What every parent MUST know about the AI Generation

Hello and welcome to the Life Without School podcast. Here to help you and your children live the life you want to, not just the one you're told you should. I'm Izzy, a home educating dad from New Zealand. If you're enjoying this podcast and want weekly episodes just like this one, go to StarkGravingDadblog.com and make sure I have your email address. I share a new episode to my full Life Without School collection every single week. Thank you so much for tuning in today. Let's do this.

For all of human history, childhood has been a time of preparation for an adulthood you can see and understand and picture yourself living. Whether you were learning to hunt or farm, apprentice in a trade, work the family business or study your way toward a profession, the arc you needed to follow was always clear. You could look ahead and see the kind of adult you were likely to become. You could picture the work you'd do, the way life would look, the shape it would take.

Things would always get more modern, of course, but between your childhood and your adulthood, they didn't change all that much. Not really. If you were a child in ancient Mesopotamia or in feudal Japan or during the Industrial Revolution or in the suburban sprawl of the nineteen eighties, you could see the shape of your future reflected in the adults around you. That has been true for every generation in human history. Until right now.

Because now, for the first time in our history, children are growing up without a future they can clearly see, without a clear picture of what they're actually preparing for. The arc, the bridge that connects from childhood to adulthood, is gone. This is the impact AI has made on the world.

We're at a very significant turning point, one that anyone in the software or technology industry can see very clearly right now, but one that is not being taken seriously enough yet, least of all by a formal education system. So as someone with a platform like this that a lot of parents listen to, and as someone with access to behind the technology curtain that can sometimes feel a bit inaccessible and mysterious,

I believe I have a responsibility to try and lift some awareness of what the coming years are going to look like for our children. And when I mean lift awareness, I mean we need to take the vast majority of parents from having maybe a vague awareness of AI and what's going to happen, to a much deeper understanding of the impact it's going to make on our children's lives. Because right now, the vast majority are in the dark.

I took a poll on Instagram and Facebook that was responded to by thousands of what are highly invested parents, and only twelve percent said that they feel they're totally across where AI is at and what kind of change we might see in the world. About half said they have a kind of fringe awareness of all this, but nothing very deep. And then thirty five percent, comfortably over a third, said that they really didn't have much of an awareness of this at all.

So let's call it what it is. eighty eight percent of parents in this particular poll from my audience who do not have a deep enough understanding of how the world is about to change in order to guide their children into it with confidence.

So I won't get so dramatic that I'll say this feels like an emergency episode, but it certainly feels urgent. Because it's highly likely that that poll I took is reflective of the broader population, and maybe it's skewed even more heavily towards not really having an awareness. I I need you to understand that I don't say any of what I'm going to say today lightly.

If you've listened to any episodes of this podcast before, you will know that I am not a rash, reactive human. I put a lot of value in being considered and reasonable and rational and calm. And so when I say that I'm extremely worried about how unprepared the current generation of children are to take on the world we're leaving behind for them, I'm saying it from that position. And I am worried.

My two younger children are five and ten. I think a lot about the world they're going to walk into, about what their twenties might look like, about what kind of life might be waiting for them. And you know what? I can't see it. I cannot picture it. I, like you, was raised with a certainty about the future. Not perfect certainty, but direction. I knew that if I followed certain pathways, there would be a structure on the other side that would hold me.

A place to step into, a way to earn a living, to participate, to contribute, to belong. But that structure is changing so quickly now. Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of work as we know it. Entire industries are being reshaped. Traditional employment is starting to erode. Even the very idea of employment is starting to erode. And if that sounds crazy, just listen through this episode and see where you stand on it by the end.

All the wonderful things we were taught to aim for job security, linear careers, predictable professional paths, those ladders we get onto and then climb, are all going to reduce and in many, many cases completely vanish. And yet we're still preparing children as if the arc, as if that bridge from childhood to adulthood is just the same as it's always been. We're still walking them through an educational model built for a future that simply does not exist anymore.

Make no mistake, today's children are walking towards a future that doesn't resemble anything we've ever seen. And so the question becomes if the world is changing faster than we can even predict, what exactly are we preparing our children for? What on earth should we, as parents living through this era, do to help our children get ready for this new world?

