Open Letter to My Students, 2024–25
Lately I’ve changed my major. To be more precise, I’ve changed over to the idea that the best college major may well be no major at all. For more detail on my reasoning in support of transdisciplinary studies, check out my recent article on “Regenerative Economics” through the Global Bildung channel: https://medium.com/bildung. For over 20 years, however, students have known me as an information technology instructor and students electing my classes for the upcoming school year are entitled to expect that I deliver instruction with complete integrity in specifically IT disciplines. So some explanation is in order. This open letter is my attempt to clear things up and to show how IT workforce development feeds into the bigger picture questions treated in my essays on Medium.
With very few exceptions, my IT students over the past two decades have mostly been interested in upskilling and in gaining additional qualifications for gainful employment in IT-related fields. I see no reason to expect the class of 2024–25 to feel differently about acquiring such valuable job skills. Upskilling is very likely still a common goal for most students. What is changing, however, is the world around us. IT was an amazing and very lucrative career pathway during the computer revolution of the 1950s, the PC revolution of the 1980s, the Internet revolution of the 1990s, and even through the cloud and social media revolutions of the 2010s. You just could not go wrong financially by focusing on IT. But can we honestly say this is still true? Looming doubts are gathering on the horizon.
Our Changing World
The most significant current disruptive force for traditional IT pathways is without a doubt artificial intelligence (AI). Current AI can do amazing things, and tomorrow’s AI will only be that much more capable. Technology companies are placing huge financial bets on AI and AI-related companies are among the most valuable in the world. That all sounds great — until we consider that for all these AI investments to pay off financially, the companies involved will need to reduce their cost structures. Payroll, in particular, is going to need to come down. The major value proposition for AI seems to be something like automating as many processes as possible to reduce the need for expensive workers. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for current IT students? It may well be a great thing, if you are one of the lucky winners who lands an elite position as an AI developer or supervisor. It may not be such a great thing if entry level job postings dry up due to automation and available IT job opportunities seem always out of reach. Previous technical revolutions — computer, PC, Internet, cloud, and social media — eliminated some technical job categories but ultimately replaced them with different types of job categories. Will AI work the same way? Maybe. But no company is investing billions in AI with the idea of making future payrolls spiral ever higher. Those numbers just do not add up.
But AI is not the only disruptive trend in our current world. This article details at least 8 of them: https://medium.com/bildung/abcdefgh-and-what-it-means-to-be-human-b292ff10856d. From biotech to nanotech to social conflicts to environmental concerns, there are plenty of reasons to wonder how far and how long current trends can continue. In writing articles on topics like “Regenerative Economics” and “Circular Education for a Circular Economy” I am personally hedging bets on the idea that the IT gold rush of the post-WWII era may be turning in some new directions. I failed to hang out with Bill Gates in the 1970s (and with more and better foresight I very likely could have!), but from the 1980s onward I’ve done a decently good job of technical trend spotting and steering my students toward some coming Next Big Thing. My current thinking about the Next Big Thing is it may be far bigger than all the IT skills put together. Planet Earth herself may very well be the Next Big Thing. If we don’t get the planet right, all the AI algorithms in the world may not do us much good.
To Anticipate the Future, Study History
My original college major in the 1970s was history. I tried some computer programming, but punch cards were not my jam. (Bill Gates and his friend Paul Allen saw that differently — they used the same University of Washington mainframe computer lab I did — and the rest, as they say, is history!) Anyway, I don’t regret studying history at all. To get a perspective on the future, the deep study of history is without a doubt the best preparation possible. How can we understand where we may be going, if we do not learn how we got to where we are now? Because I do take my current teaching job very seriously, and because I really do want to advise my students in the best and most productive ways, in the last couple of years I have been turning more and more to history books and to related works in philosophy, social science, and scientific complexity theory. This is all my attempt to see the big picture, to better understand how to guide students through the changing landscape of IT, workforce, and the evolving global economy.
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A book I recently completed reading is Kojin Karatani’s The Structure of World History (Duke University Press, 2014). I’ll give a very brief summary here to set up what I want to say about IT skills and IT workforce development for the coming era. According to Karatani, social evolution has largely been driven by three very different modes of exchange. The first mode was reciprocity (we can call it “gifting”). This mode of exchange characterized indigenous, tribal, and clan-based societies. The second mode was plunder and redistribution (for brevity, I like to call this “tribute”). The third mode was monetized commodity exchange, what we now know as capitalism or international trade. IT workforce development during my professional lifetime has largely been about monetized commodity exchange. Namely, my students (and not just my students — I did this too!) worked very hard to master in-demand IT job skills so they could sell their labor on the open market and command a high price for it. That’s Capitalism 101 and it’s a game we’ve all been playing for quite awhile now. But can this game continue? One problem is the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands. The trend with AI is concentration of vast amounts of the world’s wealth in just a few gigantic companies. Is that a world most humans are willing to live in? Karatani does not favor that sort of world and neither do I.
