Learning Hack podcast

Ross Stevenson is founder of Steal These Thoughts! and describes his job as AI enablement architect. Before going independent he was Head of Learning at Trainline, ran digital learning at Tesco for six years, and spent seven years in HR. If enablement sounds a lot like performance consulting, he wouldn’t disagree. So is AI the...

A third of UK workers say their own organisation gets in the way of them doing good work. Four in ten managers would rather not be managers. So why does L&D keep building interventions that ignore the possible situational causes of poor performance? Robin Hoyle is Head of Learning Innovation at Huthwaite International and has...

Two-thirds of HR professionals say AI is their top development priority. But only a third of organisations offer any AI training – and fewer than one in five think their leaders are equipped to lead in an AI-enabled environment. So where is the gap, and whose job is it to close it? Erica Farmer is...

How a teenage girl’s waking dream birthed what is (probably) the first science fiction novel – and in the process gave the world its most enduring image of technology gone wrong. This time we’re coming for the myth, the curse, the cliche that is Frankenstein. John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach climb up the tower, point...

Can the future of an entire civilisation be calculated like the behaviour of gas molecules? In the second of two episodes on Isaac Asimov, John Helmer and Ezri Carlebach turn from his robots to his other great franchise — the Foundation saga — and the seductive idea at its heart: psychohistory, a fictional science that...

In 1942, a 22-year-old chemistry student and part-time writer set down three short rules for how a fictional robot ought to behave. His aim was to kill off the lazy “robot-as-Frankenstein-monster” cliché. More than eighty years later, real engineers, real ethicists and real lawmakers are still arguing about them. This is the first of two...

Every genre has a shadow canon — the writers who don’t make the syllabus, don’t sell out on Amazon, and rarely get the Netflix series. In science fiction, that shadow canon is where some of the most intellectually adventurous, politically serious and formally daring work of the twentieth century was done. Having opened the series...

A hundred years ago this spring, a magazine called Amazing Stories hit the newsstands and — almost by accident — gave a name and a shape to the genre we now call science fiction. Its publisher, Hugo Gernsback, was an immigrant electrical engineer, visionary and relentless self-promoter. He wanted his magazine to delight and enthrall...

In 1983, Isaac Asimov predicted that computers would let every person learn what they wanted, in their own time, at their own speed. Forty years on, that vision is more or less the world we live in. So what else might science fiction have to tell us about the future we’re already inside? Welcome to...

Augmented Workforce, Learning at the Frontline and the Destiny of L&D. For a long stretch, you could skip Learning Technologies for a year and miss almost nothing. Not this year. AI has stopped being something L&D is piloting and started being something the field is rebuilding around — and the conversation at LT26 had a...