So I I want to look at a few things today. I want to give you a sense of where AI is at right now, what it's capable of, and what kind of things it's already starting to do and replace. Then I want to give you what I believe is a fairly conservative view of what the world is going to look like within the next ten years, which for most of us is when our kids are going to be somewhere in those early working years of their twenties.

Then finally, I'll throw around a few ideas for what education should look like as of now. Right now. As home educating parents, we don't have to stay tied to the glacially slow formal system. Because regardless of what happens, I can promise you the current generation of children going through school are going to be the most underprepared and disadvantaged twenty year olds in human history.

Before we start, I just want to say it again, as clearly as I can. I'm not scaremongering here. I'm not just jumping on the AI bandwagon as clickbait. I live and work in this space professionally. I know a lot of people who live and work in this space professionally. And I am acutely aware that most parents are miles away from being as informed as they should be on the change that's already happening. So my goal here today is to change that.

To have you listen through and leave with a sense of Well, maybe a bit of shock, but also empowerment in what you can best do to support your children through their younger years, then their teenage years, and then into young adulthood in a whole new world. So if you're feeling brave and ready to explore this with me, then let's do it.

Part one. Where is AI at as of right now? It's very easy to think all this talk about AI and job disruption as still a conversation about the future. Something that's down the track a bit, something we'll have time to figure out when we get there. But that's not what's happening. That moment was five years ago. This isn't something that's coming one day. It's here. We're living inside the shift right now. It's just that most people haven't realized how fast the ground is moving beneath them.

So let me put this as plainly and as clearly as I can. Right now, artificial intelligence is supporting human work so effectively across so many jobs, roles and professions, that it's now starting to replace the very people that it was helping just a couple of years ago. We already have systems that can write high performing marketing copy faster and more competently than most humans. Draft and revise contracts, legal filings, and financial reports.

summarize dense research papers and explain them so well that a child could understand them. Generate original art, design branding assets and build entire websites from scratch. Analyze blood work, interpret scans and draft medical notes. Respond to customer service requests with human-sounding nuance and empathy. Plan, publish, and optimize full scale end to end advertising campaigns. Create original music, video, essays, lesson plans, even emotional support scripts for therapy bots.

Not in theory, in practice, in businesses all over the world today, right now. Now, if you're sitting here thinking, Yeah, but I've used ChatGPT to edit something for me, or Gemini to write my emails, or some other AI tool to do some other thing, and you're thinking, Okay, it's it's pretty good, but I can't see how it's going to replace jobs. Then there's something really important you need to understand. Please do not fall for that trap.

Because everything I've just listed is still mostly about AI being a tool, something we use, something we guide, something that has made people better in their roles, more efficient, faster, and all those good things. But there's a big difference between using AI to support human work and using it to replace the human entirely, right? That's the jump most of us can't see very clearly, and so we aren't quite as worried about it.

But this technology is, right now, as we speak, crossing into that new space. One where these AI tools are being developed into what's called AI agents. And this is where the risk of human replacement has become totally inevitable for a vast number of jobs we've always just taken for granted.

If you've never heard this AI agent term before, get used to it, and here's the simplest way to understand it. Most AI tools up to this point have been like very clever assistants. You give them a task, they give you a result. They wait for you to act, to ask them things, to prompt them. You're still in the driver's seat, deciding what to do, when to do it, and ultimately how to interpret the outcome. But an agent is not designed to just complete a single task.

It's designed to be given a goal and then to figure out what it needs to do to complete it. It's designed to make its own decisions, to take multiple steps, as many as it needs to, to loop through thinking and decision making processes on its own. to find and utilize whatever tools it needs to execute on completing that goal. It doesn't need to be told exactly what to do. Once it knows what its goal is, it will figure out how to get there.

It doesn't need to be told how to do things. You just tell it what you need. And then it gets there. You can spin up an AI agent right now and give it a goal like build me a website that sells eco-friendly dog toys. And it will write the code, design the branding, set up a Shopify store, generate the product descriptions, and write a launch campaign using tools like Figma, Stripe for payments, Zapier to connect things in Canva all by itself.

Or you could ask it to summarize this two hundred page court case and highlight relevant precedent for a new brief. Agents can now scan legal databases, extract precedent, highlight key decisions, and flag contradictory rulings, tasks that would usually take a junior associate or paralegal hours, maybe even days. This is something already in use by legal firms. Or maybe it's take these patient voice notes and turn them into a structured medical report.

