The great irony of automation is that it has come for the very people who built it. CS graduates are now finding themselves competing with machines as well as each other, and then, when they do get jobs, they risk creating even more sophisticated algorithms that could become their own replacements. So what the hell do we teach our kids?<\/p>\n
\u201cCoding used to be like: Hey, I know Python, I know C, I know Java, I know this stack or that stack, and I have five or ten years\u2019 experience on this,\u201d says Nicolas Genest, an AI entrepreneur and CEO of the tech education startup Codeboxx. \u201cAnd it no longer matters. AI codes better today. I\u2019ve seen it, I\u2019ve experienced it, I\u2019m saying it: it codes better today than any software engineer you can think of. It\u2019s faster, it secures more coverage, it writes all the tests, it doesn\u2019t have a blind spot, doesn\u2019t get tired. It can work 24\/7 and doesn\u2019t react negatively to undesired feedback from the product team. It doesn\u2019t flinch when you tell it \u2018Do this again\u2019 for the seventh or eighth time, or \u2018You\u2019re not done.\u2019 Engineers hate being told they\u2019re not done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Genest should be an unlikely candidate to say this, since his entire career has been built around his own coding skills. He\u2019s been coding since 1985, when his grandfather let him borrow his computer and he taught himself the basics. But these days, Genest hardly codes at all: he \u201cvibe codes\u201d instead. In other words, he writes prompts (such as \u201ccreate the code for a phone app game about farming\u201d) in language models like Claude or ChatGPT, and then he simply tinkers with what\u2019s there. He rarely finds that many mistakes. In journalistic terms, he\u2019s moved from being a staff writer to an editor. Why would he go back?<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t just computer science that\u2019s in danger, either. Genest, who is Canadian, had his green card denied four years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cI spent tens of thousands of dollars on lawyers to get denied that green card,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd this year, I decided to give it another shot \u2014 but instead of hiring lawyers, I opened a conversation with ChatGPT.\u201d With a few short prompts, the LLM had built a new green card strategy for him, created letters of recommendation and support that he could send to the appropriate people, and had advised him to check six boxes on the standard application rather than the three that are usually required. Genest asked it to take into account his failed application, the ways in which other applications had failed, and strategies that had been used in the past for people in a similar position to him. He then followed its instructions and put in a new application, which was successful. His green card arrived in July.<\/p>\n
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The most successful coders of today learned on machines like these. Their kids have access to much better technology, but also potentially much more limited opportunities (Getty\/iStock)<\/p>\n
\u201cI was able to achieve all that without using flawed lawyers \u2014 expensive, flawed lawyers,\u201d he says. The key was augmenting all the usual steps with personalized ones, he believes. He also asked it to take into account types of green card applications that seemed to have been successful most recently. A single lawyer would struggle to stay on top of their game like that.<\/p>\n
In his day job, Genest often sees new computer science grads sign up to educational courses in AI, because the developments have moved faster than college curricula. That\u2019s one way of dealing with the current landscape. It\u2019s similar to the way in which Genest\u2019s eldest son, who is 18 years old and studying at the University of Florida, has also responded: he\u2019s doing a double major in math and finance, with AI-focused internships. Genest\u2019s younger son, however, who is 15 years old, has responded very differently.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe said, \u2018I’m gonna be a baker and I’m gonna bake bread. I’m gonna have my own bakery,\u2019\u201d says Genest. \u201c\u2018Because people need to eat and people love bread, and I’ll do pastries.\u2019 And so a lot of people of this generation cope that way. He was like: \u2018I need certainties and I’ll go physical, because the physical world remains existing. The white-collar jobs are at risk. I’m not going to risk myself going into this right now. I’m going to try to do something very concrete.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
The new consideration for parents, then, might not be how to make their children fluent in technology, but how to make them more human in a technological world.<\/p>\n
A digital world shaped by white men<\/p>\n
Kate Arthur is an entrepreneur, charity founder and author of two books about how to develop \u201cAI literacy\u201d in a rapidly changing landscape (her latest, Algorithm to Adulthood: Becoming an Adult in an AI World, comes out later this year.) She\u2019s also a mother to three girls, one of whom recently dropped out of her computer science degree after four years, in order to transfer to Women\u2019s Studies. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a long discuss about why,\u201d Arthur says. \u201cAnd she just said that in the university system, her classes are so dry and so boring. There\u2019s no discussion, no debate, there\u2019s no real thinking in terms of world problems. And so she said: \u2018Actually, I\u2019m not engaged anymore. I know how to code. I\u2019ve done four years of this. Now I really want to challenge my creative side and my debating and conversation.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
