{"id":365031,"date":"2026-04-05T15:21:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-05T15:21:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/365031\/"},"modified":"2026-04-05T15:21:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-05T15:21:10","slug":"what-to-teach-your-kids-to-prepare-them-for-an-ai-scrambled-job-market","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/365031\/","title":{"rendered":"What to teach your kids to prepare them for an AI-scrambled job market"},"content":{"rendered":"

I work with a lot of very smart people, and sometimes one of them asks me a question that stops me in my tracks. That\u2019s what happened after I published the newest installment of my advice column, Your Mileage May Vary, which was about whether it\u2019s morally icky to send your kid to private school<\/a> instead of the local public school.<\/p>\n

Bryan Walsh, one of my editors, hit me with the question below. I felt so many people would relate to it that I wanted to publish it along with my own response to it. In the future, I hope to share more of these smart questions from within our newsroom. For now, consider this one about making decisions under radical uncertainty. Here\u2019s Bryan\u2019s question:<\/p>\n

Sigal\u2019s column<\/a> is characteristically smart, and I\u2019d encourage anyone wrestling with the decision about how to educate their child to read it. But as a parent of an 8-year-old in a Brooklyn public school, what strikes me most about the private-vs.-public debate isn\u2019t the ethical dimension \u2014 it\u2019s the sheer vertigo of not knowing.<\/p>\n

Something I realized fairly soon as a parent is that we get exactly one shot at it. There is no control group. You can\u2019t run your kid through public school, rewind, try private, and then compare outcomes at age 30. You\u2019re forced to make what could be a massive, consequential decision with radically incomplete information. <\/p>\n

That uncertainty gnaws at me. When I was growing up in the 1980s, the basic formula for life success was still legible: get good grades, go to a good college, get a good job. That pathway still exists, but it\u2019s fraying in ways that make school choice, like so much else today, feel even more like a shot in the dark. What skills will actually matter in 15 years? Will the curriculum your kid learns in third grade have any bearing on a labor market being reshaped by AI? Will the network your child builds matter less \u2014 or even more? <\/p>\n

I\u2019m supposed to be a futurist, and I have no idea. I suppose it\u2019s some comfort that neither does anyone else, though plenty of people will charge you $40,000 a year in tuition to pretend they do.<\/p>\n

The research Sigal cites is genuinely reassuring \u2014 family background matters more than which building your kid sits in. But knowing that intellectually doesn\u2019t silence the 3 am voice that whispers: What if you\u2019re getting this wrong?<\/p>\n

This is such Relatable Content! How are you supposed to set up your child\u2019s \u201cone wild and precious life<\/a>,\u201d as Mary Oliver put it, when life offers you no clear instruction manual and you only get one try?<\/p>\n

This is hard in the most stable of times. And it feels even harder now, when so many parents are wondering how they can possibly educate their kids in a way that\u2019ll prepare them for AI\u2019s disruptions to the labor market and society overall.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re right about two things. First, the old formula for life success \u2014 good grades at a good school will get you a good job \u2014 can be counted on less and less. And second, parents now have to make decisions about their kids\u2019 education with radically incomplete information.<\/p>\n

Uncertainty is a very hard thing to hold, especially at 3 am.<\/p>\n

So at this point, I could try to reassure you by telling you the concrete things you can do to benefit your individual child. I could reiterate what many AI executives and early adopters have told their own kids<\/a>: Cultivate soft skills (like listening, empathy, and accountability) and metacognitive skills (like critical thinking, experimentation, and flexibility).<\/p>\n

I could also reiterate something I\u2019ve said before<\/a>: A good education is about much more than ensuring job security. As Aristotle argued back in Ancient Greece, it\u2019s about cultivating all the character virtues that make for a flourishing life \u2014 honesty, courage, justice, and especially phronesis or good judgment (learning to discern the morally salient features of a given situation so you can make a judgment call that\u2019s well-attuned to that unique situation). The advent of AI makes a virtue like phronesis more relevant than ever, because your kid will need to be able to wisely discern how to make use of emerging technologies \u2014 and how not to.<\/p>\n

But the thing about the virtues is, you build them up through practice. If your kid doesn\u2019t have the opportunity to encounter friction that forces them to practice reasoning and deliberating, they\u2019ll have a very hard time developing good judgment.<\/p>\n

And AI tends to remove friction. It makes things fast and easy, which can be handy in the short term, but can lead to intellectual \u2014 and moral \u2014 deskilling in the long term. As AI use pervades society more and more, I think the most unusual kind of person will be one who has become neither brain-dulled nor virtue-dulled by deferring to AI models without using their own cognitive muscles first.<\/p>\n

So if your goal is to make your kid stand out in a way that just might give them a leg-up when they\u2019re grown, I\u2019d say: Make sure that they build those muscles while they\u2019re young, and for the love of god, keep exercising them. Even if this doesn\u2019t give them full security in the labor market, it\u2019ll help them live a more flourishing life writ large.<\/p>\n

