The arrogance of the academy…and the death of the university

“You have been recognised as an expert in your field.” Compliments like that are always welcome. But I’m always slightly suspicious of what follows, particularly when the email comes from a university. Sure enough, when someone wrote that to me this week, what followed was a request for me to contribute to their research without any form of remuneration.If this was a PhD candidate asking for input to their paper, that would be one thing. In fact, I have contributed to just such a project in the last week. But this was a university doing research to inform its own strategy. And when I asked about being paid for the hours of work they had requested? Well, so far, silence.This was not my first negative encounter with a university. I have worked successfully alongside clients like the Alliance Business School at the University of Manchester (teaching foresight tools to people working for Audi), and happily guest lectured here and there. I was absolutely delighted to receive the Alumni Award for outstanding achievement from my alma mater, Lancaster University last year. But frankly, the majority of my interactions over the last decade have been deeply negative. Some examples:

• The business school that took six weeks to respond to a new business enquiry about partnering on a project for a FTSE100 construction company. The person who eventually (and half-heartedly) emailed back told me that they wouldn’t consider less than £10,000 per day for one of their academics. For comparison, at the time the consulting fee for a director-level person in a big four consultancy was £1200-2000/day.

• The department head that invited me in to talk about partnering on some research, only for me to find that all they really wanted was for me to speak, unpaid, to prospective corporate partners, and that they were offering no academic engagement at all.

• The business school that after four or five meetings, offered me a meaningless job title in return for unpaid guest lecturing, rather than the research collaboration originally discussed.

• The very famous business school that asked me to run two full-day workshops on its (very expensive) MBA programme, at the other end of the country, in return for the ‘prestige’.

• The university that attended an event about innovation and engaging with the business community, boasting about the hundreds of post-grads and phDs on its computer science courses, yet I had never seen a single student or academic participate in the city’s thriving start-up community

I could go on. And on. About how even when you do work with them, they are awful at paying you and have no mechanism to just pay an invoice for your time but instead force you through convoluted expenses processes. You’d think I would have learned sooner. But honestly, right now I think I am done with universities. Certainly ones that don’t value my time or that of people outside the academy. Or ones that have the arrogance to believe that association with their name alone somehow justifies the investment of my time.

A pattern?

This latest email got me thinking, not just cross. Maybe I am over-extrapolating from my own negative experiences. But it certainly feels like there is a pattern here. Because I’m not the only person in business that I know has had experiences like these. You have to ask, why do they place so little value on the time of people beyond the walls of the institution?The desire to engage with the business community is a constant refrain from many inside universities. But what it really seems to mean is ‘can we extract cash from big companies to fund projects’. There’s rarely any sense that there might be other valuable exchanges. Of ideas for example. No, those are the province of the academy.It feels bad to be knocking universities right now in the middle of strikes (which I wholeheartedly support) and the ongoing debate about freedom of speech on campus (a whole separate and highly polarised debate). But I’m concerned because I am an enthusiast for the idea of the university. 

The value of an education

It may not feel like it, in the middle of a cost of living crisis, but in general we are getting more comfortable as a species. Less of our time is spent just surviving and more of our time is spent on fun and self-improvement. There will likely be some disruptions to this trend, as a result of climate, economic, and population change across the rest of this century. Maybe war and further pandemics too (sorry). But as I’ve always said, I’m a long term optimist, short term pessimist. Ultimately, human beings are climbing Abraham Maslow’s pyramid, and will be spending more of our time at the top, studying and self-actualising (whatever that is). Temples to the acquisition of knowledge without any necessary commercial driver should be thriving institutions in the future. But they have to survive that long first. And right now, it all feels a bit precarious.There are major questions about the economic value of an undergraduate education in the workforce. Yes, right now, a degree remains a requirement for many roles and gives a boost to your earning potential. But I hear two things from large employers constantly. First, that they are disappointed in the work-readiness of graduates. And second, that they are relaxing their previous entry requirements to increase the diversity of their workforce.A degree isn’t just about making you ready for the workforce. But when getting one might put you tens of thousands of pounds in debt, it’s hard to decouple study from your future earning potential. What happens when it becomes clear that a degree is no longer the obvious route to career success?This wouldn’t be such an issue if we had a more rounded culture of life-long study. We could be undergraduates at thirty, forty or seventy. But that will take time to develop.