Karatani suggests a new mode of exchange may be emerging. Karatani does not give this new mode a name, but I think it’s fair to summarize it as “global collaboration”. Global collaboration is similar to indigenous gifting or reciprocity, but on a much wider scale. Karatani’s is a stage theory of history, built on his careful reading and updating of prior stage theories, such as those of Immanual Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, and Karl Marx. Stage theories can be problematic — too much literalism in projecting stages into the future has led to much grief — but it’s also rather necessary to consider how one thing leads to another in world history. Civilizations and empires could not have arisen except on the foundation of previous clan societies. International trade and early capitalism could not have taken off without civilizations and empires to mint the coinage and create the demand for exotic goods. Likewise, I don’t see how global collaboration can become the new normal for future humanity if we don’t leverage the communications infrastructure that recent capitalist investments have given us. I teach Amazon Web Services on Zoom and discuss philosophy with my international friends on Facebook. All this goes through PCs, tablets, cell phones Wi-Fi, and broadband connections. In history, one thing leads to the next thing. If I’m right that global collaboration is the upcoming next thing, it’s also very much the case that we needed recent capitalist investment (warts and all) to get us there.
All the World’s a Stage Theory
My friend and colleague Lene Rachel Andersen has a very healthy view on stage theories. Namely, by all means take history seriously, but don’t take yourself so seriously that you start to imagine that all of cosmic evolution points directly and only to you! Any IT person ought to know that upgrades are always in the pipeline, so however wonderful our current generation is, we can only hope that future generations will be more wonderful still. Also, it’s not like we, with our more advanced and complex modes of exchange, are fundamentally better people than our ancestors were. I rather imagine in many ways our ancestors were better, more capable people than we are. In her essay on Polymodern Economics (https://lenerachelandersen.medium.com/polymodern-economics-ec4d817b3824#) and in her larger works on Polymodernity, Lene does a great job explaining how our current era — the polymodern era — benefits from appreciating the skills and sensibilities of prior societies like hunter/gathers, traditional farmers, and early modern traders and craftspeople. If you really think about it, early humans had to be very good at relating to one another. Those relational skills have never gone out of style, and human relationships are really the basis for every other mode of exchange. Likewise, traditional societies practice virtues like honesty, loyalty, faithfulness, and following the rules. Current employers still need people like that. They also value post-traditional capitalist skill sets like creativity, initiative, problem solving, calculation, and evidence-based research. But all calculation and no loyalty does not a great employee make! Likewise, neglect of basic human emotions and relationships is not a strong job qualification either, even in an AI-driven workplace. Lene’s core insight about modes of exchange and historical cultural stages is “all of the above”. Her Global Bildung movement aims at providing students with such “all of the above” learning experiences.
Now What?
So what exactly does a likely-to-succeed IT pathway look like in 2024–25 given all the considerations above? My first advice is to build that pathway from the foundations up. First of all, be indigenous. Learn how to live in your own human skin. Learn how to dine, dance, sing, and converse with your fellow humans in physical situations. Relationship skills are really key. Many of the authors I cite in my essay on “Regenerative Economics” are people I have shared meals with during the past year. That personal contact gave me the confidence to write about them in the essay. It could not have happened any other way. Most of this current essay wrote itself in my head today while I was out on a kayak, with fish jumping off my bow and harbor seals all around feasting on the fish. Nature fuels my fire. Let Mother Earth take you to school. She will give you inspiration! Beyond digging deeply into nature and primordial human experience, learn also from the great traditions. That includes world religions, world philosophies, arts and sciences from every continent. AI, streaming video, social media, and search give you convenient access to all the world’s knowledge. Shame on you if you refuse to take advantage! This globally humanistic context will help you align your value system and will teach you about skills and virtues that have stood the test of time even in dire situations like war, famine, plague, and persecution. Do you think the next few decades will be soft and easy? Nothing at all I have learned from history suggests soft and easy are what the future has in store. My parents’ generation went through world war and the Great Depression. I got luckier — lots of global chaos, but nothing I had to take very personally. Feels like borrowed time … Social change is only spinning faster. Those who are agile, adaptable, flexible, and resilient will likely do better in what comes next. Again, though, working from the foundations up, the classic IT skills of late-late-capitalism (or whatever we ought to be calling the recent Information Age), are still going to come in very, very handy. Beyond relationship skills and humanistic value systems, knowing how to get complex technologies to work properly can get you invited to almost any party. Although nowadays I count philosophers as friends, I still show up in their world as an IT guy. Everybody needs to deal with Zoom Everybody needs a mailing list. Everybody needs a social media presence. Make yourself useful. People will value you for that!
So my general educational recommendation is to sample all the world has offered up until now — indigenous, traditional, capitalist — and then to reach confidently for the Next Big Thing — Mother Earth herself. IT skills turn out to be perfect tools for the job. If Karatani is right, and if global collaboration is what’s coming next, we will need IT at the highest levels to make it happen. But beyond classic IT skills like programming, configuring, testing, debugging, patching, and updating, I also recommend you put a very high priority on peer-to-peer collaboration. The future, I believe, belongs to those who work best in teams. Luckily, there are many available opportunities to practice IT collaboration skills. Contribute to an open-source project. Volunteer for a charitable organization. Promote or participate in a hackathon. Become a peer tutor. Form a study group. Work with friends to build a game or a web app or a mobile app or some other awesome IT skills demonstration that does some good in the world. And if you are really all about the money — then network, network, network! With people, that is. In an AI-dominated world, who you know is going to count ten times more than what you know. Information is becoming cheap and easy (and not especially reliable). Relationships, by contrast, are golden. One more time — be indigenous. Find your tribe. Learn who will pull you up when you take a plunge. It turns out that human body/minds are the very best information technology of them all.
