The great jobs displacement is coming, and it’s enough to give anyone vertigo. It’s even worse if you’re a parent. Will our offspring be swallowed by the AI Pac-Man? Should the aspiring drama student be pushed to join the stampede into science subjects? Is the expensive panic master’s degree better than a paid job in the pub?
Helicopter parents have always looked for an edge, despite this sometimes backfiring. A new paper finds that in South Korea, where extra tutoring is now so intense that high school students are not getting enough sleep, the most tutored children are more likely to become behaviourally disengaged at school. How that helps anyone is unclear. But the worldwide tutoring industry continues to grow.
Paranoid parenting is now more rational, given the levels of uncertainty in the economy. But it seems unlikely that we can robot-proof our children’s futures, or even our own, given the speed at which we are heading towards artificial general intelligence. Ten years ago the mantra was “learn to code”, now it’s “double maths”: tomorrow it may be something entirely different.