preparing for the working world in the age of AI
or: seven things to tell your kids when they ask what they should study now, or what the point of studying is
If you enjoy my writing on technology you might like to know that I have a new book out in a week about the current information crisis and what we can learn about it by looking back at previous times humanity has been through similar things! It’s called Don’t Burn Anyone At The Stake Today and as ever it really helps if you pre-order. On with the advice/thoughts:
The other day a friend who works in publishing and who has one child at university and another doing A-Levels asked me what on earth she should tell her children about the future of work. They were, she said, really worried about what AI could mean. They’d read stuff saying that no job would be safe, that there was going to be a permanent underclass. They felt paralysed and demotivated; is AI going to take half the jobs or mean that there’s no such thing as a job at all?
So this is an answer for those young people, today.
do not believe the fairytales about AI. AI is not going to become a god or a monster. That stuff is science fiction, and as a science fiction writer I can tell the difference. AI is a normal technology. Read this short piece on The Majority View. “It’s just tech, everything doesn’t have to become some weird religion”. It’s just tech. Far and away the most likely thing is that the changes that will happen will be like those from all other tech. AI is going to do the things that technologies always do. It is going to make some jobs much easier, it’s going to mean some skills lose their currency while others need to be learned and it’s going to create new jobs.
how do we know which skills will continue to be useful? I would suggest that the skills of discernment are those which always continue to have value. They would have had value in the Roman empire and they have value today. They are the skills of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Consider what happened after the invention of the desktop publishing computer programme. A package called QuarkXpress (you can look it up) decimated certain jobs - people who used to do page layouts using scalpels and letraset suddenly had to retrain to use Quark or lose their jobs. But please note three things.
it was very possible to retrain relatively quickly for a lot of people. If you already had the skills in one format, for many many people it was a matter of a few weeks or months to learn how to apply them in another format.
one of the things that happened was that a lot more things were better designed, demand increased for stuff that looked like it was professionally laid-out and the quality of the laying out improved
most importantly of all: that technology, although it could make doing page layout faster and easier once you had the skills, although it could ‘snap to gridlines’ rather than needing a ruler… still needed a person to know when the page looked good. You can create an eye-bleedingly ugly page using QuarkXpress just as easily as you can create a layout of surpassing loveliness. You need human discernment to tell the difference.
The same is really really true today, and if you think AI can just produce finished work in any field whatever that is because you do not have sufficient skill and discernment to tell the difference between good work and eye-bleeding work. Sure, sure, after QuarkXpress (and MS Word) a lot of people started making their own flyers in Comic Sans, and they looked better than the handwritten photocopied ones but they still looked, my friends, really really bad. The job of a professional designer was not suddenly redundant. Skills of discernment retain value in these times of technological change.
how do you develop the skills of discernment? This one is very very important: do not let the AI do the work for you before you have learned how to do it yourself. Unfortunately it is probably going to take our education systems a while to catch up to the fact that an LLM can now write an essay, and children are going to continue to be tested by essays written at home for a good long while. (Although I must say that the education system in the UK moving away from coursework and back toward exams in some cases is now looking a lot less stupid.)
