, and it eventually reads this environment, responds.

and i think the thing is agents work on behalf of things um and i just it's it's clear we can see it we can see it upstairs we saw with the gpt it's they're getting good and there's going to be this uh phenomenon of not really just the internet it's a phenomenon of scale but a long tail of agents and i think there's gonna be some very big powerful agents at the um the Justin Bieber end of the scale.

If you guys have heard about the YouTube long tail, you've got Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift get billions of views. But if you take the stuff down at the long tail, 1% of it still corresponds in terms of total watches or something like that, meaning that the tail is big. And there's going to be a lot of agents out there is what I think.

Reflections on AI and the Future

So I've been thinking about AI basically since this article came out, even before it, which is Wait But Why. Basically, the thought is now it's kind of a big deal. I kind of think about it.

you know, it's not going to go like vertical. We can kind of see the future. And I think all, probably most people here in the innovation economy are tinkering with what the future is going to look like. And we're all working on it in our own ways.

Ambition Clusters for EdTech

And so I said I would talk about ambition clusters for the future of edtech.

This is kind of what I generally, I mean, I don't know if this is really saying anything relevant, I mean, not relevant, but unique.

Envisioning the Future with Technology

I think, Joshua, your prompt for this talk was something like, with the technology today, what's the future going to be like? Is that what you said? So prompting, I'm an agent trying to give a talk about that prompt.

And so all these things exist in a big way and have existed in a big way. But it's just, there's, you know, people talk about Cambrian explosion in AI. I see it every day.

I see people working across this whole this whole space. If you're working on something in this space, I'd love to chat and try to match patterns.

The Significance of Agents

But I think the summary is it's all agents. And agents do things for us. They help us. They extend us.

Conclusion

We're not totally there yet. There's these 50-plus agents upstairs working across the school context.

the end user being an administrator, a teacher, a student, and that's all I got.

Let's see.