The nice thing about this advice for you, as a parent struggling to know what to do for your kid, is that it means you don\u2019t have to do anything wildly different from what\u2019s been done in the past! The benefits of a classic humanities or liberal-arts education are still among the very best you can give your child.<\/p>\n

While I think all the advice I\u2019ve mentioned so far is reasonable on the individual level, I\u2019d argue the very best advice would be to question the entire premise that focusing on that individual level will be an effective way to ensure much of anything for your child\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

On the current trajectory, it seems all too likely that we\u2019re heading toward a future of \u201cgradual disempowerment,\u201d<\/a> as some AI researchers put it. The basic idea is that as AI becomes a cheaper alternative to human labor in most jobs, the economic pressure to sideline humans will become incredibly hard to resist. Historically, citizens in democratic states have enjoyed a bunch of rights and protections because states needed us \u2014 we provide the labor that makes everything run, from the economy to the military.<\/p>\n

But when AI provides the labor and the state becomes less dependent on us, it doesn\u2019t have to pay so much attention to our demands. Worse, any state that does continue taking care of human workers might find itself at a competitive disadvantage against others that don\u2019t. And so the forces that have traditionally kept governments accountable to their citizens gradually erode, and we end up deeply disempowered.<\/p>\n

Under these conditions, focusing on the object-level question of \u201cwhat skills should I teach my individual child?\u201d is a bit like trying to protect your kid from climate change by buying them a better sunhat.<\/p>\n

Instead, it makes more sense to focus on the structural problem, which demands political engagement and collective organizing. If you want your kid to have a job as an adult, then teaching them to be an effective citizen and advocate \u2014 and doing that work yourself right now \u2014 probably matters more than any particular school subject they will study. This can take many concrete forms<\/a>: organizing with your labor union, supporting advocacy groups that push the government to make tech equitable and accountable, voting for politicians who share your vision, and spreading compelling counter-narratives to the fanciful stories<\/a> that AI companies are selling the public.<\/p>\n

I know that accepting the limits of what we can guarantee by focusing on the personal level is a tough pill to swallow. We live in a culture that conditions us to think in terms of the atomized individual and valorizes being self-sufficient and self-directed (see Silicon Valley\u2019s current obsession with being \u201chigh agency<\/a>.\u201d) But my own life has taught me how fragile that model is.<\/p>\n

I grew up in a family on welfare, so financial and professional security feels very salient to me. I tend to gravitate towards a \u201choarding\u201d mentality. That is, faced with my own 3 am anxieties, I spent years trying to maintain a sense of control by telling myself that if I burnish my educational credentials, work hard at my job, and save enough money, I\u2019ll be okay.<\/p>\n

But for me, that illusion of control came crashing down a decade ago when I developed a chronic illness. For a while, it was so intense that I could barely walk. And I was shattered to discover that nothing I\u2019d hoarded \u2014 my education, my job, my savings \u2014 could help me. Even worse than the physical pain was the emotional pain of feeling alone: My doctors shunted me from specialist to specialist, and my friends and family didn\u2019t realize that I needed more support. I was so used to the idea that I was self-sufficient, in my castle buttressed by the achievements I\u2019d hoarded, that I didn\u2019t think to ask.<\/p>\n

Recently, a friend of mine also developed a chronic illness. But unlike me, she\u2019d spent many years cultivating a community of extremely tight-knit friends. They\u2019re the sort of group that talks a lot about solidarity and mutual aid<\/a>. And they walk the talk. I\u2019ve watched how my friend, buoyed by all the meals and parties and other ministrations they lavish on her, has been able to manage her physical challenges with so much less fear and so much more security than me. My castle isolated me. Her refusal to build one gave her true safety.<\/p>\n

As AI disrupts the labor market, I\u2019m trying to move myself from the hoarding model to the solidarity model.<\/p>\n

And I wonder if it might serve you and your family well, too. The problem we\u2019re all about to face together is structural, not individual. So the benefits you can offer your child on the individual level are, it pains me to say, fairly limited. But if you focus on political engagement and collective organizing that could actually make some difference to the structural dynamic<\/a> \u2014 and teach your child to ask structural questions and be civically engaged as well \u2014 you might be able to sleep a little better at night.<\/p>\n

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\"Swati<\/p>\n

Swati Sharma<\/p>\n

Vox Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I work with a lot of very smart people, and sometimes one of them asks me a question…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365032,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[1665,365,363,364,84,19939,111,139,69,7254,145,173079],"class_list":{"0":"post-365031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-advice","9":"tag-ai","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-education","13":"tag-future-perfect","14":"tag-new-zealand","15":"tag-newzealand","16":"tag-nz","17":"tag-policy","18":"tag-technology","19":"tag-your-mileage-may-vary"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}