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.
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.