To make something good of the future, you have to look the present in the face.
| Simone de Beauvoir
Making A Dangerous Bet
Some aspects of forecasting are straightforward. Consider this recent news, reported by Dana Goldstein:
The reading skills of American high school seniors are the worst they have been in three decades.
When I read that, a chill ran down my spine.
Reading the tea leaves in such a case isn’t very hard work. These now-seniors are soon to be workers or college students, and they will be hindered in their careers or academic pursuits by poor reading skills, with the impacts potentially lasting for the rest of their lives.
US ‘policy’ (if you want to call such a dismal plan a ‘policy’) at the present is to move away from participating in the green wave, and instead of creating a demand for a well-educated workforce engaged in a revolution as large as the first industrial revolution, we instead are attempting to build A.I. to intentionally reduce future jobs for these Americans, and the world as a whole.
I will leave it to educators and psychologists for a forensic analysis of what’s gone wrong. The pandemic, rising smartphone use, AI chatbots, increasing disengagement and discouragement: all of these factors likely contributed.
However, I would like to make an economic observation. The US economic system is involved in a massive bet, as David Wallace-Wells recently characterized it [emphasis mine]:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to workfutures.io to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.