And it will extract key symptoms, generate an SOAP note, check medication interactions, and prep the summary for the doctor review, a process already being used by clinicians. Or maybe it's review last year's expenses, categorize them for tax purposes and generate a draft return.

And it will pull bank fee data, scan for anomalies, categorize transactions using rules, apply deductions, and output a tax report fully ready for a final review by an accountant. Again, something already in use by accounting firms. This is about autonomous software agents. acting like they are an intern, a marketer, a coder, designer, analyst, researcher, legal assistant, accountant, medical scribe, HR coordinator, project manager, the list will go on and on.

And are getting faster, more accurate and more capable.

This is the key shift. Most of us just aren't giving enough weight. Because once you give a machine a goal, launch this product, plan this campaign, write this code, fix this bug, summarize this research. And it can break that goal into tasks itself, choose the tools it needs to get it done, and run through them without you. You just don't need a person sitting in that chair anymore. where you used to need ten people, maybe now you just need one or two.

Again, this is not a theoretical one day in the future thing. It's already happening. So please understand that all this AI stuff is not about ChatGPT writing an email for you. It's about entire job functions being carried out, start to finish, by programs that think, plan, act, and improve themselves without needing to be watched. That's the line we're crossing right now.

So if AI agents are already capable of launching products, writing legal briefs, compiling tax reports, and drafting medical notes, Is it really that hard to imagine that in ten years they'll be monitoring patient health in real time and adjusting treatment plans without a doctor's input? Running entire logistics networks from port to doorstep without human dispatch? Overseeing farm operations with drone surveillance and precision automation.

Optimizing energy usage across cities without a team of engineers, running full scale construction projects from blueprint to build, and handling financial planning for thousands of clients simultaneously. And if you bring robotics into the picture, the shift becomes even more tangible.

We're talking about machines that don't just think, they physically act. Machines that can stock shelves, prepare food, deliver parcels, clean buildings, assist in surgeries, care for the elderly, build homes, manage warehouses. Machines that don't get tired, don't need wages, and don't stop for lunch. When the cognitive power of AI is paired with the physical capability of robotics, there are very few industries that remain untouched.

This is not science fiction as much as it sounds like it. It is already underway. And in another decade, it's hard to imagine a single sector on the planet that hasn't been reshaped by it. Now, I know, I know it's easy to hear all of this and think, sure, but seriously, this is decades away. That is absolutely science fiction, especially this robotic stuff. But you need to understand that it is not. This is not a vision of 2050 or 60 or 70. It is happening right now.

Amazon already runs fully automated warehouses where robotic arms pick, sort, and pack goods, all guided by AI systems, not humans, that optimize routes in real time. In fast food chains across the US and Asia, robotic arms are cooking fries, flipping burgers, and serving customers, not in some prototype test mode, but in live, daily operations.

In hospitals, robotic assistants are transporting supplies, prepping surgical tools, and even already performing ultra precise microsurgeries under the direction of human surgeons. In aged care facilities, robots are being used to help residents dress, take medication, and even reduce loneliness through social interaction. And in Japan, autonomous construction robots are

uh I'm totally serious, are laying bricks, pouring concrete, and inspecting work sites. They are replacing what used to be teams of skilled tradespeople. This is not speculative. These are not just lab tests. These are functioning systems already reducing the need for human workers today. And we're still very early. Give it five years, ten at the most, and none of this will feel like science fiction anymore. It will feel like daily life.

And at that point, we're not just talking about a few job categories being affected. We are looking at the dismantling of entire sectors of human labour. Across medicine, transport, agriculture, education, infrastructure, finance, you name it. them all shrinking under the weight of systems that can operate faster, cheaper, and probably more reliably than any of us ever could. If you talk to any CEO at any forward thinking company, pick an industry, pick a place in the world, anywhere.

Chances are they will tell you they're working hard to figure out how AI agents can replace human workers at scale. And the moment these tools can perform at the level of a competent employee in whatever the role it is, which maybe is a few years away, sure, but it might literally be twelve months away, companies will start making that shift as quickly as they can.

