What skills will your kid need in the age of AI?
"As far as brains go, I got the lion's share,” says Scar. “But, when it comes to brute strength...I'm afraid I'm at the shallow end of the gene pool."
Scar, of course, conveniently fails to notice that Mufasa is not only his superior in strength. He is also stronger in character.
The cautionary tale of Scar in The Lion King is not that it’s bad to be smart. It’s more that intelligence without character is dangerous. And, in the end, character is what makes the kingdom flourish, not raw cleverness.
“In short-term games, skills are more important than character. In long term games, character dominates.” – Johnny Uzan
The pitfalls of arrogance were true in the ‘90s when The Lion King debuted, in 1599 when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, and all the way back 5,000 years ago when ancient Egyptians were telling roughly the same story. Horas, in the old stories, is the god of paying attention and uses that ability to defeat his evil uncle Set and save his kingdom. Sound familiar?
We have deep intuitions about this sort of thing.
As AI hands us unlimited intelligence–but not character–by putting all information at our beck and call, the differentiator in our long-term success will be our integrity. Scar’s cleverness is limited by his lack of character. He may have a higher IQ than Simba, but he’s not humble enough to look far enough into the future to navigate the social and the natural world.
To navigate an AI-saturated world (and maximize their impact) your kid needs robust mental models for integrity, not necessarily a higher IQ or a STEM degree.
We’ve figured out the most effective models for long-term success, and encoded those secrets in stories for thousands of years–but also in simple modern self-help language. The notion of a growth mindset, for example.
Teach your kid these mental models (which reflect ancient wisdom), and they will thrive in the coming age of AI, no matter how the world of work evolves.
The 1% rule and the Dunning-Kruger effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect simply states that the less you know about a given topic, the less you understand how ignorant you are, giving a false sense of confidence.
Pride comes before the fall.
If your kid prides herself on her smarts, it’s psychologically difficult to overcome this effect. Learning more about a topic merely reveals that she isn’t that smart (yet) and disincentivizes further interest.
AI will amplify this effect because it will be easy for your kid to find information that reaffirms her half-baked assumptions. It will be easy to posture integrally examined intelligence without actually having done the work. She’ll be able to have a theory, search for quick validation, and assume she’s correct.
Becoming aware of this tendency is half the battle. Make sure your kids know the Dunning-Kruger effect exists.
Then teach them to embody mental models that are better, like the 1% rule. This is characterized by 1) humility and 2) understanding of compounding effects and 3) learning to enjoy incremental progress.
1% better each day, the rule goes, produces a 37x increase by the end of the year. Compounding effects are fun.
That ties in closely with a growth mindset, which pushes a kid to embrace failure along the way.
The growth mindset and the importance of attention
For a growth mindset, all you need to believe is that you can improve over time.
“The fool is the precursor to the savior.” – Carl Jung
This requires a tolerance for short-term losses. A growth mindset welcomes failure because it is the stepping stone to later success.
For example, if your kid loves to skateboard, part of becoming great is a willingness to fall down (often) and sometimes get hurt. There’s a reason skateboarding is associated with later success in life.
What failure teaches is the value of attention. When you fail often enough and prefer to succeed, you learn to pay close attention to what causes one or the other. Watch kids skateboard–they will obsess over a millimeter of toe placement for hours.
Scar, on the other hand, puts the “eyes of the king” (the bird, Zazu) in a cage. He doesn’t value attention because he thinks he already knows everything.
To prepare your kids to navigate a world of AI, you don’t need to pressure them into online courses or spend hours fiddling with GPT3.
You just need to let them do what they naturally do – play. Let them skateboard or snowboard or obsess for hours over a chessboard or setting up a motherboard or whatever lights them up. Let them learn to be okay with falling, then growing. They don’t need much from you except to resist the urge to prevent them from feeling the pain of failure. I know – it’s hard.
But first-hand experience with failure will be their Sword of Truth as they become adults and navigate an increasingly AI-centric world.
Outrage bait and knowing thyself
In the book Homo Deus, Harari warns that if marketers know more about us than we do, we are in trouble.
We are heading into a world where AI will offer you a cure for the anxiety you didn’t even consciously feel.
Without a proper understanding of your desires and robust mental frameworks (like those above) your kid is likely to fall into more and more outrage bait, political division, and all the products these machines sell to heal the trauma they caused in the first place.
The only way to avoid AI manipulation is for your kid to become aware of the negative emotions they’re being drawn into. Give them the mental models that empower them to thrive and provide exponential value for themselves and others.
In a world dominated by AI, kids need strong mental models and a moral compass, not easily distracted by hyper-intelligent marketing.
If they master those mental models, they can take advantage of more interesting opportunities than any of us can imagine.
They need to start small, improve incrementally, stay humble, embrace failure, and pay attention. And we could all stand to practice that more. Start today.
Thanks for reading,
Taylor + rebelEducator team
P.S.
What we’re looking at:
Quotes we’re pondering:
“Education stuffs you full of ideas without the coinciding experience that gave rise to those ideas in the first place, giving you incorrect perspective and notions.” — Authur Schopenhauer
''The wit was not wrong who defined education in this way: 'Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.” — Albert Einstein
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.” — David Foster Wallace
An excellent article! AI is starting to have a profound impact on industries we didn't think were possible to disrupt so quickly. There was an assumption that it would be Blue Collar Jobs, White Collar Jobs, then Creatives who were disrupted. We are observing exactly the opposite. We need to help students remain valuable in an AI dominated future. The only way to do this is enhance the thing that makes them unique; critical and abstract thinking and as you say: character.
I've written more of my thoughts out on the topic here:
https://open.substack.com/pub/nickwatson/p/we-need-to-raise-socrates-from-the?r=1vtqzp&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web