Education experts may wish to weigh in, but from a technology-observer’s perspective I think this will be the greatest disservice to this generation: that we didn’t move quickly enough toward viva and presentation tests and a ‘study at home, write your essays in class’ teaching modalities, and kept on letting them submit ChatGPT-written essays without immediately clamping down on it. The way you develop skills of discernment is by doing the work yourself. Writing the essay, drawing the picture, composing the piece, researching the question, constructing the argument. It’s not the end result of the essay or the bullet-pointed argument that matters, just like it’s not the precise LEGO tower that the five-year-old builds that matters. It’s the skills of thinking, weighing up, discerning, considering, asking yourself ‘does this make sense’ that you learn when doing those tasks that are important. It is the kids who were not made to learn these things who will be angry with their parents in 20 years time.perhaps the most important skills of discernment you can learn to prepare for work in the world of AI are the skills of research. How bad is the world possibly going to get? Maybe quite bad, I can’t promise anything, humanity has been through rises and falls before. But the one thing I can promise you is that powerful people and organisations will always, always want to have access to true, accurate, relevant information and to thoughtful, intelligent analysis based on it. This has been the case throughout human history. It is based entirely on self-interest: people who have power want to hold onto power and therefore they need to know how things really are and what will really work. And if you imagine yourself as part of a future resistance against great structures of power, those abilities will be valued there even more. So you need all of the old-fashioned skills:
the skills of a historian: how to work out whether something you’re reading is plausible or just seems a bit fishy, how to evaluate sources, how to understand the limitations and biases of whatever you’re reading
the skills of proper research: where to go to research stuff that isn’t on the internet. There’s a lot of stuff that’s not on the internet, still. Those are the things that will gain value as everyone can use internet search tools. How to, as Robert Caro1 says, turn every page and come up with something no one’s found before
the skills of taste: how to tell whether something is beautiful or ugly, whether its message is meaningful or just a cliche, whether a building will have the right or the wrong effect on the people inside it
the skills of imagination and creativity: using the human parts of you to feel the zeitgeist, to try to sense what it is that you are craving, what within you needs expressing, what questions are unanswered in those around you that desperately need an answer
There are many others. I’ve listed these because I am certain that they have been valuable since the Ancient Greeks until this very day. When you have those skills, AI can be a useful tool at speeding up some processes. Without those skills, all you’ll produce even with the best AI is stuff that is extremely, aggressively mid.
what age should you start using AI? AI is absolutely not for primary school children and I would argue that AI is not for any child who you would consider too young to look at social media. And even more so I’d argue that you need a bit of time on social media interacting with real people via screens before you’re ready for ChatGPT. It horrifies me that schools are pushing small children toward using AI tools in an era when we are realising the dangers to young minds of the full torrent of a smartphone or social platforms2. At least a person is a person?! An AI can encourage a child to do terrible things and there’s not even a human being at the other end that might experience remorse and call to warn someone. An AI is not a companion. An AI is not a friend. It is a technology, it is a tool. You can start learning to use it once you’ve learned the skills of discernment the old-fashioned way. And probably once your socialisation into the world of other humans is mostly wrapping up.
pay attention to what people are saying who are working at the forefront of the areas you’re interested in getting into. People I respect who know about computer programming are the only ones I know who are really saying: “oh yeah these skills are actually important”. Cal Newport is very much worth paying attention to on this, for example. Don’t listen to pundits, listen to practitioners3. That is, people who are actually doing the job. Use point 1 to guide you: anyone who’s talking about AI becoming a god or a monster is almost certainly an idiot and is not going to help you get a job much less a career.
Don’t look at what’s being taught in first-year undergrad by a graduate student: look at what people who are masters in their field are doing themselves. If you’re 16+ and you’re interested in some area of work, seek out information from experts in that area about whether AI is useful, and if so what it’s useful for and familiarise yourself with it. Do that alongside other kinds of research: read books written by experts in the fields you’re interested in, listen to lectures by them, read their academic papers. Don’t presume that AI is the most important thing to know about; in many fields it isn’t because it is just a normal technology.as the great sage of technology said: Don’t Panic. These technologies are incredibly easy to use if you have the background of skills. The thing that makes them so interesting is that they are so easy to use! If you have that grounding of excellent old-fashioned skills of discernment, then being able to do some parts of the work more quickly or more thoroughly will be a great benefit to you and you will pick it up in weeks. There is no hurry. AI is a normal technology. It will do the normal things. There will be new jobs, higher expectations and some jobs will become less common. It will not happen all at once. Be drawn toward what interests you. Learn the old-fashioned skills. When it is time to apply technology to them you will be ahead.
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goodness me, watch that film. Watch that film and then read The Power Broker.
actually I think those things are dangerous to us all and we all need laws enabling us to properly protect ourselves from seeing things we’ll later wish we’d never seen.
ugh every time I do a ‘not this but that’ construction now - especially an alliterative one - I shudder as I feel it sounds too AI. but, still I did write that and it’s good alliterative advice.
feels so surreal to me that schools don't simply have students... write essays by hand anymore.
That Quark example is brilliant. My brother asked me yesterday how AI was going to affect book editing and I said something a lot less precise: it’s not yet, because a reader’s/human’s taste is still essential in publishing. Human discernment is a much more succinct way of putting it!