Research opportunities

It’s not just in teaching that universities are under threat. We have to ask whether they are the right place for research now as well. Academic publishing has been a scandal for years. It’s increasingly clear that the quality of scientific papers is not what it was thought to be. And with wages under pressure and the reduced availability of grant funding, smart people have hard choices to make about where to conduct their research.This has been true in STEM subjects for some time. Why struggle along at a university when you can raise venture capital or inhabit the well-equipped lab of a major corporation? I met a woman a few years ago who had left behind an incredible academic career at one of the UK’s most prestigious universities because she got tired of filling out grant applications when her - clearly commercially valuable research - could be completed so much more quickly in the private sector. At the same time, the open source movement has created a vehicle for the collaborative creations and dissemination of a whole range of technologies that might historically only have sprung from the febrile atmosphere - and funded time and equipment - of a university campus. In the humanities, researchers are also finding new ways to fund their passions. Publishing, podcasts, Substack, Patreon, YouTube, online courses, live events series. These are all things that an individual can do with a laptop now to generate an income from their ideas. From history to feminist theory, there are people in the wild now, acting like academics but existing beyond the academy.

The university society

Here’s the optimistic picture: it’s not that the university is dying but that it is being subsumed into society. That our increasing wealth is already driving us up Maslow's hierarchy to the point where we are consuming knowledge out of preference, beyond the old formal strictures. This carries risks, the universities might argue. Flawed as they may be, the modern academy has functions for quality control. Routes to fund research that is important, even if it is not popular or profitable. But can we really not do these things outside of a university? It seems there’s a profitable niche in just about everything, in a global digital marketplace. And the open source community is (generally) pretty good at quality control. I don’t want to see the end of universities. Though looking at the collapse of some departments, like modern languages, it feels like some are already well on their way. As well as being a wonderful place to soft-launch yourself into adult life, the very concept of a university, a space devoted to higher learning, is something a society should be proud of. But it feels like the academy’s sense of itself, of its own value, is out of sync with reality. Without that recognition, it is at real risk. And not just of continuing to piss off people like me with its arrogance.

Further and higher education: The dividing line

I wrote in a recent blog post about one of the diving lines in Britain being between the 50ish percent of the population who now go on to higher education, and those who don't. I wondered how it must feel to see a rising proportion of your peers go on to academic study and all that entails. And considered the impact this has on our political outlook, as highlighted in Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford's new book, Brexitland. In short, the big split now is broadly between urban, degree educated voters (Remain) and those in rural and less affluent areas without higher education (Leave).

FE Collapse

What I didn't realise when writing my previous post was just how stark the collapse in further education has been in the last few years since the rise in higher education student numbers. The total number of people studying in further education has fallen by more than two thirds in the last fifteen years. The result is that the total number of people continuing in education beyond school years has not increased, as is widely believed, but fallen by a third.

Data sources: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/ and https://gov.uk

This makes the dividing line between those with and without degrees even more stark. It is no wonder that people feel animosity towards the wealthy centre and cities, populated by those who have benefited most from our national educational infrastructure.

The skills gap

This is a situation that cannot sustain for so many reasons. For a start, the skills that FE colleges equip people with are incredibly important to our economy. And as you can see from the chart above, apprenticeships are not filling the gap. As the economy starts to pick up, employers are complaining about skills shortages in IT and technology, hospitality and events. The construction workforce is ageing fast. According to the 2011 census, more than 30% of those in the key trades were over 50. And we are estimated to have less than half the workforce we need to meet government house-building targets. Brexit is unlikely to improve this situation.These industries don't just need people, they need skilled, trained people. And people are not getting the training they need on the job, according to the CIPD.

Reading the rewards

As well as the macro, there is a more personal impact of the decline of further education. Education is one of the best predictors of overall life outcomes. It is the foundation of both a more secure career and a more secure sense of self.Quite beyond the career value, learning new skills is one of the most rewarding things we can do. It's why I prize hobbies so highly: they are your opportunity to stretch your mind in new and unexpected directions.

Skills for Jobs

I confess that the 'Skills for Jobs' white paper released in January 2021 rather passed me by. I'm not sure if this is a sign of the limited attention I have paid to the FE sector, or whether there was relatively little noise made about the paper outside of the sector itself. But though the paper makes some of the right noises, what investment it does promise has to be put into context: funding per pupil for further education has fallen 12% since 2010, and funding for adult education has halved, according to the IFS.

Education for life

We have an enormous distance to travel to make up for the long term decline of further education, particularly for adults. Imagine if we had a further education sector that was world class, like our universities. Imagine local colleges as community resources where people of all ages could go to learn skills, to advance their career or for pure self-development. Imagine them as a venue for sports and shared hobbies. Imagine high quality teachers sharing their knowledge with learners face to face, and with the world through digital platforms. FE colleges could be the perfect venue to incubate new businesses, and share community resources, like maker spaces.We need more community institutions like this, not just to tackle the economic challenges we face but to address issues of cohesion, loneliness, and mental decline in our ageing population. Delivering on anything like this will require long term investment - much more than has been committed. Not just to finance the resources themselves but to build a true culture of life long learning, to encourage people of all ages and backgrounds to use these resources.That will require a lot of investment, but also a vision that goes well beyond skills for jobs.

