Philip Colligan Is One of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI

Philip Colligan fears that parents and educators will mishandle the AI revolution much like they did the Internet. The CEO of the Cambridge-based, non-profit educational organization Raspberry Pi Foundation argues that AI is now being integrated into healthcare, finance, criminal justice, and education decisions. He emphasizes that children must acquire these skills for both economic opportunities and to exercise power and agency in a world where AI impacts everything.

To address this, Colligan spearheaded Experience AI, one of the world's most extensively utilized AI literacy curricula, which has been translated into 40 countries and utilized by approximately 50,000 teachers who have taught around 5 million children. Co-developed with Google DeepMind, Experience AI imparts knowledge on AI system construction, data privacy, misinformation, deepfakes, and more.

Beyond Experience AI, targeted at 11-to-14-year-old students, the nonprofit, which is partially supported by a $1 billion endowment from Raspberry Pi's London Stock Exchange IPO in 2024, will introduce a new qualification for A-level students in England focusing on data science and AI in the fall. Colligan regrets that society neglected to discuss ethics and societal implications of technology during the 1990s and 2000s.

He highlights that we are now grappling with the consequences of building social media without considering its adverse societal effects, as we all live with the implications of that decision.