So I’m having lunch with two of my adult children, who have recently been venting about how AI is encroaching into their career space.
Josie is a junior in the fine arts program at her university. She has invested several years in learning animation (the technology as well as the art) and has created a series of sketch cartoons on Instagram that has a huge following. She has been lamenting for a while now that animation is a tough enough beat these days with AI coming in and replacing everyone like her.
Will there be any career path left for her at all when she graduates? She is not optimistic.
Her brother Trevor, on the other hand, is in the A/V program, and has been training in theater tech and audio production. He sees AI encroaching into his space, too, inevitably reducing human opportunity – but he believes AI can only take over a limited number of tasks in his domain.
His take: “Dad, I feel like I have to get out in front of it. Now.”
By that, he means he needs to learn all he can about AI and how it works, so he can accurately judge how he can prepare for its intrusion into his workspace. More than that, he wants to know how he can make it work for him, rather than the other way around.
I felt more than a little self-conscious, sitting there talking to them about all of this; AI is, after all, my profession, and it’s paying their tuition. Worse, I felt very much that I should have been able to offer some answers that would make them both feel better – and I didn’t have much.
In hindsight, I realize that Josie already has the beginnings of a solution in place: much of the response to the sweeping changes about to occur in the Western workplace and the world economy over the next generation will be a sharp rise in entrepreneurial employment.
The Millennium Project, for instance, in its recent State of the Future report, posits that within a generation, fully half of all jobs in the world will be entrepreneurial - as many as 2 billion by 2050.
Creatives like Josie have all the tools they need, readily available and at little cost, to develop completely new forms of entertainment, and put it out there as entrepreneurs. And the tools to distribute and market that creativity is even more accessible and cheap. She has only to look to her own Instagram cartoon series for evidence of this potential.
As for Trevor, his insight is shared by some of the leading pundits of AI and business leaders throughout the tech sector: people who understand AI and how to work with it will have a tremendous advantage in the job market, moving forward, over those who don’t.
IBM’s chief commercial officer Rob Thomas, for instance, said the following: “AI may not replace managers, but the managers that use AI will replace that managers that do not,” he told TechCrunch. “It really does change how people work.”
Trevor’s strategy, then, is a good one: if he can dig in and add AI to his career toolkit, he stands a much better chance in the job market when he’s done with school.
These are just two of many strategies for dealing with the AI future that’s unfolding before our eyes today. And my kids’ concerns are, of course, reflections of the concerns of their generation. They had it rough enough, having been born into an era their elders had crafted out of greed and self-interest and negligence, mortgaging the futures of those who would follow with an almost lackadaisical disinterest in building a better world. Now they have to cope with the reality that AI itself will be building the world to come, and nothing can stop it.
Whether or not that world is a better one, however, is up to us. And if it’s going to be, we’re going to need a great many of today’s young people actively engaged in making it so – and for that, they’re going to need to be well-prepared.
I, for one, am going to do my part.
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