Jack of all trades

"Jack of all trades, master of none, though oftentimes better than master of one"This is not, as many have suggested, the original saying. It started with the first couplet, a positive description of a talented generalist. This was then turned into a criticism of those without focus with the addition of the second couplet. Most recently, in a move very appropriate to our times, the last addition of the last couplet turned it into a criticism of experts.Across a series of conversations this week, this phrase kept coming to mind. I think it says a lot about our confusion around what mix of skills is important for the future. And where those skills ought to be learned. Do we need to be Jacks of all trades in the future? Or do we want instead deep expertise. Is there even a conflict between these goals?

Master of one?

On Monday, I recorded a conversation with Carl Wiese, Executive Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer for Poly. I collaborated with Poly recently on a report on the future of work and particularly hybrid working.Carl and I discussed skills for the future. We talked about the relative merits of deep expertise vs what are perceived as more generalist skills, particularly communication. Carl made the point that it is possible to be an expert in communication. And he's right. Even just within the relatively narrow realm of public speaking, there is a lot to learn about the differences between a good after-dinner talk, and a good conference speech. This is a skill that can be endlessly honed, and those that do it well are readily identifiable from those who don't.On Wednesday I had a live-streamed chat with Simon Squibb, who is on a mission to help a million people start their own business. Again, we talked about skills and particularly the critical skills of entrepreneurship. I referred Simon to my idea of the 'Three Cs' - curation, creation, and communication, all of which are highly relevant when starting your own business. But I also realised that being generally good at these things is only going to get you so far. One of my big lessons from my current business is just how powerful it is when you can engage experts whose ability goes well beyond your own. I outsource everything I can now to people who can do it better than I can. Or at least, I usually do...

Competence is a preference

The exception to this rule recently has been the audio version of High Frequency Change. The production of this got held up due to various publishing wrangles, but eventually my publisher and I agreed that I would record and produce it and they would release it. My plan originally had been to record it in a studio, but COVID-19 put paid to all that. So instead I decided to do it at home, converting my wardrobe (clothes are good for sound deadening) into a temporary recording studio. "How hard could it be?" I thought, somewhat naively.The answer is 'hard'. Between finding times to record when the house is quiet and your neighbour isn't having building work done, and learning about the mastering requirements for audible, this process has taken much longer than I hoped or expected. Having started months ago, albeit with a lot of distractions in between, I might finally finish it this week. It has been a painful process. But, the end result I am pretty happy with. And I have learned some new skills.Am I now good at audio editing and mastering? No. Certainly a long, long way from expert. But am I competent enough to produce something that sounds good to the untrained ear? I think so. And while it feels like it has taken a very long time to me, in reality, three months is not a long time to learn a new competency.

Ts, Os, and charms

With the right foundation in learning, it is easy these days to rapidly acquire competencies. The best courses on the online learning platforms like Skillshare are truly brilliant, and there is a wealth of guidance out there on blog posts and forums (on which I am heavily reliant for my EV project). Collect a few of these competencies and it starts to feel like the popular 'T-shaped' model for skills doesn't fit so well anymore.The T-shaped employee is an idea originally from the 1980s, where it was used to describe people (still then 'men') with a single deep expertise but strong supporting skills that made them good collaborators. I wonder if a different shape isn't now a more appropriate model. The O of the 'charm bracelet' is possibly most appropriate.Back when these were all the rage, you would typically buy someone the charm bracelet with a few charms on it that you thought best represented them. Over time they could add more charms.Think of skills in the same way. There are undoubtedly some core competencies that are critical for future success. I would argue those are the Three Cs that I laid out here, and in High Frequency Change. Everyone should leave school with these charms on their skill bracelet. But everyone will have others, based on their own interests and passions or upbringing.Over time we all add more charms. Some of them might be big and expensive. A trade, a degree, or a depth of experience. Some of them might be small and cheap: basic competencies collected through online courses to allow you to complete a particular task, or just because you wanted to learn.The people we want for a particular role or task might need to have collected particular charms, as well as having kept those core charms polished. But perhaps the most important thing we will be looking for is not what charms are on their bracelet, but whether they are keen to add more.

