When I was around ten or twelve years of age, I used my first digital photo editing tool, which was a pirated version of what I think was Photoshop, or something similar. It was on a brother's Amiga 500 and I didn't spend much time with it, since there were also pirated games that were more attractive to a kid. However, I know many people around my age and older, who got their start in their IT careers on cracked software.
I was talking to a client about the lack of specialized welders and their need to import skilled workers from other countries, a large and expensive challenge at these times. One of the questions I asked was what was the average age of the specialized welders, which tended to be a little older. I then asked, how did the specialized welders learn, which was through experience. I added, but you have automated a lot of the basic welding tasks.
This happens in many areas now, where the basic tasks have been automated, which sets up the problem of, can't do the job without experience, can't get experience as there are no jobs to do. In the case of software, a lot of the pirating has been stopped due to cloud access, which means that a child would have to convince a parent to spend significant amounts on what is unlikely to become a hobby. Having the cracked software available, essentially allows experimenters to become enthusiasts, enthusiasts to explore all the way into becoming professionals - people who have to buy a licence.
In Finland, there are very few fast-food jobs for teens, and only holiday work is common these days, yet there are skills and commitment lessons to be able to consistently be employed, even if it is only a short shift or two a week. There is of course the added experience of earning and managing money, scheduling, messing up and going without involved to, as well as the satisfaction associated with being able to buy something with money earned - ownership.
This continual move away from skill development in favor of automation and convenience affects other areas also, including social ability. While I had to learn how to socialize and flirt in order to get a date, "kids today" swipe left or right and that's pretty much that, the understanding is there. This might seem convenient and effective, but the problem is that the process of getting that date and flirting teaches skills in how to build and maintain a relationship past the first date too and without those skills, relationships can struggle.
For example, while a child born today might not need to read and write much in their future, there are other skills that surround or are made possible from the ability. Automating the process might be like teaching a child how to use a calculator instead of basic math, as while they might get the answers, the process becomes a blackbox to them, and the logic that will affect their intuition and decision making on a host of other areas will be affected. Not teaching the fundamentals could mean that vital skills and mental patterns are never learned, which could have profound effects on the child's future.
I personally see that sitting young children down in front of screens for passive entertainment or gaming, could lead to them missing out on various types of mental development, which could severely hamper their potential later. Skipping these basic activities is to discount the skills that are developed by completing them as unnecessary, often by people who have already developed them as they grew up in a time where automation wasn't possible, or encouraged.
The world we have created through innovation and our use of technology is driving how we learn and develop and therefore, the directions we take in life. While we value convenience as it saves us time and energy, we are very poor at evaluating the counterfactual situation where, we didn't automate the processes, we did it the hard way and learned the ropes. When we are conditioned into the automation, we really don't know what we are missing out on and we cannot know how limiting it could be on our future self.
While there has always been diversification of skill based on many factors, there has never been a time in our history where there is a clear distinction between the skilled and unskilled, with the unskilled increasing having less to trade with, as automation replaces them. "Unskilled" might be the wrong term, appropriately skilled might be better. I think that this is creating another divide between social groups, that is further going to create civic unrest and the continued disintegration of community.
While it is hard to know what skills will be valued in the future, whatever they are will likely require early development to build the foundation skills, the precursors to brilliance. I get the sense that whatever those skills will be, the value will be created because they are both in demand and, hard to get, but I could be wrong - it could be that the perfect traits for the future are inexperience, low-motivation, passivity, ill-health, uncoordinated, emotionally unstable and compliant.
These types of people are now and will be increasingly valuable - as Consumers of Things connected by the Internet of Things.
Maybe, we might want to think about being a little basic as a pathway to being very skilled, rather than something to be automated away for convenience.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
