Last week I attended the Digifest 2024. It’s nice to see some old peers and meet new people in person, and mostly support my colleagues (Dr David Pike and Alina Bajgrowicz) to present “Engaging students and staff with generative AI ethical dilemmas”.
Here I jot down some key takeaways. A few key speakers call themselves as Futurists. There were highlights on ‘community‘, ‘environment‘ and ‘immersion‘. For example, the 17 goals released by the United Nations, which well linked to our recent Academy for Learning and Teaching Excellence talk event about climate change and the use of En-ROADS Simulator. What can we do as an individual about our space environment, where 50k objects (4k satellites) in the space that can affect us? Dr Moriba Jah raised the issues of space leftover objects, and cleaning them is very costy. But I wonder why did human being generated these objects initially. Shouldn’t the ones who generated them take the responsibility for cleaning their leftover objects?
A few important but not new things are below that I should remind myself of more often:
- In life/work, we should try not taking ‘assumptions’. This is quite hard as it connects to our prior knowledge and experience. I think it’s a challenge to our cognition ability, from awareness to consciously making changes.
- Nowadays with online communications and mobile phones, persisting distraction is unavoidable. Don’t forget to use the Eisenhower Matrix.
- Many things/ideas we already know. How we interpreting what we already know into future matters.
A few noticable changes are:
- “Data analytics” is maturing, therefore enabler roles such as data engineers and data managers are required more for data governance and data interpretation.
- By 2025 many new jobs need to be reskilled. More people will choose to work for themselves as entrepreneurs. “Adaptive to changes” and resilience are curcial in employability skills.
- Four areas matter in workforce in future: Is it your interest, Are you good at it, Is it well paid and Does what you do make you feel adding value to the world.
- Comparing to my Digifest experience in 2018, this time new technology (products) seems not so highligted/addressed. It has become a part of our work/life. There were hardly robots, big touch screen, and VR equipment.
- Seems people didn’t tweet as much as before (the Covid time). I wonder if people have started to use LinkedIn more or have they moved to use other social media tools?
There are some resources called my attention too:
- What we owe the future by William MacAskill
- Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less by Leidy Klotz
- llElevenLabs can create natural AI voices. (If AI can generate my image and voice, what else can I do differently?)
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