What Career Should You Choose in the AI Age?

SPEAKER_1 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Merryn Somerset Webb (0:18)

Welcome back to Merryn Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets, explain the markets. I am Merryn Somerset Webb. This week, I'm speaking with Daniel Susskind, an economist and one of the leading thinkers on how technology and artificial intelligence are changing our world of work. Daniel is a professor at Gresham College and King's College, London, and a researcher at Oxford University and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He has spent the last 15 years studying technology and work, and his previous books include A World Without Work and Growth, A Reckoning. Now, regular listeners to Merryn Talks Money will know that I often ask our guests, what should our children be studying? What kind of work will survive the rise of AI and how should young people prepare for what is coming? And how can we help them prepare for what is coming? Well, well done, Daniel. He has written a whole book about exactly that. Not because we asked him to, but just because I guess it's interesting. It's called What Should My Children Do?, How to Flourish in an Age of AI? It asks what the next generation should learn, which skills will matter, and how much we can prepare for a future we can't predict. Daniel, welcome to Merryn Talks Money.

Daniel Susskind (1:22)

Thank you so much for having me.

Merryn Somerset Webb (1:24)

Right. We are very lucky because we have got a perfect hook for our conversation, which is that the PISA education numbers came out this morning, and I'm sure that you've looked at them as well. We are talking, by the way, on the 8th of September.

They gave up this morning and they were really depressing. They showed a global decline pretty much across the board in maths and reading. They were even down from what we saw in 2022 When we saw depressing numbers for reading and mathematical skills around the world in 2022, we went, COVID, it'll get better, it'll be fine, but it isn't. It hasn't got better, it's got worse. And I know that all generations look at the one below them and go, well, they're useless, it's getting worse. And normally it isn't. But these numbers suggest that there is something going on.

Daniel Susskind (2:14)

I think that's right. I think that's right. I mean, the numbers appear actually early on in the book, but only up to 2022 because it's global data and it takes the OECD a good few years to gather it together.

Many people have pointed to the particularly precipitous fall in literacy, but it's also numeracy as well. I mean, I think it's a disaster in itself, but it's a particular disaster for thinking about how we prepare the next generation for the age of artificial intelligence. And I think there's two reasons why.

One is, and this is a theme that runs through the book, and you alluded to it in your opening comments there, which is that it is incredibly difficult, not impossible, to predict the future. The way in which we have traditionally, I think, thought about preparing the next generation for the future of work is to try and think as cleverly and as deeply as we can about what's going to happen in the future and what jobs will have to be done, then reason back and say, well, these are the future proof skills that we need to teach the next generation. I just think that's too difficult to do. We just can't predict with confidence, particularly in this extraordinarily uncertain world, exactly what more advanced skills, perhaps it's creativity, perhaps it's judgment, perhaps it's problem-solving are really going to be in demand. But I think what we do know is that whatever those advanced skills turn out to be, they are going to rely in some way on people having those basics in place. Those basics are basics not simply in the sense that literacy and numeracy are the most fundamental skills, but they're also basic in the sense that they're the building blocks, they're the foundations for everything else. And so I think that is one reason that I think it's particularly worrying, that whatever skills do turn out to be valuable, they are going to rely on these basics.

Merryn Somerset Webb (4:16)

Would you blame technology for this decline in literacy and mathematical ability? Would you look at that and say, well, this is social media, this is children not paying attention, or is it something's gone wrong in teaching? We know there's always fads, aren't there, in the way that children are taught, and there's different ways that children are taught. And if you drill down into the numbers that we've seen globally, there's something quite interesting has happened to England, where mathematical and literary skills have remained fairly static, but there's been no devotion to any particular type of educational fad in England. It's stuck to basic old-fashioned ways of teaching, give or take. And so England now finds that it's moved from number 20, 25 in the world in most things happened to being in the top 10 in almost every educational skill, whereas at the same time, we've seen devolved areas of the UK where maybe there's been something more faddish going on at Scotland, Wales, where we've seen declines. So it's just that that could be part of it globally, a different way of teaching.