"They took our jobs!"

It’s an old trope… China doesn’t invent anything, they take our ideas and do it cheaper. “They took our jobs!”

In fact this is a (rather shockingly racist) myth. China innovates a lot, and without their ability to scale up technology at a reasonable cost we wouldn’t all be sitting here with smartphones and laptops at an affordable price.

But there is a kernel of truth in that old trope, and it has nothing to do with China. It is rather the fact that creative people invent new things and then teach others who then imitate at scale. In the process they commoditize and make it cheaper, enabling the benefits to be felt more widely which is good for society.

In the last 50 years this commoditization has been a global one, driven by a shift of skilled labour in manufacturing; first to cheaper economies, and then to automation (they took our jobs, then the robots took their jobs…)

The next 50 years will see an acceleration of the same trend within many skilled service industries. You can already get a cheaper software engineer in Delhi than in Silicon Valley. In a few years you won’t need to, because an AI will be doing your software development, and your accounting, and legal, and so on…

There is an assertion that the creative people won’t lose their jobs to AI, because AI isn't creative. It just imitates what it has seen. It is derivative.

The bad news is that most of us think we are creative workers, when in fact we too are derivative workers. We create our own versions of what we see around us. We interpolate.

I hate to tell you this, but AI is great at that.

What most of us might consider ‘creative’ is just the unexpected output of rather predictable cognitive processing of data. Some people just have access to different data and/or have better processing power than the rest of us, and as a result we find their output surprising and unintuitive. We deem them to be creative. In fact they have just trained their neural networks differently.

Only a very small percentage of people are truly superior to AI in the long term. Those folks who’s brains are wired differently and who see the world differently; the radicals who create big shifts in science, technology, art, fashion. The 0.01%.?

The 99.99% of us who are not in this rare category need to learn how to manage AI efficiently - to be the managers of an AI workforce. We need to become skilled at leveraging the huge advantages of AI for the benefit of society.

Automation has already made many manual skills less valuable, the internet & Google has made memorizing facts a less useful skill, and now AI will do the same for analyzing information and generating content.

Everything a human brain can do will one day be done better by AI. Think about the consequences of that for a moment.

We can already use AI to bring us richer insights which our brains can work on to create even more ‘surprising’ and ‘creative’ outcomes. Humans can still play an important role in directing AI.

But what about when the processing power of AI surpasses that of a human? What about when AI can manage itself without us human idiots bossing them around…?

In a world where humans add no economic value, how do we decide how to distribute resources? Will capitalism still work?

Society needs to think hard about those questions, for the sake of our grandchildren.

In the meantime, encouraging creativity, self learning and radical thinking will be the key to the success of my children, and yours, in the future economy.

Non-conformism will be a valuable trait.

We face a future world where the diversity of neural networks in humans will be the means to add value. Meanwhile our traditional schooling tries to make everyone’s neural network identical…

We need to change our attitude to education.?

Our classical education system is designed to produce people who can operate ‘the system’ of our economy in the post Industrial Revolution World. It has been outdated for the last 50 years (at least).

In the classical education system AI would be banned from the classroom. It will be deemed cheating to use it in an exam, just as using a calculator used to be.

But what is the point of education if not to prepare our children for the real world they will need to work in?

Embracing AI as a tool from a young age and learning how to lead and manage an AI workforce will be key. Our schools need to nurture these skills for the majority, and encourage radical thinking and non-conformism, because one day that is all we will have left.

What will an education system fit for the future of our children look like?

A question we should all be asking… among many, many others.