Educating the next generation

When I read books about the future, it seems that the next generation will grow up in a world that is almost impossible to imagine – robot performing surgical operations and caring for old people. Homes and even kitchen appliances have to be protected from cyber attacks. Ubiquitous sensors all over the place will remove privacy. 

I think of how the smartphone and the internet has become part of  every day life – from the poorest to the richest. Just as radio, then television, then the internet changed lives so will artificial intelligence create more revolutionary changes. It will  affect the jobs that will  remain for   human; and it will even influence moral standards. 

I worry most about the future of  my grandchildren whose lives are going to be impacted by the time they become adults. Diego is seven years old. Emilio is four years old and Nana is two years old. They will face an entirely different set of opportunities and challenges than the one I encountered when I was growing up and even from the one their parents went through growing up.

In his book Industries of the Future, Alec Ross interviewed several people on how to best educate the next generation. Most of the people he interviewed emphasized the importance of learning languages – one a traditional language like English, Mandarin or Spanish and the other one a technical language.

Investor Charlie Palippahatiya says: “ That’s the one important thing that we have decided, that languages are really important to facilitate an understanding of the world, both the physical in which we live as well as the technical world we will live.”

Jack Dorsey presents a different case. He says you learn a programming language for a different reason: “I don’t think you do it to become an engineer or to become a computer programmer; you do it because it teaches you to think in a very different way. It teaches about abstractions, about breaking problems into small parts and then solving them, around systems, and how systems interact. So these are all tools you will use everywhere, especially about building a business, or running a business or even working in a  business. If you can synthesize a massive complex business  into something  that is essential that you can articulate in a very crisp way, that’s exactly what programming teaches you.

Google’s Eric Scmidt said: “The biggest issue is really the development of analytical skills. Most of the routine things people do will be done by computers, but people will manage the computers.”

Alec Ross believes that the distance between the traditional liberal arts fields and engineering fields will begin to collapse. Jared Cohens writes: “Why should I have to be a political scientist or a computer scientist? Why is there not a hybrid between the two? Why is it that I have to be a historian or an English major or an electrical engineer? Why is it that there is a need for a more interdisciplinary approach that merges the sciences and the humanities in a way that prepares kids for a world where those silos are beginning to be broken down.”

Today’s youth that will enter tomorrow’s workforce will need to be more nimble and more familiar with the broader workings of the world to find a niche they can fit into. With robotics automating labor that is cognitive and nonmanual, tomorrow’s labor market will be increasingly characterized by competition between humans and robots. In tomorrow’s workplace either humans are  telling robots what to do or robot are telling humans what to do.

The growing economic diversity and increasing pace of change means that investors and people in the global businesses will have to be as mobile and able to work across cultures as people newly entering the workforce. The innovation and creation of new companies that is just now beginning to take place in robotics, genomics, cyber, big data and new fields made possible by the code-ification of money, markets and trust will spring from the world’s principal or alpha cities. But they will also come from places that open up economically, politically and culturally. 

It is the obligation of those who are in positions of power and privilege to shape our policies to extend to as many people the opportunities that will come with the industries of the future.

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