Why? Because humans are expensive. They need salaries, time off, management, support, healthcare, laptops, offices, HR departments. AI doesn't need any of that. Once it works, it just works. twenty four seven, no overhead, no burnout, no salary negotiations. It is clear and obvious that millions of people's jobs. I was gonna say could, but it's more likely will cease to exist in a relatively short period of time.

And yes, past technological advancements have wiped away a lot of jobs at different times in our history, but we need to be very clear that we have never seen anything like this. Because those past transformations, from the Industrial Revolution to the Internet Age, happened over decades. They gave society time to adapt. They eliminated certain roles, sure, but they also created new ones at the same kind of pace.

When the typewriter disappeared, it was because the computer replaced it, and with it came a need for operators, IT support, systems architects, designers, engineers, all the rest. But this this is different. Because artificial intelligence isn't replacing a task or a tool. It's stepping into the the cognitive realm, into jobs that were once considered too complex, too human to automate. And it's not going to do it over decades, but over a series of years, m even months.

And the other difference is that it's not just the speed, it's the bridge. Every other major technological shift in history has hit a relatively narrow band of industries at first. agriculture, manufacturing, clerical work, whatever it was. The people affected were usually in specific roles, in specific sectors, doing specific types of repetitive or manual tasks. But this This is horizontal. It's not targeting one industry, it's sweeping across all of them.

Law, medicine, education, design, finance, software, marketing, journalism, logistics, customer support. This list could be a thousand things long. It will be touched by AI. It's not starting with low skill or entry-level work. It's eating into high-paid, high-status, university trained professions. The very roles we have always held up as safe, respectable, and worth aiming for.

And that's what makes this moment so different. Because when disruption comes for everyone, not just a few industries, not just one type of worker. We can't just shift people around the economy and expect everything to keep running. There's nowhere left to move to. Let me make this a bit more tangible. A month ago, in May twenty twenty five, Microsoft laid off six thousand people.

That's three percent of its entire global workforce gone in one pass, and you better believe that's just the beginning. As part of that, Microsoft CEO has said that 30% of the company's code is now written by AI. How long before that? Seventy percent, eighty percent, effectively a hundred percent.

How long before that 6,000 people becomes 60,000 people? A hundred thousand people, gone from one company? And do you think those people will be able to apply for roles within other technology companies? Or are all those other companies downsizing their human head counts in the same way? Where do those people go now? IBM have just replaced hundreds of HR roles with AI agents capable of handling tasks like vacation requests and pay statements. Walmart is cutting fifteen hundred corporate jobs.

Not as a cost saving move, but as part of their quite clearly signalled shift towards automation and AI. They're streamlining operations, they're rolling out robotic systems, and increasingly using artificial intelligence to manage everything from inventory to ad campaigns. It's not just retail work changing, it's the corporate engine behind it.

GeoLingo have gone through layoffs recently, and they've come straight out and said that they were directly tied to the adoption of AI. Tasks that used to require human writers and translators are now being handled by large language models. CrowdStrike, a big Texas based cybersecurity firm, cut five hundred jobs, five percent of its workforce, citing what they call a market and technology inflection point.

Those words are kind of blunt, but they're accurate. AI is shaping every industry and they're just restructuring accordingly. Mark Zuckerberg recently said that in twenty twenty five that's this year. Meta and other companies like them working on this will have AI that can operate at the level of a mid level engineer, not junior. It will write and ship complex code contributing far beyond what a junior employee ever could. In his words, this will reduce the need for humans to do that work.

And shortly after he spoke about that, Meta announced that it was shrinking its workforce by five percent. That's close to four thousand people gone. Again, what other tech company is going to hire them? Most people familiar with what's going on in this space will tell you something that's honestly kind of hard to hear and almost equally hard to believe, but we have to listen to it.

AI could replace half of all global entry level white collar jobs within the next five years. Five years? And the scale of our children's lives, that's effectively tomorrow. And what does it look like in ten?

Now, to keep drawing this line through, there are two other things we really need to get our heads around. The first is that the jobs being replaced are not the ones we thought were at risk, or would assume were most at risk. It's not just factory lines and cash registers and repetitive manual work. It's not just low-skilled, low-paid jobs.

It's the jobs that for the past fifty, sixty, seventy years we've been telling our children to aim for the ones that come with university degrees, the ones that are supposed to mean security, stability, access to a middle class life. Did you know that the highest paying job in the US is an anethetist? They train for over a decade. They're responsible for those critical seconds between life and death and surgery. And they are predicted to be replaced by machines quite soon.

