Philip Colligan’s greatest fear is that parents and educators will treat the AI revolution the way they treated the advent of the Internet—which is to say, they won’t engage in teaching children how to responsibly use it until it’s too late.
“We are in the middle of those systems being introduced into healthcare, finance, criminal justice decisions, education decisions,” the CEO of the Cambridge, U.K-based tech-literacy educational nonprofit Raspberry Pi Foundation says. “Kids need to learn these skills for economic opportunity, but also for power and agency in a world where AI is affecting everything.”
That’s the motivation for Experience AI, one of the world’s most widely-used AI literacy curricula; the educational program has been localized in 40 countries and has been used by some 50,000 teachers to explain the new technology to about 5 million kids. Developed in partnership with Google DeepMind and launched two months before ChatGPT debuted, it provides lessons on how AI systems are built, data privacy, misinformation, deepfakes, and more.
Beyond Experience AI, which is intended for teachers and students in the 11-to-14 age range, the nonprofit—funded in part by an $1 billion endowment from the low-cost computer company Raspberry Pi’s London Stock Exchange IPO in 2024—will pilot a new qualification for A-level students in England on data science and AI this fall.
“What we got wrong in the nineties and aughts is we didn't talk enough about ethics and the societal implications of technology,” says Colligan, who last year was awarded the Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his leadership. “We've got a generation of people who built social media without really thinking about the negative effects it's going to have on society. We are all living with the consequences of that.”
