Last week I had the opportunity to attend FlagshipKansas.Tech’s Ad Astra Technology Summit for the second year in a row. I also live-tooted my experience again.
Flagship’s mission is to propel the tech sector within Kansas through continuous efforts in awareness, education, and the workforce. They do this through advocating for improved technology education, providing tools and guidance for educators to prepare their students for careers in technology, connecting entrepreneurs with mentors, recognizing outstanding students, educators, and innovators, and more.
I started the summit with a VIP meet and greet with Bill Nye!
I’ve seen mixed reports about his personality in the past, but I’m happy to report that he was extremely friendly and entertaining!
Bill Nye kicked off the summit with a strong advocation for critical thinking, grammar, and arithmetic education. He spoke about how automation is the future and upskilling is a must. He shared his belief that fusion energy is the most important thing for the world to be working on as a way to spread electricity and access to the internet to everyone. He emphasized the importance of voting – especially in mobilizing the youth to vote. And he also shared that he collects slide rules!
CivicPlus has won innovation awards from Flagship in the past, and is one of the sponsors of the Ad Astra Summit. Some members of the Flagship board and several of their volunteers are also current and former employees of my company. Our CEO, Brian Rempe, was onsite this year to hand out The Steve and Janet Wozniak Kansas Teacher of the Year Award, as well as awards for Tech Student of the Year, Tech Visionary of the Year, Tech Community Innovator of the Year, and Tech Startup of the Year.
Ad Astra offered sessions and panel discussions for startups, managers, educators, technologists, and more. I opted to spend my time this year attending as many sessions as I could on AI.
I attended a discussion with panelists both for and against the use of AI. Some initial topics of the discussion started out at a place I would consider reasonable: stating that creating art involves more than just applying paint to a canvas. The quality of artwork is not determined by the difficulty of its creation; rather, it lies in the expression of the artist’s intentions. However, it quickly went to a place I would consider pretty extreme with one of the panelists stating “You don’t need a C-Suite – just ask ChatGPT”!
I watched several demos of different AI tools. Some were pretty impressive ranging from an AI barbershop quartet singing about technology in Kansas to AI assisted airplane maintenance. Others completely broke, like when Claude thought a biltly link to a csv file was a request to upload a video to YouTube. Ultimately, I came away with a few sites I want to spend some more time looking into:
It was interesting to witness the dichotomy that exists when technologists and educators discuss AI. Tech people are very excited about what artificial intelligence can do, with less concern about the impact it could have on real people. Teachers have the opposite approach. At one point in the day there was a heated debate about what would happen to the people being replaced by AI that aren’t privileged enough to be in a position where they could easily develop new skills. These kinds of discussions need to keep happening as AI continues to advance. The importance of getting people from different walks of life in the same room to hash out these issues will only grow.
