I haven’t been posting as frequently lately – I’ve been wrapped up in thinking about the future. Specifically the future of work: what does it look like for humans in the time of AI?
These will be interesting times for humans and the systems that educate us. An educational paradigm primarily based on building knowledge is woefully misaligned in a world where everyone carries a supercomputer in their pocket with access to almost all human knowledge, further augmented by commodified intelligence that can organize and synthesize it on command.
In The Coming Wave, the authors share “An urgent warning of the unprecedented risks that AI and other fast-developing technologies pose to global order, and how we might contain them while we have the chance.” When I read this last April, it felt prescient, profound, even scary. Now a year later, it’s almost quaint. AI + Robotics + Synthetic Biology – how will humans survive.
Imagine a world where AI designs titanium robotic platforms, wrapped in and powered by organic flesh grown in labs, controlled by autonomous AI agents. Terminators from the iconic movie, basically. Even more so – Westworld.
All of this has massive implications for humanity. We are going to need to simultaneously confront deep philosophical questions about our existence while battling with machines for our jobs and livelihoods _and_ trying to raise generations of future humans to be ready to live in this future world.
What is the meaning of work, as the types of work that humans do best is slowly but surely pinched out? Will there be a “human premium” for products and services “certified made by human hands”?
All this to say that I will be thinking and writing about this more in the coming days. To make it distinct from this website, I started a SubStack: Adaptive Shifts. I plan to publish weekly thoughts about the intersection of AI, Education, and what all this mean for the Future of Work.