In his keynote at the KPMG Tech and Innovation Summit, Jason Calacanis shared a slide about millennials, gen z, and their love of gambling. These are the kids who sit at a basketball game but have their eyes glued to their phones the entire time, making bet after bet; they're the kids in the basement trading memestocks for lulz. When secure jobs are a joke and the housing market is out of reach, why not just embrace nihilism and bet the farm?
It's a dark take, but not necessarily an incorrect one. Despite proclamations about the strength of the economy, I know tons of people who are out of work right now -- and they all have top tier educations and glowing resumes. And if someone with an Ivy degree and a shelf full of honors is out in the cold right now, how can a regular person get ahead? Add to that growing concerns about mass displacement due to technology, and it's no wonder that the vibes are off.
The event featured a lot of excitement and optimism about emerging technology, and that's a stance I tend to agree with -- but my excitement is starting to become tempered. It has nothing to do with the tech, and everything to do with the fact that lots of humans are going to go through radical changes in the next decades -- and many simply won't accept them.
I was at a family wedding over the weekend, chatting with a guest, and asked what she was up to recently. She'd lost her job recently, and rather than looking for a new one, or retraining, or upskilling, or going to the gym, or finding a new hobby, she's just...hanging out and watching Netflix. Her husband works and can support them, but it was a wake up call for me, an almost psychotically driven person -- most people, at the end of the day, just aren't that motivated to learn and change.
Unfortunately, the future is all about learning and changing and growing. They key skill we need to start teaching kids and retraining adults on has nothing to do with math or coding or emotional intelligence -- it's the need to make sure people curious and intrinsically motivated. That's a trait often found more in developing markets, and as the economy becomes ever more global, people in the US and Europe are going to fall behind.
We need to train a generation of new workers who look at a headset and think about all the ways it can solve problems and improve their work. We need to train a new generation to look at AI and ask themselves "how can I be better than this machine?" We need to train a new generation to realize that education doesn't stop when you finish school, and that continuous learning is the path forward. And we need to do it now.
Much of the toxicity in our current political climate has roots in the fact that people weren't upskilled and retrained early enough. When car factories started closing in the seventies, unions fought for people to be paid to do nothing, not to retrain or relocate. When timber industries shut down in the Pacific Northwest, it was convenient to blame spotted owls, rather than the timber companies that wanted a cheaper labor force in Brazil.
AI and spatial computing can solve so many of these challenges, from helping people learn more quickly to providing paths to new work. It's up to those of us working in the space to tie all this together and help the next generation of workers before it's too late.