Future Skills: What to learn and teach for success in tomorrow's world

What are the vital future skills for success in tomorrow's world? Which skills should we be learning to advance our own careers? What should we be teaching our children to give them the best chance in life?I have been asked these questions since I became a futurist. And I have answered them many times, in talks, Q+A's and in blog posts. Here, I have tried to bring all those answers together into a more definitive response.

How do we know what future skills we will need?

What are the criteria for the 'right' skills for the future? The starting point for my answer to this question comes from work I did at the start of my futurist career. I sat on a panel for the Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW) on the future of education. As a panel, we considered the question of the future of education from a number of perspectives. Mostly, given the convening organisation though, these were centred around the economic value of education. What benefits do particular skills bring to the individual, the business, and the state, in terms of working and earning potential? We asked questions like: What are the gaps between today's education provision and the needs of employers? How do we see the nature of jobs and work changing in the future?Our conclusions covered three main areas: divorcing skills from knowledge, preparing for change, and emphasising creativity.

Knowledge is the context in which skills are acquired

I have long been critical of the idea of a knowledge economy. In a world where almost any fact can be recalled in a few key strokes, knowledge is a commodity. What matters is the skills to find the knowledge you need, qualify, and apply it.Of course it’s not quite that simple: our skills of search and qualification are naturally informed by a base level of knowledge. You cannot totally divorce the skills of discovery and validation from knowledge. Knowledge gives you a solid platform from which to work. It is a benchmark against which to test the facts that you discover.Beyond this sufficiency though, it is hard to make the case for acquiring knowledge as an end in its own right. At least in economic terms. Known facts no longer offer anyone a clear differentiator in the job market. Rather, the acquisition of knowledge is the context in which we develop critical skills. Acquiring more knowledge through the development of these skills is a very welcome benefit. But it is the skills that hold the real value.

Preparing for change

I spend a lot of time talking about the future of work. People ask: what jobs will we do in the future? There is no single career to which I can comfortably point people today. All will go through periods of disruption in the future. The only way to offer people some measure of career stability is to help them prepare for such an environment, building skills that help them adapt.Whatever skills we focus on teaching, adaptation has to be at the core. And the most important part of adaptation is learning. First of all, recognising a gap in your own knowledge or abilities. Secondly, finding a source of information or training to fill that gap. And thirdly, the skills to hone that new ability. To apply yourself in using it and improving it.

Innovation

The only other defence against disruption is to go on the offensive. Be the one doing the disrupting. And that means innovation, and creativity.Creativity is too often perceived as something innate. People get the sense early in life that there is such a thing as a creative person. The ones who can draw and paint, or play music. This is, of course, nonsense. We are all creative. All disciplines require creativity, to a greater or lesser extent.The arts though are a great domain in which to teach the skills of creativity. Creativity is about experimentation. It is about iteration. How do you become creative? You have the confidence to try something, see it fail, and learn from the mistakes. We can use the arts as a honing ground for creative skills. Which is why its so disappointing - even worrying - that they have been de-prioritised in the UK curriculum.

Future skills beyond work

So far the prescription for skills has been purely about economic value. But education is obviously about much more than that. I believe there is a lot of coherence between the future skills we need for economic success and the skills that give us a wider opportunity for self-fulfilment. The critical common factor is self-reliance. The skills I will describe below are ones that allow us to expand our own abilities, feel the reward of making something new, and communicating our value to others. Whether your objective is financial, self-development, or about growing your role in society, these are all valuable attributes.

The Three Cs

So what are the future skills that we should be learning, honing, or teaching to our children? I believe there are three, and I call them the Three Cs.Curation: This is about the skills of discovery and qualification. Knowing what you don’t know, finding that information, and ensuring its veracity. It’s about learning to learn, critical to adaptation in a career that will likely see a lot of change.Creation: Synthesising something new is the most valuable contribution to an economy, notable since our own is increasingly focused on service. Sadly, we seem less and less focused on teaching creativity, which can be developed in a huge range of contexts. Science is often a creative subject, but the arts are a fantastic way to develop our creative muscles (and a huge industry in their own right).Communication: Our skills are worth little in the economy unless we can share what we have learned and created with our colleagues, customers and stakeholders. A broad spectrum of communications skills, writing and speaking, designing and presenting — even coding, an increasingly common form of communication — are vital for future careers.

Not only do I think these skills, combined with a solid work ethic and a good disposition, define a valuable employee today, I think they are also some of the most defensible human traits in the face of rising automation.

Let's break each down in more detail.

