The only new thing (to me) was the observation that some of our societal timeframes (e.g picking a 4yr university degree) hinge on assuming a specific rate of societal change. If the rate of disruption exceedes that assumption, the timeframes become inadequate.
> AI is developing faster than humans can individually and collectively understand it and adapt to it. People trying to plan their futures, e.g. trying to plan for a world several years in the future as they enter university, can no longer do so the way previous generations could.
I tried asking this before on here, and didn't really get many useful replies (and I guess I won't again now the algorithm has decided this post has too many comments and not enough upvotes, or whatever it is that's caused it to sink off the front page), but I'm honestly interested in what people here with (school age) children are telling their kids about the future, and what that looks like in terms of decisions around education, careers etc.
This isn't because I think that having children gives people any extra insights, but because it's pretty hard to think of other situations in which people have to plan for the happiness of others they care about over a timescale of decades and where there's significantly more ability to change course than for many adults (kids tend not to have short-term financial commitments that lock them into existing career decisions, for example).
Historically I think a lot of people in tech would have recommended it as a good career (whilst at the same time, reputedly, the people who made generational wealth out of tech were arranging their children's lives to minimise exposure to the products that made them rich). Is that still what people are saying?
This is something I've been thinking about for a while, as I have two high schoolers, both with a knack for programming, and at least one of them wants to get into software.
A lot of my comments get responses that assume I'm an "AI booster" but what I really am is someone highly motivated to understand the capabilities and limits of this technology, because it is already very directly impacting the future of my kids.
What I tell my kids is a function of what I believe the future holds: nobody will be doing low-level cognitive work anymore, it will all be done by AI, so our job is to be better than AI. Unfortunately:
a) Low-level cognitive work is like (SWAG) 80% of all knowledge work, and so more than 80% of jobs are effectively gone, they just don't know it yet.
b) AI is getting really good really fast so that 80% is also growing quickly.
That means that the days of doing a junior-to-mid level job, kind of just coasting along -- often until retirement -- are gone. Everybody has to be good enough to be doing the top 20% of cognitive work, which involves fuzzy things we call innovation, expertise, domain knowledge, intuition, taste, handling uncertainty, and the like.
So my advice to my kids is:
1. Whatever you do, be the BEST at it, regardless of grades. Grades already meant little, now they mean even less. Being the best likely also necessitates strategic avoidance of AI, but I'm willing to be proven wrong on that.
2. Be "high agency". Annoying buzzword but perfectly captures the trait everybody will be hiring for. The 80% of the jobs were those doing the drudgework for the 20% "high agency" people calling the shots. And those are the exact jobs that are gone. Just do things, because now you can.
3. Critical thinking may soon be the only job requirement remaining. Get bullet-proof at that and learn relevant skills (maybe data literacy?)
I'm also encouraging trade school, but that seems less attractive to the kids.
I'm not saying skip college just yet, but we do intend to aggressively "value-maxx" college education (e.g. community college) and focus on building something, anything, practical -- since showing what you've built is better than degrees from most colleges.
I thought of that too and looked into it. (Or rather had an AI look into it! ;-)) Fortunately, there are extreme physical constraints on how quickly manual labor could be replaced, especially anything requiring dexterous work. Mainly, supply chain constraints on rare earth elements, which are required to make these motors feasible.
By some estimates, today's global supply is like 2% (or was it 0.2%?) of the total amount required to enable such widespread deployment of robots. Until we can scale that up (or figure out how to bypass that dependency) there is a very hard constraint on how fast they can be deployed.
I have a hard time believing that won't be overcome or surpassed when you compare it to the cost of producing an adult human capable of skilled trades.
I have three children aged 15-17. My youngest one has shown an interest in becoming an electrician, and I encourage that as I think it is pretty AI safe and in high demand.
My two older and more theoretically oriented children I am not sure what to recommend so I let them find something they are interested in mostly on their own.
* Keep calm and carry on, because we don't have any better ideas
* Sometimes it's OK to eat the damn marshmallow (i.e. in the face of future uncertainty, remember to do things that make your kids happy today)
I kind of suspect that the first one in particular is more or less people's default response. But I also wonder about what changes people _have_ made, if any.
My kids are too young for that, but my nephew is applying to college now. I told him that anyone who says they have any great insight into how he should be thinking about his future education/career is either wrong or lying.
Having the job market completely change during 4 years of college has happened a lot recently. Ask anyone who graduated into the dot-com boom or the 2007-08 financial crisis.
The changes cut both ways and are volatile. Someone who picked Computer Science in 2018 was panicking about their job prospects during their senior year as it felt like the economy was falling apart, but then graduated into one of the most ideal hiring periods all of time for CS grads by 2022.
Prior to mainstream discussion about AI, the most common opinion was that the software industry was getting too bloated. Most people were getting tired of spending most of their week doing an Agile circus (which was different at every company) as they tried to coordinate with all of the PMs, designers, product owners, stakeholders, and other loosely-defined roles that were hired to build out someone's empire.
AI arrived just in time to explode those structures and start fresh. I think there will always be demand for developers in some form, but I don't think we're going back to the days of assembling cross-functional teams of 20 people with different roles and titles to do simple software work.
I do think that AI is going to encourage more software development overall, which will balance this out somewhat.
Either way, I think the people who went into CS because they like building things will have a place to land, even if it looks different than what they expected.
I think the people who went into this path because they like writing software but don't care as much for the product side are going to be sad, but that only really matters if they had a 2nd-best degree choice that would also not have been disrupted. Unlucky if that's the case.
I think the people who only went into software because they thought it was an easy way to make a lot of money by finding an email-job company where they could work a few hours per week are going have a hard time as companies realize they can have smaller, more efficient teams now.
> AI is developing faster than humans can individually and collectively understand it and adapt to it. People trying to plan their futures, e.g. trying to plan for a world several years in the future as they enter university, can no longer do so the way previous generations could.