Will AI Be Your Child’s Future Boss?

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Artificial intelligence will likely be used in the application process to decide if your child gets their dream job when they are older. But now imagine that same AI not only hires your child but also becomes your child’s boss, assigning tasks and distributing paychecks.

Crazy, right? Or so I thought until I read this post on LinkedIn by Simon Smith, the executive vice president for generative AI at Klick:

I mentioned this during a keynote talk I was delivering in Dubai last week. A member of the audience asked if I thought this would actually happen. I chuckled, but the laughter died in my throat. Because the truth is, I don't know.

What I do know is that two startups may be about to flip the script on everything we thought we knew about the future of work.

Skyfire, a company you've probably never heard of, has created a payment network that lets AI agents spend real money. Your money, if you let it.

“AI agents can’t do anything if they can’t make payments; it’s just a glorified search,” said Skyfire co-founder and chief product officer Craig DeWitt in an interview with TechCrunch. “Either we figure out a way where agents are actually able to do things, or they don’t do anything, and therefore, they’re not agents.”

He's not wrong. And he's not alone.

Another startup, Payman, is building what they call "Fiverr for AIs." A marketplace where AI posts jobs and humans complete them for pay. It sounds like science fiction, but over 10,000 people have already signed up for their beta.

The implications are staggering. We're not just talking about AI taking jobs anymore. We're talking about AI becoming the employer.

Do We Need To Teach Our Kids Skills AI Doesn’t Have?

The knee-jerk reaction is to double down on teaching our kids skills that AI can't replicate. Stay one step ahead of the machines, and we'll always have a place in the workforce, right?

Wrong.

The uncomfortable truth is that AI isn't standing still. It's evolving at a pace that makes Moore's Law look like a slow crawl.

Elon Musk—love him or hate him—predicts AI will eventually do all work. All of it. If he's right (and his track record on tech development is probably the best in the world), then frantically trying to fill the shrinking gaps in AI capabilities is like teaching your kid to be the world's best horse-drawn carriage driver in 1910.

Humans Of The Gaps

There is another way that doesn’t mean we become the humans of those shrinking gaps.?

We're not just biological machines waiting to be outperformed. We're fundamentally different from AI, and it's time we started acting like it.

Instead of viewing humans and AI as competitors in a zero-sum game, we need to recognize the unique value that humans bring to the table. That value is not a skill or a set of knowledge, it’s the fact that we are humans.

This doesn't mean we should ignore the reality of AI advancements. Far from it. We need to prepare our kids for a world where AI is ubiquitous. But not by placing them in the gaps where AI can’t perform, at the moment.

We need to shift our focus from what our children can do to who they can be. Instead of asking, "What jobs will be left for humans?" we should be asking, "What kind of world do we want to create, and how can we empower our children to shape it?"

This is a call to action for parents, educators and policymakers. We need to overhaul our education systems, not to churn out more efficient workers but to cultivate more complete human beings.

The future may indeed see AI agents with the power to hire and pay humans. But it's up to us to ensure that our children enter this world not as mere gap-fillers but as confident, skilled individuals ready to work alongside AI in ways we may not yet imagine.

As Craig DeWitt, Skyfire's co-founder, puts it, AI could act "as a secure intermediary between vendors and your bank account." This future suggests a symbiotic relationship between humans and AI, rather than one of competition or subservience.

Two Species Working Together

The choice is ours. Will we prepare our children to work for AI, or will we empower them to create a future where AI works with us. Two species working alongside each other.?

As I tuck my daughter into bed tonight, I'm not worried about whether she'll be working for AI. I'm excited about the world she'll help create alongside AI.?

It's time to move beyond the "Humans of the gaps" mindset and embrace a future where human value is recognized independently of AI capabilities.

Our children's future isn't about competing with AI. It's about being so unapologetically human that the question of working for or against AI becomes irrelevant.

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