Not not all anethetists will be replaced, of course. We'll need human oversight there for a long time yet, hopefully a long, long time. But we just won't need as many. You might have one working alongside and monitoring five very capable machines instead of a team of six people. If AI can step into that role, as it's very clearly predicted to do, what exactly do we think is off limit?

And the second thing is that entire rungs of the career ladder are vanishing, the most significant of those being the very first rung. Entry level roles, the ones that used to let a young person get a foot in the door, learn on the job and prove themselves, are being absolutely swallowed by AI. Customer support, junior marketing, legal research, assistant roles, data entry, editing internships.

These were the gateways. They gave young people a way to move from education into the working world. But now, in field after field, industry after industry, those gateways are being closed. AI doesn't need an intern. It doesn't need some junior to shadow and learn. It doesn't need a graduate looking to build experience. It just gets the task and does it.

Which means the very structure we've told kids to climb, study hard, go to university, start at the bottom and work your way up, no longer exists. Many CEOs already are asking their teams to tell them why the more junior role they want to hire someone to fill can't just be performed by AI. It needs to be justified. And often the answer will come back as, oh actually we've worked out it can be done by AI. So then often the CEO will say, Well then do that.

That's the lens now in a lot of companies, and that is very quickly becoming the norm. And hey, just to qualify this further, I work in this space. I'm head of go to market for a software company, which means I run the sales, marketing, customer success, and customer support functions and teams. And a good deal of my headspace right now, and our CEOs who I work very closely with, is how I scale those functions with as few people as possible.

It honestly feels quite strange to do that, but now that we have this technology available, it just makes commercial sense. We want a profitable business and the biggest cost in most businesses is its salary bill. It's paying people. So if we can have a smaller team building a bigger business, that's what we'll do.

I did a similar thing for another software company from twenty thirteen to twenty twenty one, and back then the way we grew was through headcount. To scale we had to have more people sitting in seats and doing the various jobs we needed done. But now, just four years on from wrapping up that journey, that is no longer the case. And those four years have been the very early days of AI, not the exponentially more advanced state we'll find ourselves in in another few years.

And as cold and heartless as some of this might sound, we need to look at this from a commercial perspective, because that's how every company on the planet is going to approach this. A machine won't forget. It won't need breaks. It won't miss or push back on deadlines. It won't call in sick. It doesn't care about meaning or purpose or work-life balance. It doesn't struggle to leave its baggage at the door because it doesn't have any baggage.

It just does what it's asked, instantly, at scale, and doesn't stop until it gets it done. So when we walk our children through an education system designed to train them for the world we're used to, we're asking them to become good at things technology has already mastered.

And it's only a matter of time before it's mastered almost any professional skill you can think of at a level way beyond what any of us could perform them at. And all of this is going to accelerate at a pace that takes us all by surprise. If we don't pause right now and work hard to see this very clearly, and to stop pushing our children through a model that is built for an entirely different world, then we are actively setting them up to fail. They will hit their twenties feeling all at sea.

I guess the main point I want to make here is that no most jobs haven't been replaced by AI yet. Most people on the planet are still just heading off to work this week like they always have done. So is this really as full on and imminent as what I'm making it sound? To which my question back would be, based on everything you've just heard, would you bet on things still being the same in ten years? Five years? Even two years?

Most experts say it will be nothing like the world of today, unrecognizable. And for what it's worth, I absolutely agree with them. If this episode is resonating and you're finding this podcast helpful, I release one like it every single week inside my complete Life Without School collection.

These are highly focused, research-backed episodes that speak directly to the questions and challenges home educating families face. They're designed to help you build an approach that actually works for your unique family. It's a page subscription because that's what helps me keep doing this work, supporting families around the world through something grounded, well researched, thoughtful and genuinely useful every week.

But it's pretty low cost and it's easy to cancel anytime. So if this feels like the kind of support you could use every week, jump over to startgravingdadblog.com and make sure you're signed up to get my emails. That's where I send them out every week and that's where you'll be able to join the complete collection. I'll also link directly to it in the show notes for this episode, right there on my website.

