Gigaom AI Minute – November 13

Transcript

When I'm out giving talks about artificial intelligence the number one question I'm asked is, "What can my child study today to make them relevant in the job market of tomorrow?" I like to kind of flip the question around. I went to high school in the 1980s and if I knew everything about how the world was going to unfold what could I have studied then that would have helped me today? When I look back at what my high school actually offered then, there's actually only one course that I could have taken which would have helped me today, and that is, of course, typing. Nobody really foresaw that a hundred year old secretarial tool would be the main way we would spend our days interacting with the rest of the world.

The big change from that time period to today is not really the technology--the internet and all that--I mean of course it is, but in a much larger sense the big change is the fluidity of our careers. My father had the same job for 32 years and his father had the same job for 28 years. Today we move in and out of different positions, we learn different skills, our titles change, we operate at a speed that would not have been understood a generation ago, or foreseen, and we are expected to have a mastery of a far wider range of tasks.

So if you were to say, "What could I have learned then to prepare me for this world?" it's really a lot of skills we don't normally associate with a higher education. It would be things like reading body language, negotiating, teaching yourself new skills, interpersonal skills, working in a team and all of the rest of the things that our new work world demands. The good news is we're all able to pick up on those things later in life. So we aren't forever scarred by the fact we didn't know in the 80s what the world would be like. The hope is that we will be sufficiently adaptable to the world of tomorrow when it arrives.