Preparing for the Unknown

A big part of a school system’s purpose is to prepare young people to be valuable members of the workforce. It used to be schools, and the rest of the world, knew what skills kids needed to get a good job after high school or college graduation. But now that has all changed. With the advent of artificial intelligence, even the best prognosticators are unsure what types of skills will be needed for graduates to earn employment over the next ten years, and whether there will even be jobs left to get.

In 1869 Massachusetts created the country’s first Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). A few years later, the U.S. Congress created a national one.

As Josh Tyrangiel writes in the March issue of The Atlantic,

“The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization. It sends out detailed surveys to about 60,000 households and 120,000 businesses and government agencies every month, supplemented by qualitative research it uses to check and occasionally correct its findings. It deserves at least some credit for the scorecard. America: 250 years without violent class warfare. And you have to appreciate the entertainment value of its minutiae. The BLS is how we know that, in 2024, 44,119 people worked in mobile food services (a.k.a. food trucks), up 907 percent since 2000; that nonveterinary pet care (grooming, training) employed 190,984 people, up 513 percent; and that the United States had almost 100,000 massage therapists, with five times the national concentration in Napa, California.”

“These and thousands of other BLS statistics describe a society that has grown more prosperous, and a workforce endlessly adaptive to change. But like all statistical bodies, the BLS has its limits. It’s excellent at revealing what has happened and only moderately useful at telling us what’s about to. The data can’t foresee recessions or pandemics – or the arrival of a technology that might do to the workforce what an asteroid did to the dinosaurs.”

“I’m am referring, of course, to artificial intelligence. After a rollout that could have been orchestrated by H.P. Lovecraft – ‘We are summoning the demon,’ Elon Musk warned in a typical early pronouncement – the AI industry has pivoted from the language of nightmares to the stuff of comas. Driving innovation. Accelerating transformation. Reimagining workflows. It’s the first time in history that humans have invented something genuinely miraculous and then rushed to dress it in a fleece vest.”

Artificial intelligence (AI) is improving, and more companies are using it so that any resourceful knowledge worker is now delegating some of their job’s drudgery to machines.

“Many economists insist that this will all be fine. Capitalism is resilient. The arrival of the ATM famously led to the employment of more bank tellers, just as the introduction of Excel swelled the ranks of accountants and Photoshop spiked demand for graphic designers. In each case, new tech automated old tasks, increased productivity, and create jobs with higher wages than anyone could have conceived of before. The BLS projects that employment will grow 3.1 percent over the next 10 years. That’s down from 13 percent in the previous decade, but 5 million new jobs in a country with a stable population is hardly catastrophic.”

“And yet: There are things that economists struggle to measure. Americans tend to derive meaning and identity from what they do. Most don’t want to do something else, even if they had any confidence – which they don’t – that they could find something else to do. Seventy-one percent of respondents to an August Reuters/Ipsos poll said they’re worried that artificial intelligence will ‘put too many people out of work permanently.’”

“AI is already transforming work, one delegated task at a time. If the transformation unfolds slowly enough and the economy adjusts quickly enough, the economists may be right: We’ll be fine. Or better. But if AI instead triggers a rapid reorganization of work – compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40 percent of jobs worldwide, as the International Monetary Fund projects – the consequences will not stop at the economy. They will test political institutions that have already shown how brittle they can be.”

“The question, then, is whether we’re approaching the kind of disruption that can be managed by statistics – or the kind that creates statistics no one can bear to count.”

I remember sitting in the audience at an educational conference 20 years ago when the speaker told us that our job, as school leaders, was to prepare students with the skills necessary to prosper in world that we couldn’t describe. That statement scared the Bejesus out of me.

But the rest of the conference sessions addressed topics like “Improving Your Algebra Scores,” “How to Interpret a Reading Passage,” and “How To Improve Recess” (not kidding about that one).

Absent were sessions that helped all of us with the challenge to figure out what skills kids were going to need to be employed in a much different world than the one we grew up in.

So, today, let me list session topics to prepare our adult learning leaders to be ready to help their young learners adapt to a world where artificial intelligence is a major player:

“How To Improve Your Learners Reading Skills”

“How To Make Your Young Learners Better Communicators”

“Improving Your Young Learners Problem-Solving Abilities”

“How To Build Outstanding Character”

“How To Discern Fact From Fiction”

“How To Think”

Today’s curriculum is too wide. It should go narrow and then go deep. Tomorrow’s capable thinkers need to be talented readers, writers, problem-solvers, and young learners with strong character – artificial intelligence or not.

We don’t know yet how artificial intelligence will impact our workforce, but the tea leaves are swirling and settling. What we do know is that the K-12 school system we have today is not, and will not, prepared our youth for what tomorrow will bring. It’s time to develop a new system of learning to meet the challenges artificial intelligence and other future creations demand.

Til tomorrow. SVB