Comment by jacquesm
13 hours ago
To be adaptive. That's going to be the most valuable skill going forward, to be able to adapt to any and all circumstances that may come your way because it is going to be a rough ride for at least the next decade and possibly much longer than that.
I'm in the same boat as the author, have four kids and I struggle with keeping them motivated and this has been my anchor so far.
That's always been an important skill (at least in the last couple hundred years as far as I can tell).
Industrial revolution, the shift from manufacturing to services, the shift of technology over time.
Hell, they say that the reason millennials are so nostalgic and enjoy childish things is because of rapid technological and societal change in the last 30 years.
I doubt it'll slow down, the era of doing anything until you die was a foolish thing for even our grandparents generation.
That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree. In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture. It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels. Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
> That’s really not a teachable skilled to any real degree.
I strongly disagree with that.
> In my opinion, that heavily depends on your personality and depends significantly more on nature than nurture.
Nature has set us up to be amongst the most adaptive creatures on the planet. I think only the rats and the microbes have us beat. We are everywhere. One of the things that struck me while traveling the world and visiting some pretty out-of-the-way places is that there were always people living there as if it was perfectly normal.
> It’s also basically a tacit approval of dabbling in a field, or having a shallow knowledge of many fields, something I think the world will move further away from the more broad shallow tasks that AI will be able to accomplish at human levels.
Why would it have to be shallow? If you spend your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
> Teaching adaptability is basically a version of throwing up your hands and saying I don’t know what to do.
Not really, but again, you are welcome to that opinion, I just don't share it.
The time when a single skill would get you from the cradle to the grave is over and done with. And probably has been for a while but it is going to be much more fractured going forward.
I’ve done okay with my single skill (IT expert). It may be a bit broader than what some would call a skill, though :)
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> Why would it have to be shallow? If you spent your time wisely you can easily pick up more than a shallow knowledge about multiple fields. Yes, it is work. So what.
Because when you ground this in reality, if you spend 3 to 5 years in a field and moved to another field and spend 3 to 5 years in that from a monetary perspective, you are always going to be a junior you are going to spend your entire life doing low-level tasks and getting paid at low levels.
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