Quickly, quickly, quickly, the world is changing, and nobody is surprised.
I opened my phone today to find a news article related to this blog, only to see the headline that tech stocks were plunging around the world as people were concerned that the AI bubble was about to burst.
If you look at history, everything that rises this fast drops equally as fast. We've seen it so many times before.
That would be my age and my stage, but I entered into a conversation with Callum, my son, just last night or the night before. Where the 18-year-old mind cannot contemplate the fact that stocks and shares will not continue to rise by 10 or 15% every year (they never, ever, ever do).
In a second article that I read this morning (I was up too early), one of the founders of Anthropic, the open AI business that hosts Claude, is calling for more guardrails in AI, more policy, more restrictions on the development moving forwards. It's not so much that they're concerned about the fact that it's going to take over the world and make machines that are going to eat us; it's the fact that it's going to devastate the economy by casting adrift millions and millions and millions of jobs, and leaving people in a benefit trap that the state will have to fund from the people at the top end of the pyramid.
This is effectively a recipe for civil war.
In amongst this, though, and in the base of the article, he talks about the essential skills that will be required in a world dominated by AI, and yet again, Ken Robinson, the educationalist from England who made his name in America who coined the phrase ‘out of our minds’ was right.
What we need is creativity and the ability to problem-solve.
This is the thing that AI is unlikely to be able to develop for a considerable period of time.
This is our ‘secret sauce’.
Creativity can be taught, creativity can be learned, creativity can be fostered and developed and improved.
If I were you, if I was 18. If I was any age, I would be reading and listening and assimilating more and more information from the creative arts, from literature, from history and geography. Things that it's going to be impossible for AI to replicate.
The age of the specialist is gone; the rise of the generalist is finally here. Knowing a little bit about a lot is going to be much, much more valuable than knowing a lot about a little.
AI already knows that.
Blog Post Number - 4561