What should I encourage my 2-year-old to focus on academically? I don't think white collar jobs will exist in 25 years.
1. I know this is a hard projection to make, but I'd say it depends considerably on what you think his or her intelligence level will be in 20 years.
When my eldest son was 3, I started teaching him math and science. In particular, we enjoyed a great game called Crazy Machines 2, which was almost a primer for engineering design. But I was anticipating that he would be brilliant because he has good genes for intelligence and already he was showing precociousness at that age. Well, he developed. He's not gotten a grade lower than a 4.0 in his life, and that has continued at U of M this year. He will be studying computer engineering with a minor or double major in physics, with an eye to quantum computing.
Well, not everyone can do quantum mechanics, or get a straight 4.0. For instance, one of my twins struggles with math. He's the only person in my extended family who isn't good at math; it's probably his autism. What he loves is voice acting -- he's really scary good at impersonations for being 10 years old (he can do a killer Bane, which is a fucking hard accent to do). He also wants to be an author. So will college be worth it for him? I'm not sure, and I'm not sure what he would study. I suspect voice acting jobs (and acting jobs in general) will be relatively resilient to AI, so that's good, but I don't have a clear sense of how you get to that career. It's not my experience.
2. What I would do with a 2 year old is start the kid on math and science at a very young age, the most that they can handle. You'd be surprised what a little kid can do if you set high expectations and offer support. Well, that's my experience, though as noted my eldest son is unusually gifted. Still, get a game like Turing Complete, or Space Chem, or one of any number of factory building games, and play the game with the kid. Those are too advanced for a 2 year old or even a 4 year old, but can a 5 year old learn digital logic? I think so.
Kids' brains are especially plastic at a young age. If you start teaching them math and science, it wires their brain to make those concepts completely intuitive. I taught my son Bayesian Probability when he was four, and it's now the easiest thing in the world for him.
3. And keep in mind the competition. A Yale Law professor tells a story of going on a hike with his eight year old daughter. He asked her how many hikes have they gone on. She initially said two, but revised to 1 with a standard deviation of about one and a half. Age 8. That's your kids' competition, and I worry that increasingly the economy is going to be winner take all. The world will become divided between those who make the robots, and those who work for the robots, and I know which side of that coin I'd like to be on. Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to do that.
Biggest point, I think: you need to be involved in your kids' education. If you look at the bios of a lot of the big tech players, you'll often see a professor. That makes sense: professors both a) have a lot of time on their hands and b) are good at teaching (and are quite smart). They start molding their kids at an early age. Sometimes they should pay more attention to ethics than they do (e.g. Sam Bankman-Friend), but anyway -- again, that's the competition. If you aren't a professor it might be harder for you, but if you want your kid to succeed, it's important to start being involved now. Like really involved.
If all of this intimidates you . . . well, it intimidates most people. I don't make the rules; I just play the game.
Note also that college admissions are crazy. My son, the valedictorian with a 4.0 GPA and 5s on every AP exam he took (6 exams; 5 courses) and who got As in the math classes he was taking at the local university as a senior, was accepted to University of Michigan and nowhere else but safety schools. Got wait listed at Carnegie Mellon and Cornell. CORNELL! That used to be a safety school. Got flat rejected at MIT and Princeton. His SAT scores were not the best but they were 1560 or so, which is about median for MIT.
In other words, better get cranking on college application stuff starting in middle school, if not earlier. Planning for college is a decades long job now.
, a really thoughtful piece by a guy who is also super close to what’s happening:
www.dwarkesh.com