To Arthur\u2019s mind, her daughter is entirely justified in moving out of CS at this juncture \u2014 in fact, she might be doing the savviest thing she could possibly do. A basic knowledge of coding is great, but the companies of the future may well only employ a small fraction of the number of coders they once did. What will be more important is being able to inject the humanity back into the code.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the \u201880s, it was a very minority, small group of white men who knew how to code and who started to shape this digital world,\u201d Arthur adds. \u201cSo we’ve got this physical world where we were all in, and then they were building this digital world to mirror the physical world. And in that, all of their biases and all of the inequalities were baked into that environment. And so now we have this digital space where it’s so in its nascency, so young \u2014 we don’t know how to communicate in this space. We don’t have values in this space. It has no borders.\u201d More than anything, this new digital realm needs proper architects: people who have thought long and hard about its inadequacies and people who have engaged in critical thinking about it. They will have to smooth out the edges. They will have to debate about how to nudge subjectivity toward objectivity. They will have to consider how much of the code from the eighties should be used today, and how much of it might do damage; what is scaffolding and what is rot.<\/p>\n
Arthur\u2019s daughter doesn\u2019t want to be a feminist academic; she wants to be a data scientist. When she told Arthur that, she asked her: \u201cWell, what would an AI be able to do in that?\u201d They had a discussion about what can or should be automated versus what shouldn\u2019t. Arthur still thinks it\u2019s important to know how to learn to code \u2014 to know what constitutes the building blocks you\u2019re using \u2014 but she thinks that coding will become just another form of literacy, like reading or writing. The skilled workers of the future will be trained in critical thinking, creativity and community-building: things that can\u2019t be easily replicated by AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo parents who worry about \u2018What should I be doing for education?\u2019, I like to ask them how they define education, what is its purpose for them? Because we get very quickly into the myopic and forget to think about: why do we send our kids to school for 20 or 25 years?\u201d she says. \u201cWhy is it mandatory? And a lot of it does link back to that first industrial revolution and the need for us to be literate, for us to be able to read and write and communicate, and to have the numeracy skills to be able to understand numbers. Those three \u2014 reading, writing, and numeracy \u2014 anchor the creation of the digital world. So lines of code are letters, words, and numbers. And I still am a believer that we do need to know how to code \u2014 not everybody, and it doesn’t need to be a massive army \u2014 but if we are now using machines that are coding for us, who’s checking the machines? I would say the same to someone saying: Do we need to read and write? Because if machines are reading and writing for us, do we need to read and write? The moment we give over that human agency to machines, we’re losing control.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s no way to predict how the technological landscape will look in a decade, Arthur adds, so instead we should be doubling down on critical thinking skills. Just like Nicolas Genest \u2014 who says his own kids were able to unlock a phone at 18 months old \u2014 she believes the best thing we can do is introduce critical thinking very early in education, so kids are given the tools to be able to parse out what\u2019s real and what\u2019s not from an AI environment. Genest says he worried most about the effects of social media on his teens, but now there\u2019s a host of other problems for the newest parents to have to worry about: AI psychosis, AI boyfriends and girlfriends, isolation driven by a dependency on AI friends, de-skilling caused by AI programs writing essays and conducting research for today\u2019s students.<\/p>\n
\u201cNeeding to read and write, needing to understand numbers, needing to learn to code, are all part of a skillset that strengthens our ability to communicate,\u201d says Arthur. \u201cAnd they\u2019ll go into that AI space understanding how machines work, understanding how data is manipulated in these machines. And then whether you go into building those AI models or designing them or using them for your own job, that all just depends on who you are as a kid and where your interests go.\u201d <\/p>\n
Encouraging a love of education for education\u2019s sake, rather than pushing people to follow subjects in the name of employability, is the only way to be truly future-proof, she adds: \u201cIf they can just get the love of learning as a skill, because this is like a lifelong skill that this generation is going to need to know, because It is all moving so fast. To say that I want my kid to do this job \u2014 the job might not be there in five or 10 years\u2019 time. We just don’t know. So to be able to continuously learn and relearn and pivot and build those human skills is most important.\u201d <\/p>\n
The best way an education system can respond to all this is by bringing the arts and sciences back together, Arthur believes: \u201cI think our education systems in the West do a disservice by separating the sciences and the arts. Some of the greatest innovations of our time, of human history, have been through the lens of both arts and sciences. And if you just look at the beauty of nature, it’s so mathematical and so scientific, yet so beautiful and so artistic.\u201d For too long, we\u2019ve allowed a strict separation of humanities and STEM subjects, but \u201cin the world that we’re going into with AI, we need to be bringing those two together.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not necessarily just the kids who need to pivot, she adds. If essays for homework are being compromised because students are using ChatGPT at home, then maybe this should be the end of writing essays outside of the classroom. This is a good opportunity to \u201coverhaul the education system\u201d for the better, Arthur says, and it\u2019s the responsibility of adults first and foremost to become AI-literate so they can teach that literacy to their charges: \u201cThe role of the educator should be changing as well as the student\u2019s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bringing the arts back<\/p>\n
