This shopping cart can follow you around a store by itself. When you put items in it, it can cross them off your grocery list. How long can it be until the groceries just show up on your counter when you’re ready to cook? What will happen to the clerks, and janitors, and stockers, and delivery men and women? The store manager? The shopping center?
George Jetson commutes to work on a little air scooter to push a single button for an hour a week. It’s hard to imagine what George might do instead of pushing the button – to find a new way to be helpful, he’s going to need skills and passion that I just don’t see in him yet. Everything else he could do – every job he’d get such simple instructions for – has been automated. He’s going to have to change completely, from a routine-following technophobe to a self-directed instigator – and it’s going to be COMPETITIVE.
He should start now, while button tech is still primitive!
Jobs that can be automated may simply disappear for our students and their offspring. There may be no truck drivers, or factory workers, or cashiers. Most of our office jobs can be automated too, so watch out, middle class. Wealth is already being concentrated by this stuff.
I’m focusing on helping kids be adaptable and incisive. They are NOT going to be hired to push a button all day.
Giving feedback without judgement |
March 7, 2012 at 11:17 am
[...] Three students have contributed but I only praised the one with the right answer. Later, they’ll take the SAT and ACT tests and only get credit for their right answers. They’ll leave school thinking right answers are the only thing that matters – but that will just set them up for failure in 20 years. [...]