I would hate to be a parent of young children right now.

I thought screen-time constraints was enough of a challenge, but no, we’re in earthquake territory now.

Only a year ago, STEM was a safe career path for kids – learning the basics of coding was all the rage, and for liberal art parents, this was a tough thing to accept. But many begrudgingly accepted the new reality, and their kids were on the STEM path to coding futures. The future was bright.

Now it seems to have changed. One of the CEOs for a top AI Lab, Dario Amodei (cool name, right?), of Anthropic, of Claude Sonnet AI model fame, has claimed that in 3-6 months, 90% of all coding will be done by AI.

(I, for one, think this cannot be accurate, as it will take our companies more than 3-6 months to fire and lay off 90% of the programmers, but nonetheless, it’s still a bit of a tremor. And A LOT for liberal arts parents to take on board. I also feel there’s more than a little hype in that 90%.)

But I’m willing to bet the parents, now confident in their ability to pivot, will pivot. Now, they’ll make sure their children go into creative fields! Although they don’t like to show it publicly, they will be unanimously delighted about this tectonic shift in culture. Liberal arts IS THE WAY TO GO! It always has been!

Only now, Open AI’s CEO, Sam Altman, just announced that his company is about to release an AI model that specialises in creative writing. Sure, it may not be amazing just yet, but what do the Liberal Arts parents push their kids into now?

How do we even begin to predict where this AI thing will go? And what jobs it will replace? Will AI, simply create new kinds of jobs? And how long before AI gives us 14 days to do something, or we cease to exist?

In 2025, many junior coders (programmers, in the old dialect) will be replaced by AI models. As weird as it sounds, companies will have AI coders on the payroll. This is also happening in the field of marketing content (those emails you get incessantly) and PHD level researchers.

This is happening and it won’t stop.

Parents who have young children are likely not to know confidently what to do. Should they let their children pursue their passions, which will change 12.7 times before they’re 16? Or should they carefully nudge their children toward a “safe” career choice?

And in this tiny spec of a moment in human history, what is a safe career choice?

Maybe this will help:

• Parents might consider staying with the STEM idea: where their kids will be focussed on critical thinking and problem solving – encouraging knowledge about how the different forms of AI actually work, a bit of coding, an understanding of data sciences. It’s still very possible the robots will find us valuable collaborators.
  
  
• Encourage them to follow their curiosities – as we know from experience, happiness isn’t always about career and money. It’s about passion. Encourage adaptability and life learning.
  
  
• Ensure they are able to develop their social and emotional intelligence skills – we will always need to teach the robots to be empathetic and nice.
  
  
• Encourage leadership and decision-making skills – leaders are always valued, as will be managers.
  
  
• Inspire a motivation to actually get things done, and the discipline to keep doing things – this is often what separates us humans from the machines.
  
  
• Encourage creativity – just as we still like watching two humans compete at chess (even though the machines have proven they can routinely beat us), we are likely to always appreciate human artistic endeavour.
  
  
• Finally, I was going to say “Encourage future-proof industries” but I honestly don’t know what they will be. Right now, it looks like healthcare, cyber security, green energy, and AI trainers (humans who know how to teach AI models) are good bets, but who knows…

In short, try to ensure that your children are curious, that they realise learning is something they’ll do all their lives, that getting things done will always be valued, and that being adaptable and open-minded will make them wonderful and interesting human beings – wonderful human beings who will find a way in life to be prosperous and happy.

I’m convinced that there will be interesting jobs in our futures, but I’m glad not to be a parent of young children, and to have to figure out what they’ll be! 😅