Mitch Resnick has spent most of his career trying to make technology feel more like play. At the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Lifelong Kindergarten group, he developed Scratch \u2014 the block-based programming platform that turned millions of children into coders without them ever typing a line of syntax. The idea was simple but quietly radical: instead of teaching kids to memorize commands, let them drag and snap colorful logic blocks together, more like Lego than code. In the process, they\u2019d learn the habits of mind behind programming \u2014 breaking problems into parts, debugging, iterating \u2014 without the intimidation of text-based languages. Scratch was phenomenally successful and is now used worldwide in schools from kindergarten age onwards. But when I ask Resnick whether Scratch successfully prepared kids for a coding-based jobs market, he\u2019s clear: \u201cPreparing young people to get jobs as software developers was never the goal.\u201d<\/p>\n
Resnick\u2019s \u201cultimate goals have never been specifically about coding,\u201d but instead about \u201chelping young people develop as creative, curious, caring and collaborative learners.\u201d That\u2019s an important distinction, because the qualities he names are specifically human qualities that an AI would struggle to emulate.<\/p>\n
Like Kate Arthur, Resnick believes that the most successful workers of the future will need to be adept in the arts and humanities, as well as the pattern-based, systematic thinking common among software engineers and computer science grads. That\u2019s something he believed even when he was developing Scratch over 20 years ago.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn the beginning, we wanted Scratch to appeal especially to kids who never imagined themselves being interested in coding,\u201d he says. It was great that naturally pattern-based thinkers also got on board, but he was especially happy when \u201csomeone’s friend told them: Oh, with Scratch, you can make your drawings come alive,\u201d and then the kid with the sketchbook had their curiosity piqued.<\/p>\n
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Scratch is now a component in most curricula across the US and the UK, teaching children how to code through simple setups that allow them to bring their drawings alive or move a robot around the table<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not just children who have benefited from Scratch. When the globally successful CS50 course at Harvard \u2014 a course available to on-campus students that was then additionally made available for free online in 2015, and has since been taken by well over 5 million people \u2014 implemented a small Scratch project in its first week in 2007, it made a remarkable discovery: the retention rate went way up. People who might previously have dropped out because they felt that computer science was too technical or stale, or didn\u2019t speak their language, were able to stay on for weeks of technical lectures after just a small amount of Scratch. It particularly seemed to be good at keeping retention rates up for women.<\/p>\n
Resnick cautions against trying to make too many predictions for the future, considering how fast AI developments are moving. But when he thinks about what coding looks like in the future, he believes we have a responsibility to urge our systems-minded kids to consider dabbling in the arts, and vice versa. Because \u201cvibe coding\u201d and writing good prompts into LLM\u2019s will be a good skill to have, but it\u2019s best deployed with a knowledge of the technology underneath.<\/p>\n
\u201cA type of thought experiment I would do is\u2026 as 3D printers become less expensive and more capable, if someone wanted to make a dollhouse, they could just sort of tell the 3D printer to print a dollhouse for them,\u201d he says. \u201cOr you could use Lego bricks and build a dollhouse yourself. Each has an attraction. It’s not that one is right and one is wrong. For certain things, if I want to quickly build a dollhouse, I want to make sure it’s sturdy, then I can download some plans for a dollhouse, put it into my 3D printer, print it out, and I’ll have a good dollhouse. And you could then play with it and it could be a good experience. But even if you could do that at a very low cost, I think there’d still be a lot of kids who want to build with Lego bricks. There’s a joy that comes from building with Lego bricks.\u201d <\/p>\n
There\u2019s an in-between path here: you can build your initial dollhouse and then change parts quickly with a 3D printer, or print out a generic house and add to it with personalized Lego. That\u2019s probably how coding jobs will look. But if you take dismiss coding languages entirely, Resnick adds, \u201cthere’s a risk that you might lose the joy of creating, which I think is an important thing.\u201d There\u2019s also a risk that only systems-minded people would then learn the actual code, and humanities-minded students might default to \u201cvibe coding\u201d and prompt engineering and, in doing so, miss out on a valuable skillset. It\u2019s important on a social and personal level, Resnick believes, for those groups to interact with each other as we continue to build an AI world.<\/p>\n
Making an effort to stay human<\/p>\n