The apocalypse manifesto

As educators, we strive to prepare our students for the future.?

Flying the banner of employability, we have a fairly boxed-in view of the future. We deal with college students and prepare them for jobs. Slightly ambitiously, we try to prepare them so that they can be masters, rather than slaves: You should be able to choose what you will do, and once you get the job, you should be able to keep it and grow in it, we say!?

However, we know how hard a thing this is to achieve. The number of students in higher education and the number of middle-class jobs (the type which offers security and career growth) is completely out of sync. A vast majority of university graduates, regardless of their degrees, will never find a stable job around which they can build their lives. Most will go from job to job, staying at the same level all their life until those jobs disappear due to technology changing or globalisation. Many of them will then slide down the job ladder, doing work which doesn't require any of their skills and which offers no security, progression or satisfaction.

The challenge before us is to prepare our students for unknown, unknowable environments. But we make assumptions. We assume that this future will be what the media, Davos, Silicon Valley and Mark Zuckerberg say it would be. Automation will be everywhere, workers will need new skills, work will be more hybrid and multicultural and will increasingly demand complex thinking.?

Yet, we don't know what it would ACTUALLY look like. The only thing we know is that it would be something sophisticated and complex, which only a few smart men (usually men) will be able to shape. The rest of us just have to adapt - or we will fail.

However, we live with a nagging question: How much do we have to accept this version of the future? Are there other possible varieties that may equally come to be? Could there be a fragmented world with multi-speed technological environments? Could there be changing social norms or political upheavals that draw us away from investments in automation to investments in education? Could there be mass participation in shaping and implementing technology instead of a few backroom boys calling all the shots? Could the priorities of countries such as India and Nigeria come to shape the direction of travel as much as America's or China's do today?

These are not idle questions. In what we call the future, we see a set of choices. These choices are made by people self-appointed to make such choices. They have the right mechanisms at their disposal to promote these man-made choices as inevitable. Therefore, we take the 'future' with a pinch of salt. While we have committed all our waking hours to make sure that our students will be ready when they eventually confront the changing workplaces, we also want to make sure that they know sufficiently about our assumptions. And, more importantly, their minds remain open to alternative possibilities.

We find William Gibson's point "the future is already here, it is just not evenly distributed' a glib Americanism that sees one possible direction of travel for everyone. And what applies to communities, applies to people too: Everyone's ideals must be similar (richer, fitter, with a better accent) is the claim. This mindless assertion now influences higher education too. That is the point of 'employability' - that everyone must go to the same destination! We are mindful of the irony that education, designed for individual flourishing, has to be redesigned to fit everyone into one box or another.

This, we think, is the way to bring on a disaster, to ensure that we fail when our beloved billionaires unleash their algorithmic apocalypse upon us. It won't happen automatically: We have to let it happen. We are increasingly letting it happen to assume that it is someone else's job to decide the future of our work, the fate of our communities and the shape of our lives. We are narrowing our education to serve the 'people as passengers' paradigm. We are disengaging from democracy, gorging up false news and tearing apart the cultures of toleration and exchange, worshipping one false God of the future. Any departure from the dominant narrative is immediately portrayed as Ludditism, the machine-breaking zeal if we fail to buy into the limited and self-serving imagination of Silicon Valley and the Sand Hill Road (or Wall Street).

But that is exactly what we want to do. We are asking the question of what would it take for people themselves to be in charge - of their own lives, of their own work and of their own communities. We believe investment in education rather than in labour-replacing machinery is a better way to build the future. For such thinking, though, we need a new generation of leaders, who should have a clear view of technology and how the power of these can be harnessed for making more sustainable societies.?

If there is to be an existential moment, we are at it now. We are tinkering on the edges with employability as the primary goal. Someone needs to take charge and change the future.