By Virginia Trioli

Copyright abc

“Unless you’re in the top 0.01 per cent, you’re a peasant.”

That’s former Google executive Mo Gawdat on the latest and greatest human-created existential threat of our times — and yes, there are so many of them!

He was sharing realities with the Diary of a CEO podcast on what new generation AI meant for jobs and workers, and whether he believed predictions of intelligent tech destroying the jobs that kids of this generation might have their eyes on and, well … get out your rakes and hoes.

“There is no middle class,” said the self-styled “happiness guru” (after years spent directing the assembly line that’s the built the tech of our self-destruction, Mo know says he knows now what really makes us happy).

“For the next 15 years we are going to hit a short-term dystopia — there is no escaping that,” Gawdat says.

But this will ultimately be replaced by a new utopia, he says, once AI has its head and has replaced all the bad leaders and looks after us with free healthcare and other rainbow-coloured lollipops, unicorns and balloons.

The dystopia could be here

Sorry, where was I? I got confused: suddenly that weirdo behind the curtain who made the wizard roar was here patting my hand and offering me red and blue pills about a yellow brick road tech future and now I don’t know who to believe.

And why should you? The federal government’s recent economic roundtable was supposed to be the come-to-Jesus conversation admitting that future generations were going to be worse off than any before them if major economic reforms weren’t enjoined. Yet, despite some nice sounds around productivity and speeding up approval-processes and broader reform ambitions, especially on taxation, research and development and AI regulation were pushed down the road.

That dystopia may well already be here. Goldman Sachs estimates up to 300 million jobs globally might be at risk by 2030, with 25-30 per cent of the workforce exposed to automation as AI expands into new sectors, and I can quote you any other number of authorities that believe the same. The direct threat to mainstream, middle class jobs is real: that job in the law that so many parents crave for their kids is already being eaten by AI and automation, and some experts estimate that AI could displace 50 per cent of all entry-level white-collar jobs by 2027.

These predictions have freaked out every parent I know with school-aged kids and almost every conversation about senior years starts with the anxious question of “but what jobs are they going to get?”

We tried that with coding

My husband is adamant, like many others, that schools get serious now about teaching our kids for the jobs of the future, bemoaning a curriculum that has made no allowance for the ravages of AI, that seems to have no eye to the world they hope to enter.

But here is where we diverge. Apart from my creeping scepticism about the most apocalyptic predictions of an AI-ruined workforce, history has taught me not to look to institutional education for the answers.

Those who are calling for curriculum changes would do well to remember the craze for teaching kids “coding” just a few years ago, with schools insisting that this was the language they needed now — not French, not Japanese — as coding would allow them to speak fluent computer with the machines they hoped to operate.

How dumb was that idea? Like teaching someone how to cut out widgets by hand when there was a human-designed machine all along to do it at 100 times the rate. In the meantime, facility with those other languages – French, Japanese, Swedish — would have created true and meaningful connection and understanding with other people and cultures, which is how innovation and prosperity begins.

Schools are also the places where, for reasons I will never understand, we handed our kids over to Big Tech and trusted that the devices they insisted they needed would be helpful, not malign — and now we have an anxious generation of kids unable to control the flow of judgemental, unkind and sometimes dangerous content into their lives.

An iPad can’t replace some things

I watch actor Hugh Grant’s UK crusade to get screens out of schools with admiration and envy. If he seems to you to be behaving like a Luddite Karen with Etonian floppy hair, then just listen to the teachers who have to deal with distracted, disconnected screen-addicted kids. I’ve sat in meetings with teachers as they admit defeat trying to prevent kids gaming while they are in class. If Big Tech’s plan was to lull and dull our kids before feeding them into the AI fodder, their plan could not have gone better.

We have elevated tech’s role and influence, given them every market advantage to thrive, refused to tax them adequately, and now startle at the logical reality that it’s in its interests to eliminate its own, and any business’s, biggest cost — its workers.

I don’t trust the claims. It’s in the interests of the large AI developers, and even the smaller ones, that these overheated headlines stay big: you can’t get the investment you want and need unless people believe that AI will actually become Skynet, and that Terminators are just around the corner. One hundred million jobs gone is what AI players need investors to believe in order to get the funds they need to play their endgame, for which is there is no guarantee. The circularity of this economy is a game of musical chairs that will end somehow.

Right now, I’m not looking to schools to solve this for us. Instead, I’ll put my faith, as I always do, in the realm of the imagination and the ability of the best teachers to fire that imagination in our children.

Innovation, entrepreneurialism, invention and an understanding of what people want and need is not created by tech-linked subject units or trying to predict what jobs the Ponzi scheme of the international money markets will leave over for our kids. Just as it was for us, kids need to be taught how to communicate and connect, how to understand each other and go into the world seeing people for what they are and what they could be. We need to teach our kids to think, to think critically, to inquire, to imagine and to be enthused by ideas. They need to be physically fit and mentally flexible, and there’s no iPad, of any version, that can do that.

This weekend you can read about Australia’s roving backing singers, our brilliant DJs and top-end filmmakers … now this is the intelligence that I’m interested in.

Have a safe and happy weekend and with the explosive happiness of the Australian music collective, The Cat Empire back on our stages this month, here’s their recent exploration of flamenco, as they remain as musically curious as they’ve ever been. Stomp on. And go well.

Virginia Trioli is presenter of Creative Types and a former co-host of ABC News Breakfast and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne.