They’ll Figure It Out

What if the most valuable skill for our children isn't knowledge, but the ability to learn?

Yesterday, I went for a long walk with one reader that reached out. 11,000 steps later we had exchanged thoughts about startup life, parenting, world affairs, breath work, psychedelics, purpose, how to see the world, and more. 

What skills will our kids need in 20 years?

We also discussed education, which made some headlines last week, because of Yuval Noah Harari's interview with Colbert. "Nobody has any idea what to teach young people that will still be relevant in 20 years", Harari declared. 

It's a sentiment that feels all too real in a world where AI is rapidly changing the job landscape. This week the startup Devin released a demo of what appears to be an AI software engineer and the engineering bubble went wild. It's ironic that those who have been automating people out of jobs are now being threatened themselves.

With AI rapidly evolving, many existing roles will be significantly altered or even disappear. Nobody knows how fast that development will go and what the world will look like in two decades. Perhaps our children will be managing robot therapists or crafting poetry for self-driving cars. It will certainly be jobs we can't even imagine yet.

What specific skills will they need? I have no idea. But it also doesn’t matter. 

What if the answer doesn't lie in cramming more and more information into our children's heads? 

Kids aren’t buckets. That’s a flawed picture that treats children like passive vessels waiting to be filled with a pre-determined set of skills.

What won’t change?

The more interesting question to ask is: what won’t change in the next 20 years?

Humans will still be human. With all our hopes, fears, and desires. We will be longing for safety, connection, and respect. We will seek status, wealth, power, and fame.

The thirst for knowledge will remain, pushing us to explore the universe and delve deeper into the mysteries of consciousness, with AI at our side.

The world will be filled with challenges and opportunities. Things will be rare; others will be abundant. This will lead to conflict and commerce. Just like it has thousands of years ago.

True, technology will have advanced rapidly. There’ll likely be more change in the next two decades than a whole generation has seen during a lifetime. But humans have adapted before. And they will now as well.

Nurturing like flowers

We're not prepping our kids for a specific job interview, we're prepping them for navigating an unknown future. To do that, they will need the ultimate life hack humans have cultivated for millennia: figuring it out. That means the ability to learn, adapt, and keep asking questions.

They need to share ideas and work together. Thus, they need to be able to communicate and collaborate. To be curious, creative, and solve problems. All things that were essential centuries ago.

And yes, there will be plenty of new challenges and discomfort. That’s nothing new, either. By nurturing resilience, courage, and critical thinking, we're not just preparing our kids, we're preparing the future itself. We are equipping them with the skills to make the best of it.

Add integrity, empathy, and moral reasoning, and we have great building blocks of a society that thrives, not just survives.

Want to educate our kids for the future? Put those skills into the curriculum.

But stop treating our children like buckets for information. They are more like flowers in a garden, bursting with potential that needs nurturing, not filling.

Do that and they will figure it out.

🙏

Be kind,

Manuel