David Richards

Activist, Business leader, Business mentor, Connector, Educator/Teacher, Entrepreneur, Event planner, Inventor, Investor, Philanthropist, Potential employer, Social entrepreneur, Startup, Technologist, World traveler

Trustee David & Jane Richards Family Foundation, Founder Laptops For Kids, Founder WANdisco In 2017, Richards and his wife Jane donated stock valued at $1.5 million to create the charitable David and Jane Richards Family Foundation[6] to educate, empower and improve the lives of children.[7] Richards cited frustration at the UK Government's efforts to teach computing skills to schoolchildren and consequently a lack of adequate skills in a future economy where artificial intelligence and automation are prevalent. He said "You can’t have all this money and hold on to it or buy a football team. There’s only so many houses you can live in. I think it’s better to do something good for the world." During the COVID-19 pandemic Richards co-founded Laptops For Kids, a charitable organisation to facilitate the donation, secure erasure, and distribution of used digital devices, enabling children from disadvantaged backgrounds to have access to the technology they need to participate in remote learning. He said "nearly one in 10 children living in households with no access to a laptop, desktop or tablet computer, the shift towards remote learning during the pandemic has excluded up to 1.77m young people from active schooling. No access equals no education. I am not prepared to let this injustice go unchallenged. In the January 2022 New Year's Honours he was awarded an MBE for services to the Information Technology Sector and to Young People, particularly during Covid-19. In 2017 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from Sheffield Hallam University for services to business.

Educating, empowering, and improving the lives of children through hands-on programmes and targeted assistance

From a piece I wrote for The London Times, February 26 2019 In ancient Greece, slaves were an essential part of the economy, serving the elites in all sectors so the rulers could pursue their leisurely interests in the arts, learning and athletics. The philosopher Aristotle coldly noted that “from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection”. More than 2,500 years later, not a great deal has changed. Even a supposedly civilised country like the United Kingdom has to legislate to protect against slavery, servitude and forced or compulsory labour. It doesn’t have to be this way. Technology has the power to emancipate people from exploitation. Far from being the threat to humanity as presented by popular science and culture, artificially intelligent machines can fulfil the same role as slaves in ancient Greece, freeing us from servitude and drudgery. But to get to this promised land, we need to reroute our education system. Let me explain why, and how. As the CEO of a Silicon Valley and Sheffield-based software company at the leading edge of big data and cloud computing, I can see from my vantage point the big new trends coming down the line. We are already living through a period of accelerated change. Barely three decades ago, Sheikh Zeyed Road was a dusty highway cutting through a sparsely populated desert in the Middle East. Now, it is the address for many of the world’s tallest buildings in Dubai and a leading global hub. Corporate titans that once seemed unassailable have been superseded, undermined by communications providers which own no infrastructure, taxi companies which own no vehicles, retailers which own no inventory, cloud platforms which own no servers and media companies which create no content. The value is in the software interface, not the product. That’s the first big new trend. The second is decentralisation. Once we flocked to out-of-town supermarkets. Now we opt to shop locally. For centuries, banking has been characterised by centralised record keeping with intermediaries to approve and record transactions. Now, we have cryptocurrencies underpinned by distributed ledgers with no requirement for central authorities. The third is quantum computation, which the British physicist David Deutsch describes as “a new and deeper and better way to understand the laws of physics and hence understanding physical reality as a whole”. This new technology makes seemingly impossible problems easy to solve through a paradigm shift in computing power. Feeling a bit overwhelmed by these big new trends? No need. Listen to Jack Ma, the founder of the world’s biggest retailer Alibaba, who points out the computer will always be smarter than we are. “They never forget, they never get angry,” said the multi-billionaire. Once we accept this, the better it will be for everyone, not least our children. This is why we must transform the way computer science is taught in our classrooms. Teaching young people how to retain information is equipping them with skills for a bygone age. Teaching young people how to apply information will empower them. According to McKinsey, the management consultancy, up to 800 million jobs are at risk of automation. Anything that involves a task or a process will be taken over by machine learning and artificial intelligence. That’s a very big chunk of the world’s middle class population. To ensure mastery of all this new AI, we need to focus our educational efforts on the skills that computers cannot learn. Values, beliefs, team work and independent thinking. Not rote learning. The ancient Greek elites were able to lead lives of leisure through the use of human slaves. That enabled them to become masters of philosophy. The next generation can master the machines and free themselves from economic exploitation and servitude. It’s our job to teach them how to ask the right questions and use their imagination. As Einstein said, “imagination is more important than knowledge. Imagination is the language of the soul. Pay attention to your imagination and you will discover all you need to be fulfilled”.

AI, Big Data, Charity, Cloud Computing, entrepreneurship, Foundation, ML, Software

Making seemingly crazy ideas happen