Someone recently shared this about the collection and I just wanted to pass it along because it's really neat. They said For anyone on the fence, Izzy's episodes are pure magic. He's a huge reason that I had the courage to take the homeschool leap and he's the encouraging voice in my ear along the way. Best thing I ever signed up for. I love hearing that so so much. And with that said, let's get back to this episode.

Part 2. What will the world look like in 10 years? Okay, so again, I don't want to skiermonger here. I'm working hard to stay rational and grounded because that's just who I am. I do not buy into hype. But at the same time, I strongly believe we need to start looking forward very seriously at the way things might be about to change. So let's take stock and feel out where things might land. Actually, in my view, are pretty likely to land.

If AI is already replacing high-paying roles, swallowing entry-level ones, and displacing the very people we've raised our children to become, Where does that road lead? What does the world look like when today's five or ten year olds enthood? Well, first, the main one. And hear me out. The whole concept of the forty hour work week is going to die.

Not because we've finally reached a point where balance and well being are prioritized, though I wish that were the reason, but because full time employment is going to become economically unnecessary for companies to engage in. We are entering a world where it simply won't take as many people to run a business anymore. In some industries and countries it'll happen gradually, in others it's already moving fast.

But across the board, what we're seeing is the steady and almost certainly soon to be quite sudden, breakdown of the structures that once held up stable long term work. Permanent contracts, predictable hours, benefits, career progression, job security. AI agents will confidently and comfortably handle what used to be done by full teams marketing, design, finance, customer support, legal, product development, HR, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Instead of fifty or a hundred people in-house, a founder might use five or ten people, and then a network of tools and agents and maybe some freelancers here and there. Even in industries that once felt safe, education, healthcare, software, journalism, logistics, the same pattern is unfolding. More automation, fewer humans.

And as this becomes normal, and as the cost saving and efficiency benefits start stacking up for businesses, you better believe it will, the need for all the costs and management of having to carry full-time employment of very large teams will seem crazy. So instead of hiring full time staff, They'll have a few full time staff, but they'll contract a freelancer for two weeks for a specific project. They'll spin up AI agents to run certain tasks in entire areas of their business.

And they'll pay a relatively low, flat monthly fee for a set of tools that do a bunch of amazing things for them. Most businesses in the very near future will no longer need to hire large groups of people to grow. Like I said, the business I work for is in that headspace as we speak. We're asking ourselves, how do we grow a business to the size of something that would have needed 500 people just a few years ago with just 30 of us?

That's not a small shift. Yes, we still need people to be employed, but so many less. It's a total redefinition of how work fits into society and who gets to participate.

And that shift, that huge reduction in human demand, is what makes the entire structure of traditional employment unsustainable. The idea that you would train for a single career, work a consistent job for a consistent company, and exchange your time for predictable pay for forty hours a week, for forty years and then retire is being dismantled right before our eyes.

And in its place, we're quite seriously looking at a very different world. I mean, it just has to be different, right? Even if we suddenly had a need for just twenty percent less employees, that's a seismic shift. Think of the tens of millions of people that represents. And most people are saying that kind of number is conservative as we get into the two thousand thirty. So we could have this scenario where we have a major mix of both underemployment and unemployment.

Where millions of people may still be working, but where we have overqualified adults doing gig tasks, freelancing, part-time roles that barely cover their life costs, and they've got to bundle a bunch of those together to make it work. Simply because the jobs that once offered decent pay, long term growth and security just don't exist anymore, or at least not enough of them. And in that kind of space, governments will have no choice but to respond in some way.

Because when large swathes of the population are no longer earning enough to spend, contribute, or pay taxes in meaningful ways, the entire economy falters. Consumer spending drops, demand dries up, social unrest, of course, builds. Governments can't ignore that. They will have to step in. In some places it's almost certain that we'll see, and I know this sounds crazy, but This is what most experts are starting to talk about.

We'll have ideas like the universal basic income, regular payments to citizens, not as a welfare stopgap, but as a structural foundation of life. Maybe reshape tax systems, where companies that deploy AI at scale are sh are expected to fund the societies that they no longer hire from. Because as you can imagine, those running the AI companies will hold all the aces, financial and more.

