Three Things Kids Get Wrong About the Future
Young children are biologically predisposed to tinkering with concrete objects instead of thinking in abstract terms. For them, the future could seem vague, at best.
No matter how often we hear about the future being here now, I see things that make me believe that young kids, or even grown-ups don’t quite understand what the future means, today. Or what it is telling us to do. Or how we ought to meet it. This wondering was my inspiration for my children’s book, What If the Future Comes.
You see, it may be easy to think and speak about the future. Anyone can do it. But how we do it is the real deal. Hitting the right notes has a lot to do with understanding what we are talking about when we speak of the future. I will dare say, it is not what we usually think. And kids have even lesser clues beyond fictional films.
False Futures
1. The future is a far-away time.
Sure, there is such a thing as a distant future, but quite often the way kids are introduced to the future makes them believe it to be a distant reality, always approaching, never arriving. They are asked what they want to become and what things they would like to do. So, they pick careers off of their most enjoyable pretend play scenario and leave it at that. While there is value in having kids look ahead and see themselves achieving dreams, it might be helpful to make them understand how to get there. Getting there from this moment does not happen just like that, in an instant. They get there in daily increments. We might need to scale the advent of the future down to a realistic encounter. Come to think of it, the future is really just a sunshine away. Seen this way, we avoid a seeming disconnect between what I am doing every day and the big future. I’d tell a kid; the future is as close as tomorrow which makes today your steppingstone to the future. If you want things to happen in your future, start building on them today.
2. The future will be dominated by robots who will drive people out of their place under the sun.
Technology domination and the ever-increasing automation of countless systems and daily processes no doubt challenge the enduring value of human hands, but that does not mean humanity is about to be totally displaced and done away with. It does, however, mean that you need to take stock of non-automatable skills such as instinctive empathy, insightful creativity, and even the ability to manage and master technology to create meaningful human experiences. Nurture this among the youth and in yourself. As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella assures, there remains “a lot of steps along the way’ before AI becomes out of control. While this offers little consolation, it does support people’s hope in maintaining control on AI capabilities with due diligence in installing safe boundaries and clarifying expectations. Fortunately for present-day kids, technology does not sound as threatening as it did to earlier generations. Surely our digital dwellers can find a way to settle in with technology without losing their sense of humanity and connection with others. This is not to say the path is easy. It is important to guide young minds on how best to have a healthy relationship with technology in life and work each day.
3. The future will come like an all-in-one pack of threatening events and tricky surprises.
The things we see on sci-fi movies won’t all come in a day or at once in a magnitude they are hyped to. No matter the speed of technological advance, there is always a time to prepare, enough opportunities to get used to something even as dramatic as an AI takeover. I think it’s important that we usher kids gently into the future by helping them see and understand the changes they encounter daily. Talk about what things could be shaping up in the coming weeks, months or years. There is not one event that signals that the future has arrived. It is all but challenges that come one after another, invading our daily experiences. Coping in day-tight compartments might be a good approach to keep from being intimidated by the earth-shaking depictions of future things. It is high time we take ownership of our time and our thoughts. Enough of letting sci-fi films do the thinking and painting the picture for us.
The below is more than just a footnote.
As I was writing this piece and while musing about how kids tend to elaborately imagine instead of realistically see the possibilities of the future, I was struck by a piece on the BBC Archive which features a 1966 interview of children who were asked to imagine what life would be like in the year 2000. Surely, they were thinking far beyond what was actually available or feasible in their time. They may have sounded wishful thinking or wildly imagining. But the accuracy of some of their predictions is quite astonishing. One common answer was that automation would take jobs. Of course, this is now happening all over the place and would only penetrate even more industries. They also saw the rise in global climate threatening life on earth. This is hardly rocket science. One only needs to feel the unusual intensity and duration of hot months, or wring in discomfort over wild weather patterns to nod in frustration about how that future came to be. Those kids also talked about factory farming reaping higher productivity. Along with sophisticated farming technologies, it has obviously come to fruition. There were optimistic views, too, such as increased efficiency in the workplace and higher efficacy of cures for serious illnesses. But as you can imagine, they were overshadowed by doomsday-like apprehensions of nuclear weapons which, sadly enough, did indeed come to pass and their threat is ever becoming a new normal.
Still the future is not a bygone conclusion. There is hope for kids. There is that hope we must create each day, in each future that comes.
