A few years ago I wrote a blog post titled The necessary skills for a robotized future, in which I argued that if we’re going to thrive in a robotized future, where AI and robots perform a lot of the work humans do today, we need to master new metaskills, i.e. "skills about skills" or "high-level skills that inform other skills".

What exactly are those metaskills, you might ask? In the blog post I pointed towards a book called Metaskills: Five Talents for the Robotic Age by Marty Neumeier, in which five essential skills are discussed. These skills are:

1. Feeling, which refers to intuition and empathy.

2. Seeing, which is about systems thinking and the ability to grasp the big picture.

3. Dreaming, which is a form of applied imagination and the capability of being original.

4. Making, which is a generative approach to solving problems.

5. Learning, or rather learning how to learn, also referring to autodidacticism, i.e. the act of learning about subjects in which one has had little formal education.

It’s a pretty good list, I’d say, and if you want to hear more about how Neumeier thinks, check out this video of him presenting the metaskills (30 min).

Recently, I re-listened a good episode of the Tim Ferriss Podcast with Seth Godin, in which the topic of essential skills for the future came up. Godin makes a simple but compelling argument that actually we should teach our kids just two things: 1) How to lead; and 2) how to solve interesting problems. This is how Godin sees it:

Because the fact is, there are plenty of countries on Earth where there are people who are willing to be obedient and work harder for less money than us. So we cannot out-obedience the competition. Therefore, we have to out-lead or out-solve the other people.

It sure is a simplification, but I think it’s a great and useful simplification. In that particular podcast, Godin doesn’t explicitly describe how we should teach kids leadership, but when it comes to problems solving, he gives some clear advice:

The way you teach your kids to solve interesting problems is to give them interesting problems to solve. And then don’t criticize them when they fail. Because kids aren’t stupid. If they get in trouble every time they try to solve an interesting problem, they’ll just go back to getting an A by memorizing what’s in the textbook.

It would be interesting to know how the (elementary school) education of kids has evolved in Europe and particularly in my home country of Finland during the past 10 years when automation and AI has been a hot topic. We used to rank high in assessments like PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), but then again, does PISA measure the right things?

I think the key questions are the following: Do we have a clear understanding of what kind of skills (i.e. metaskills) we should teach our kids, so that they can thrive and succeed in a future where automation and robotization are ubiquitous? And are we doing the necessary changes to our schooling systems in order to get us in the right direction?

I fear that the answer to both questions is no.