And potentially a really interesting cultural pivot, where success is no longer measured by what you earn, but by what you contribute, create, or care for. It's also highly likely that we'll see the rise of what some are calling a post work economy, not meaning that no one works, but that paid employment is no longer the central organizing structure of adult life. And hey, that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, there's a version of this future where humans finally have more time.

More space to create, connect, raise their children, support their communities, all that good stuff, because their labor is no longer required to keep the system running. But here's the can't. That kind of positive transition will only happen if we prepare for it, if we rewire how we think about value, if we support people not just financially but emotionally. Because a society where work no longer defines worth, it could be liberating, but it could also be devastating.

Because for generations now we've linked identity and dignity to productivity, to employment, to job titles. If you take that away without replacing it with something else, with new ways to belong and contribute and feel needed, you don't get some fairy tale utopia. You get a kind of collapse.

So all this is critical for us as parents. The roles our children were once told to aim for, the secure jobs, the respectable careers, the stepping stones to a stable life, they will not be there when they arrive. They just won't, at least not many of them. The rungs have already started to disappear, and unless we prepare differently, we're not just sending them into some hazy fog, we're sending them onto a tight rope.

One of the pillars of formal education credentialing is already beginning to collapse, and within a decade its role surely will be entirely obsolete. For decades we've relied on degrees and qualifications to signal competence. If you studied hard, passed the tests and got the piece of paper, you were deemed ready. But AI has already completely undermined that entire model.

When a machine can recall, apply and explain complex knowledge faster and more reliably than a university graduate ever could, and when employers are already turning to portfolios and real world proof over formal credentials? The value of those credentials just vanishes. Companies are already losing faith in education pipelines that aren't producing adaptable, flexible, job ready people.

And in their place, we're already seeing a rise in skill-based hiring and project portfolios that actually show what a person can do and how they can contribute. That show how a person thinks and solves problems and adapts. The future won't care about what's written on some certificate. It will care whether you can build, solve, adapt, and contribute in ways that a machine can't.

Which means that within the next ten years the school system as we know it will be totally redundant. The world will have outpaced it entirely. School will still be promising to prepare children for future employment even while the jobs that promise is built on disappear before our very eyes. That's already happening.

I believe that the formal education system is already broken, of course, and already doing a disservice to any child sitting in it. But within ten years, I don't think there'll be many people left who don't absolutely agree with that. Education is just too locked into a slow-moving cycle of curriculum reviews, policy reform, and testing. Meanwhile, AI is over here evolving at an exponential pace.

What's relevant one year is already outdated the next, and school just isn't built to adapt at that speed. So the gap between what children are being trained for and what they'll actually face in adulthood is widening so so fast. At a certain point, that gap will just become too big to ignore for everyone. This system i it doesn't need reform. It needs replacement. And unless that happens pretty soon, it won't just feel broken. It will be impossible for anyone to take it seriously.

So with all of this, in my opinion, pretty likely almost short term future bubbling away, the question becomes How do we guide our children in a world that's no longer structured around graduations, qualifications, employment, performance reviews, entry-level roles, and corporate ladders? What becomes important when work as we know it disappears?

Part three. What on earth is the role of education now? If work is changing this fast, if traditional employment is shifting, the forty hour work week is gonna become less and less common, and the ladder we told children to climb is being pretty rapidly dismantled. Then the obvious question is, what exactly are we educating them for? Because the current system is still just pretending that the old world is intact.

School is still built to produce workers. It's still pushing children to meet deadlines, pass tests, follow instructions, memorize facts, and output information on demand. It's still rewarding compliance over creativity. Speed over depth and right answers over good questions. In other words, it's preparing children to compete with technology, and the technology is already winning. Good luck beating it on any of those things.

Because AI can now recall facts instantly, generate text and solve problems faster than any human being on the planet, learn from feedback in real time, and work twenty-four seven without needing a break or time off over Christmas or a raise. So if the purpose of school is to train kids to do what technology is already doing better, what exactly are we doing?

And school in its current form won't just fail to prepare children for what's coming, it will actively train out the qualities the future will need most. So as home educating parents, this is what we really need to tune into. Think about it. Originality is punished as going off topic. Independent thinking is called disruption. Risk-taking is discouraged because it might lead to failure. Deep learning is replaced by broad, shallow coverage, just enough to pass the test.

