Our View of The Future
We all want what is best for our children. We make decisions every day, both large and small, believing we are setting them on a path for future success. An enormous amount of time is spent thinking about how to discipline, what schools to attend, afterschool classes to take, finding friends, and being happy. If you Google "parenting," there are over 346 million entries with advice, blogs, scientific studies, workshops, and books from nearly every perspective. We believe there is one perspective that is missing from the literature and parenting discussions that are key in developing strong, resilient children well prepared for the future.
For the first time in history, the future is unfolding at an accelerated pace of change across many domains that demand people hold different skills than are required today. Historically, everything changes, but in the past, it did so at a slower pace. Consequently, it was much easier to absorb, predict, and plan accurately for essential future skills, education, and opportunities.
While experts can't foresee precisely what will happen in the next decades, they are predicting profound changes to how we live our lives, how we work, how we interact, how we use leisure time, how we learn, and our ability to lead happy purpose-driven lives. In this age of acceleration, entire environments are being altered so quickly we haven’t had time to reshape our businesses, communities, leadership, schools, societies, and ethical choices.
Successful businesses see these changes and are investing heavily in preparing their products and services and their workplaces to take advantage of the changes coming our way. Many schools are trying to pivot their pedagogy, instruction, and curriculum to prepare students with the necessary skills.
New technologies, along with the ability to scale quickly are what drives these changes. Technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), augmented reality (AR), autonomous vehicles, the Internet of things (IoT), Blockchain, Cryptocurrencies, and robotics. These technologies are creating a radical change in human communications and experiences by closing the gap between physical worlds and the digital realm. We are entering an era where relationships between humans and machines are taking on a new meaning.
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The World Economic Forum predicts that by 2020 a loss of 5 million jobs worldwide due to the use of artificial intelligence (Future Jobs Report 2018, World Economic Forum)
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85% of the jobs that today's learners will hold in 2030 have not been invented yet (Institute for the Future & Dell Technologies. The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships, 2017)
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Futurist Martin Ford maintains 75% of occupations we know today will disappear by the end of the century (https://mfordfuture.com/about/)
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We do not entirely understand the problems these new technologies will create, let alone how to solve them.
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In the next decade, we will see the emergence of human-machine partnerships and human-machine teams (Institute for the Future & Dell Technologies. The Next Era of Human-Machine Partnerships, 2017)
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By 2022 everyone will need an extra 101 days of learning (Future Jobs Report 2018, World Economic Forum)
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The genetics revolution will allow us to reprogram our own biology (Singularity)
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The robotics revolution will allow us to create a greater than human non-biological intelligence (Singularity)
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“As strangeness becomes the new normal, your past experiences, as well as the past experiences of the whole of humanity, will become less reliable guides. Humans as individuals and humankind as a whole will increasingly have to deal with things nobody ever encountered before, such as super-intelligent machines, engineered bodies, algorithms that can manipulate emotions with uncanny precision, rapid man-made climate cataclysms, and the need to change your profession every decade.” (singularity)
Far too little understanding and discussions are taking place on what these changes mean in day to day life, in how we need to adapt and how to prepare oneself with the necessary skills to navigate these new worlds. Few are talking about these changes. Even fewer are talking about how to parent and raise children that will be prepared and resilient. Most individuals, families, and communities are not monitoring these technological changes and will not be positioned to take advantage of future opportunities. In order to create a better future in light of the technological changes coming our way, we need to understand the changes and how our choices today will prepare our children, families, and communities for the future. Thomas Frey, a popular futurist speaker, has a thought-provoking point of view on how we create the future.
“The future creates the present!” Yes, this is just the opposite of what most people think. They believe the work we’re doing today will automatically create the future, but from a little different perspective, it is the images of the future that we hold in our head that determines the decisions we’ll make today.
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