We regularly hear alarmist predictions that AI is about to destroy jobs and that there will be nothing to replace them. This is nothing new and has been the message of doom for every advancement in society. From the Industrial Revolution to the latest Digital Revolution, more jobs have been created than have been lost. Doom mongers were already hard at work in 13th Century France, where the creation of windmills and watermills were expected to herald the mass loss of hand grinding of grain.
The problem does not lie with the AI Revolution itself, but with the willingness to adapt to the new paradigm and to do it in a timely manner. Even the Industrial Revolution had to make changes for the workforce to be able to take advantage of mass industrialisation. Education changed for large numbers of people to be able to work in the new environment, even if it was only to develop reading and mathematics skills at that stage.
We saw the same thing with the digital revolution, where the need to train people to develop IT solutions through coding, debugging and syntax training became a new educational requirement. This led to the generation of whole armies of high-tech workers and thousands of jobs created in high-tech companies. Moreover, these were predominantly jobs for younger people who were supposed to be the ones whose futures the Revolution was meant to be ruining.
The AI Revolution is not any different in its scope or behaviour than previous Revolutions. It will certainly mean the removal of several more labour-intensive data crunching roles in the workplace, but there will be new roles created at the same time.
However, the one difference with the AI Revolution is the speed at which it is progressing. There has always been change as a necessary precursor for society to move forward. However, the gaps between these changes have become shorter ever since the Industrial Revolution. Therefore, the concern is whether we can adapt to the speed of changes quickly enough.
This requires a total rethink of the way in which we approach education from primary school through to university. No one imagines that we don’t need the basic skills of the 3Rs to be able to master other new skills. However, our computer intelligent youth can easily use AI to solve the more complex elements of the 3Rs. Indeed, I am still trying to find a use for differential calculus I studied over fifty years ago.
We need to focus much more on developing skills rather than subjects and to start it from the earliest ages. We need to harness our young people’s natural creativity to solve problems with a variety of answers rather than problems that always have one right answer than can be easily ticked.
We need to look at new ways of assessing pupils and their skills through observation and verbal assessment rather than written essays and homework that simply requires a couple of minutes on the computer waiting for AI to do the homework. Recently, I came across a wonderful story for one of my workshops, supposedly written by a ten-year-old but, upon investigation, it turned out to be written by AI.
The changes to education also need to find their way into universities. Given the speed of change since the advent of AI, we cannot wait for completion of a four-year degree. We need to create modular courses that can be added to over time as change continues to evolve. Content also needs to adapt so that course eliminate the low-level tasks needed to create data and use AI to do this, while concentrating on the use of that data at a strategic level.
To achieve all of this requires an administration that refuses to balk at change and takes positive action. Yes that change needs to be within education, but it also needs us to harness the massive resource at our disposal. The real experts in technology are not the politicians, but the millions of young people sitting at home jobless. These people are already utilising AI. The role of government is to find a way to use that knowledge to benefit the economy.
The young people have done half of the job by learning how to use AI. At present, many are sitting at home on benefits using AI for entertainment.The challenge of government is to do their part with changes to the other levers that encourage young people to use their knowledge within the workplace.
AI has the potential to behave the same way as all the other revolutions and make a step forward for society. As in the past it is the young who will be the agents of change. The real question is not whether the young can do it again, but whether governments’ traditional resistance to change will stop it. Governments much prefer small incremental, low risk changes. However, revolutions are never small and to ignore them simply increases the risks.
Roger Cowdrey is the author of Joining the Dots and Creating an Entrepreneurial Mindset
