What Kids Should Learn in the Age of AI
13 tech leaders on the future of learning in a world with artificial intelligence
As a new-ish parent, I worry about everything.
When I hear my son cry, I worry something bad has happened to him. If he’s not hungry, I worry he’s uncomfortable–or, worse yet, sick. If he sleeps too much, I wave a hand over his mouth to make sure he’s breathing.
My son is not even two, and there’s no limit to what I find myself worrying about. Recently, I surprised myself with a new worry.
After seeing him yell “stop” at the dogs, I had the startling realization that he was already learning by mimicking my partner and I, which meant we needed to worry about two new things: 1) what we say and do around him and 2) what he’s learning from his environment.
I’ve put a lot of thought and care into my own learning and what I allow into my environment. More recently, I’ve even been re-evaluating what’s worth learning, given the impact AI is having and will have in the world.
And while I’ve been thinking about the implications of AI for my own life and career, I’d never thought about what it was going to mean for my kid, who will grow up AI-native.
So, this for me, raised the question: What should I, as a parent, teach my son to be successful in the age of AI?
After hours of Googling, ChatGPT-ing, and YouTubing, I found some interesting answers to this question. If you’re a parent, educator, or just some curious about AI and the future of education, take a look at what today’s AI leaders, from Sam Altman to Satya Nadella, recommend you teach your kids.
TL;DR:
The top skills tech leaders believe kids should learn are:
Meta-skills like learning how to learn, critical thinking, adaptability, curiosity, and creativity
STEM
The latest AI tools
Coding (and not coding)
High agency
1. Sam Altman, CEO OpenAI
“Resilience, adaptability, high rate of learning, creativity, certainly a familiarity with the tools…learning to code was great as a way to learn how to think.”
2. Yann LeCun, META Chief AI Scientist
“Okay, so a 10-year old is not going to have any problem because for that 10-year old is going to grow up with AI, and AI will just be part of the scenery; it will be completely natural.
A 20-year old, the question is what specialty should I learn. Is it worthless to learn computer science because AI systems are going to program better than I can? No, that’s not true. You should study very basic things that have a long shelf life. You know, mathematics, physics, basic computer science, you know, things like that. Applied mathematics. Because those are the things that will be necessary to, basically, understand and develop the next generation of AI systems. And AI is going to help you learn that stuff and learn to work with it. But you need to learn the basics for it.
So if you have the choice between taking a course on mobile app development…the shelf life on this is three years so don’t do this. If you have a choice between this and quantum mechanics, learn quantum mechanics. That’s my recommendation. Learn things with a long shelf life.
So a 30 to 40-year old, their world is going to change a lot. Don’t put all your chips on what you think is going to be the big thing because it’s going to change within 3-5 years. The technology is going to completely change. The capabilities are going to be much bigger than they are currently. So don’t make choice that make you a prisoner of a hypothesis about where technology is going.”
3. Jensen Huang, CEO Nvidia
“I want to say something and it’s going to sound completely opposite of what people feel.
Over the course of the last 10 years, 15 years, almost everybody who sits on a stage like this would tell you it is vital that your children learn computer science. Everybody should learn how to program. And in fact, it’s almost the complete opposite. It is our job to create computing technology such that nobody has to program. And that the programming language is human. Everybody in the world is now a programmer. This is the miracle of artificial intelligence.
The countries, the people, that understand how to solve a domain problem in digital biology or in education of young people or in manufacturing or in farming, those people, who understand domain expertise, now can utilize technology that is readily available to you. You now have a computer that’ll do what you tell it to do. It is vital that we up-skill everyone and the up-skilling process, I believe, will be delightful, surprising.”
4. Guillermo Rauch, CEO Vercel
“My priority for my kids is that they learn math, code, design, and above all, to express their own ideas eloquently and fearlessly.”
5. Kevin Weil, CPO OpenAI
“So our kids…It’s amazing how AI-native they are. It’s completely normal to them that there are self-driving cars, that they can talk to AI all-day long–they have full conversations with ChatGPT and Alexa and everything else. I don’t know. Who knows what the future holds. I think things like coding skills are going to be relevant for a long time. Who knows. If you teach your kids to be curious, to be independent, to be self-confident, you teach them how to think, I don’t know what the future holds but I think that those are going to be skills that are going to be important in any configuration of the future.”
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6. Demis Hassabis, CEO DeepMind
“When it comes to kids, and I get asked this quite a lot from university students. First of all, I wouldn’t dramatically change some of the advice on basic STEM, getting good at things like coding; because whatever happens with these AI tools, you’ll be better off understanding how they work. And how they function. And what you can do with them. I would also say immerse yourself now. That’s what I’d be doing as a teenager today, in trying to become a sort of ninja at learning the latest tools. I think you could almost be superhuman in some ways, if you got really good at using all the latest coolest AI tools. But don’t neglect the basics too because you need the fundamentals. And then, I think, teach sort of meta-skills like learning to learn. And the only thing we know for sure is there’s going to be a lot of change over the next ten years. So how does one get ready for that and what kind of skills are useful for that–creativity skills, adaptability, resilience…all of these meta-skills is what will be important for the next generation.”
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7. Satya Nadella, CEO Microsoft
“I think that core curiosity and critical thinking are still going to be perhaps at a premium and somewhere coupled in there is confidence.”
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8. Brett Taylor, CEO Sierra and OpenAI Chairman
“It’s really hard to predict right now but I’ll saying learning how to learn and learning how to think will continue to be important.
The basics of learning how to think: reading, writing, math, physics, chemistry, biology; not because you need to memorize it but understand the mechanisms that create the world we live in is quite important…”
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9. Amjad Masad, CEO Replit
“I would say learn how to think, learn how to break down problems. Learn how to communicate clearly, as you would with humans but also with machines.”
10. Dr. Fei Fei Li, Stanford Professor and “Godmother of AI”
“What about the future generation of workers? Our teens? Should parents be investing in having their teens learn about AI?
I get this question a lot from anxious parents. And I jokingly say that the most important thing for teens is to love their parents, so their parents need to chill out.
I will never say every teen out there should learn to code. I think the beauty of our humanity is the diversity in who we are, how we think, our talents, our passion – maybe even more so in the machine age.
We should raise our new generations to be full humans, not machines. So for instance, now tech jobs are on the rise, but the arts will never go away. People caring for each other will never go away. Creativity will never go away. Scientific investigation will never go away.
So, whoever you are, embrace that part of you and keep using and updating your knowledge of these tools. That’s important. Just like grownups, teens should have a growth mindset.”
Source: Atlassian: Dr. Fei Fei Li on maintaining our humanity as we expand the boundaries of artificial intelligence
11. Mike Krieger, Anthropic CPO & Instagram Co-founder
“Nurturing curiosity and still having a sense of the scientific process…so the skill of asking questions, inquiry, and independent thinking.
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12. Geoffrey Hinton, Godfather of AI
“Train to be a plumber.”
13. Varun Mohan, CEO Windsurf
“When I think about what we learned the most for engineering or computer science it was not exactly how do you write code. That is like almost a given that you can write code after going to college. It’s more like the principles of how you think about a problem, how you break it down, and how you solve it in an interesting way…one of the things that’s undervalued is this kind of agency piece…
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