What Should Kids Study For A Robotic And AI Future?

My wife, who rounds in the hospital and teaches, often tells me that if more people really understood what the medical professionals see and what they must do, this just might alter their perspective on how they lead their lives. With real experience often comes better understanding. And yet, when you can’t fully experience something, perhaps the best alternative is to learn from someone who is able to clearly and compellingly teach.

Arriving Today, by distinguished science writer and Wall Street Journal technology columnist Christopher Mims, is one of those books that is able to tell the incredible story of what happens when you order a new USB charger, from the point of origin to the point of delivery, on that UPS truck. Imagine watching a movie where you follow this USB, and as you journey to each new location Christopher teaches you chapter by chapter about the history of technology, the origins of the ideas behind what he sees, the numbers that back them all up, and the stories of the people who are impacted greatly by all of this. No other science writer that I have read uses numbers quite in the way that Christopher does in seeking to help explain the size and scale of the logistical supply chain that exists that brings a single item to our door.

What this book did for me, more than anything else, was open my eyes to where the current robotic and AI technology has already progressed, and how rapidly it will likely change in the future. Over two decades ago I learned about how the cult of efficiency had already overtaken so much of our lives through Robert Kanigel’s The One Best Way. Arriving Today gives us a glimpse of what is already going on behind the scenes and how all the conveniences in our lives come from rapidly expanding robotics and artificial intelligence capabilities coupled with calculated efficiency. It will make you think the next time you click.

This has implications for the future workforce, and perhaps most importantly for how kids today might develop their skills to have a greater likelihood of finding fulfilling employment. The jobs of the future most certainly will not be quite the same as the jobs of today.

Why did you write this book?

I got interested in supply chains because I stumbled into nearly fully-automated warehouses and I thought they were fascinating applications of the kinds of robotics we’d long been promised, but which had never really been delivered. Then my agent suggested I trace the entire supply chain and I thought, well, why not? Smart guy.

How did you use statistics and quantities to tell the story of what goes in to one of our amazon.com orders?

Throughout the book I wanted to justify as many of my assertions as possible with hard numbers from reliable sources. This is a habit that’s been trained into me by my editors at the Journal, so I carried it over to writing this book. Often, the thing I assume is true, going into a reporting project, turns out to be quite a bit different from my first impression of it, and the data are what help show why that’s so. Because global supply chains are so big and so sprawling, I felt it important to quantify as much as possible the scale and speed of things — the size of giant shipping containers, the capacity of every single one of those containers, the speed with which an Amazon warehouse worker must grab things off or put things on shelves, the number of different possibilities UPS’s route optimization algorithms must consider when optimizing their entire network every day. (A number of possibilities far greater than the number of atoms in the universe, it turns out.)

What should I encourage my kids to study for a future with rapidly improving Artificial Intelligence and Robotics?

“Learn to code” used to be the mantra, but the truth is that in a world with more and more optimization, being flexible and having a variety of skills turns out to be more important. Independence, problem solving, self-confidence, grit, robustness in the face of failure — I believe that more than ever, the skills kids need to learn are traits we might call personality characteristics, but which can after all be learned.

Beyond that, everyone needs a grounding in the basics, and that includes a reasonable facility with mathematics, but also the ability to communicate and problem solve with others. The new liberal arts, you might call it. (Which happen to be all the fields that the Greeks and Medieval scholars once called the liberal arts, back when geometry, mathematics and music were seen as of a piece with the rest of the subjects we now consider the liberal arts.)