But w what happens when the world no longer values anything that was on the test? What happens when we stop needing human beings to memorize content and start needing them to think flexibly, to create new paths and bring something irreplaceably human to the table? That's where school, as we know it, will. Collapse, it just will. Quite soon.

The world of work is undergoing the most rapid transformation in all of human history, and yet we're still educating children like it's 1980. Like the path ahead is stable. Like the rules haven't changed. So if you're considering leaving that system or you've already left it, I believe you're a big step ahead.

But that's where the real work starts. How we prepare our children for the world they're actually going to live in. What does an inverted comma's good education look like in this era? What do we build instead?

Well, I think we need to get very serious very quickly about a different kind of preparation. One that has nothing to do with spelling tests or curriculum coverage or keeping up. One that accepts fully that the future will not reward people for what they've memorized. It will reward them for what they can build, navigate, initiate, and solve.

I promise I'll do an entirely separate episode on on all of this stuff sometime soon as a follow up. And if you haven't heard the exclusive episode on my website called What Really Prepares Your Child for Adulthood, then you should jump over to startgravingdadblog.com and search for it.

It actually covers a lot of really interesting things relating to this. But I want to quickly share five real world capabilities I think we should be focusing on right now. The kind of attribute preparation that will actually matter. First one is self-management and personal agency. In a world without job structures or permanent set working hours, your child will need to know how to manage themselves.

Not just their time, but their energy, attention, output, and emotion. These are skills most adults were never taught. Your child should start learning them now. Second thing, deep work and independent problem solving. Surface level knowledge is everywhere. What matters is the ability to go deep, to focus, to stay with complexity, to work through problems that don't have obvious answers. Third thing, real world skill development.

Instead of ticking boxes, help your child build tangible functional skills, not just academic ones, practical, creative, technical, and interpersonal. The kind that lead to useful output, adaptability, and confidence. To be clear, it's almost certain that a lot of those skills won't actually be needed for employment, but all the good stuff they develop internally as part of that process will absolutely serve them well.

Fourth thing, relationship building and collaboration. The most resilient people in the future will be the ones who know how to find their people, build things together, and communicate across differences. And fifth thing. identity development and direction finding. In a world of almost infinite choice and no real fixed paths, children are going to need a very strong sense of who they are, what they care about and how to move toward it.

That kind of direction doesn't come from outside. It gets built internally over time. Make sure they develop that deep, strong sense of self.

These five things, they're not a loose alternative to formal education. They form a much more deliberate and honestly demanding kind of education. A child raised this way will build the muscles they'll actually need in this very quickly changing world. Motivation without any external pressure. Adaptability when things change, because they will, over and over again. Confidence to try things I've never done before. Patience to get really good at something that's hard.

I believe we're at the edge of one of the most fascinating periods of human history. But I also think we're woefully unprepared for it. So, this is a call. This is a call to parents who want to get ahead of this. This is a call to families who want to spend the next 10 years building resilience and confidence and adaptability and purpose.

Because I strongly believe that families who take this seriously, that parents who step into this big unknown space to help their children develop skills and attributes and qualities that will serve them well regardless of where all this goes. Well, they're giving their children the best possible head start. So here we are, in a moment of history where, for the first time ever, our children are growing up without a clear picture of what adulthood will look like.

We can't point to a stable workforce. We can't plan for careers. We can't describe what success will mean. we can't even tell them with certainty what kind of work will exist. And that's pretty uncomfortable, especially for those of us who grew up being told the world was linear, that if you just worked hard, stayed on track, followed the steps, you'd end up somewhere solid. That's gone. The other side of that bridge is no longer visible. And while that's not our fault, it is our responsibility.

Because if the world is changing this fast, we can't cling to the way things were. We have to lead, to adapt, to prepare our children not for the system that's always been, but for the reality that's coming. And that means shifting the question from how do I make sure my child keeps up to what kind of human will thrive in the world that's coming? That's the work needed.

Raising children who can think for themselves, guide themselves, ground themselves, who can walk into uncertainty and still know who they are and what they have to offer. There's no roadmap for that. But there is a path, and we build it with every choice we make, every day, every conversation, every opportunity we give them to grow in the real world, not just rehearse for one that's disappearing.

Our children are being asked to walk a very different road than any of us were. And it is so, so important that whether we like where it's headed or not, we stand up and walk it with them.