What Should We Teach Kids in the Age of AI
I’ve long believed that “coding” is the new literacy.
I always intended to teach my son programming at a relatively early age. Now, as computer programming is being upended by AI, I wonder whether I should.
My son and I are currently building a simple game together. As I watch him watch me type queries into the coding assistant window, the irony doesn’t escape me.
Is Everything Changing Yet Again?
I started thinking: if we should no longer teach kids to program, what should we teach instead? What skills and traits will be conducive to success for someone becoming an adult in, say, the year 2040?
I’m going to ignore the timeless, low level traits like grit, thick skin, discipline, ability to postpone gratification. The importance of these is widely documented and seems universal and timeless.
I’d like to focus on higher order, teachable things.
None of these ideas are new. I think their importance is growing with the advent of AI.
The New “Learning How to Learn”
With information access becoming near perfect and the world changing at a rapid pace, it’s long become clear that memorizing specific facts wasn’t important anymore. What’s important is “learning how to learn”. The ability to find new information and synthesize it.
What’s different now? On top of just having perfect access to information, we now have AI tools that do a lot of the “synthesis” work for us.
What are now the human skills in “learning how to learn”? I think these are:
- The ability to pose the right questions (“learning how to ask”)
- The ability to critically assess highly polished content: poke holes in it, validate hidden assumptions and sources
The New Computer Literacy
We’ve also appreciated “computer literacy” or “internet literacy” for a while now. I take these to mean “the ability to quickly master and utilize digital tools and data sources”. Spreadsheets, SQL, databases, social media etc.
What does this look like in the age of AI? I don’t think there’s much change here. The ability to discover, internalize the capabilities and apply AI tools will set people apart. The only change is the pace of innovation keeps accelerating.
Agency
The third skill is agency or entrepreneurship. I find these words imperfect.
Here’s what I mean:
Given the ability to acquire any information and perform any task, what is left to separate us is the skill of realizing that anything can be done and the initiative to go out and do it. There are no bounds and no rules.
Everything can be made, created, changed, affected. You need the drive and the belief in your ability to do so.
Language and Writing
As I’m going over these skills and thinking through how we now use different flavors of generative models to accomplish tasks, there is a common thread running through all these uses: language.
The ability to express yourself clearly is as important as ever. Except that we now have a new type of audience: AI.
To succeed, one needs to have a rich vocabulary to convey our ideas to AI and the ability to structure our thoughts clearly.
Creativity
The last one is the trickiest to “teach” or “learn”.
Technique that used to be acquired by investing the mythical 10,000 hours doesn’t matter nearly as much. Text, image, video, music - all can be created based off of text.
What remains is perhaps what is becoming the last property of “human”: the ability to come up with innovative ideas to serve as input for the different models we’re using.