Curate: Discover and qualify information

Curation is my shorthand term for the dual skills of discovery and qualification.Discovery starts with self-discovery, recognising those things that you don't know, or don't know how to do, that might hold you back. This could be missing data sources in solving a problem. It could be missing skills for the next stage of your career. Or it could just be the perfect illustration for the blog post you are writing.Discovery is a partly about technical skills, like forming effective web search queries. And it's partly about a hunger for growth and development. The ability to learn and a love of learning.But it is also about having good filters. We need to know that the sources that we draw from are of good quality. Particularly in this age of fake news, and with the growing threat of deep fakes. What we need is a well-trained sense of scepticism.Scepticism is the best defence from digital security threats. It is scepticism which allows an individual to begin to challenge claims and differentiate between sources. If you can develop a sceptical ‘sixth sense’ in people then you can speed this process, allowing snap judgements about the quality of a source.

The value of media-literacy

Take the example of the four-foot-long rat supposedly discovered in Hackney in 2016: a good sceptic would immediately question that. And this scepticism is something we can - and should - teach. In my first proper job after university I used to run a lot of media training programmes, teaching people how to deal with the press. We taught hundreds of people across Europe the basic principles of understanding what was newsworthy and how to communicate it through press releases and interviews.A phrase that will be familiar to anyone who has been on this sort of session is ‘man bites dog’. What it means is that the press are interested in things that are out of the ordinary. A dog bites a man? Well so what: that’s what dogs do. But if a man bites a dog? Well that’s unusual, and hence, newsworthy.For the very reason that a four-foot-long rat is newsworthy, it should also set off the mental alarm bells of the sceptic — to say nothing of the journalists who happily published the story.This same rule applies to many of the ruses used to con people in digital scams. It just takes a few moments thought to realise when it. Widows of African leaders wanting to move money out of their countries through you? Friends being mugged in foreign countries and using Facebook to ask everyone to wire them money? Both clearly men biting dogs.Some of these things are innately ridiculous. Others do require a bit more knowledge or context to be revealed as such. Like the Microsoft technical support scam. But you don’t have to teach people much about business, computers or the internet — no more than should be the basics of any education* — for these too to start to smell a little fishy.Teach people media literacy, and give them a broad education in the way the modern world operates, and I think we can develop in most a very healthy innate scepticism.

Create: Synthesise something new

Creativity is one of the most critical future skills for two reasons. Firstly, the nature of the environment in which we operate is changing. Secondly, because it is how we add the most value to our careers and to our employers.While I don't believe the pace of changing across the board, as I lay out in High Frequency Change, I do believe that every sector faces growing disruption. The defence against this disruption to your own career and your own business, is to drive change rather than wait for it to come. That requires constant innovation, and innovation requires creativity. Not necessarily the lightbulb moment spark of inspiration, but iteration, revision and recombination. The ability to try things and learn from the failure, over and over again. The ability to smash two old things together to make something new.This innovation is what creates economic value. It is how we take processes and make them better. It is how we create new products and services. Doing it makes us incredibly valuable to our employers, and gives us the chance to create our own enterprises in whatever form.

Communicate: Clarity and Efficiency, Precision and Beauty

Communication is about your ability to hear others, and share your own message. Listening is always the first part of communication, though it is also part of the Curation skill set above. Without it we cannot learn and we cannot shape and tailor our actions.Listening is critical in business because so much value will be placed on human to human interaction in the future. As more of our interactions are handled between machines, so those that remain entirely analogue will become of ever greater importance. Whether you have a role in care, service, HR, or leadership, listening is critical.And once you have listened you need to share your message. Doing this well requires precision and clarity. The ability to capture the listener and compel action. In a world flooded with noise, the ability to create a clean signal is highly valuable.

Efficiency

First of all, great communication is about efficiency: the ability to communicate a clear and unambiguous message in the minimum number of characters.Twitter has made this a daily test for millions of people, and it is not easy.Twitter’s enforced 140 character limit made it challenging to communicate a clear point in a compelling fashion. Users developed their own syntax to address that challenge - a syntax that has somewhat lost its value  the expanded character limit.By keeping messages short, Twitter has allowed people to scan a huge amount of information and opinion in a very short space of time. This is highly valuable in this noisy world, and the reason that so many people use Twitter as readers more than writers.

Precision

Precision is often lacking in workplace communication. This seems a particularly acute problem here in the UK. I wonder if this is one of the causes of our low productivity.Our manners often prevent us from being direct about what we want, meaning briefs from manager to staff, and from client to supplier, are often much woollier than they should be. Our culture means that staff member and supplier are often unwilling to challenge the woolly brief, so instead throw themselves into the work with gusto, becoming ‘busy fools’ and wasting everyone’s time and money.In a ‘gig economy’ where the ability to brief a job in clearly and comprehend (and challenge) this brief are vital, the lack of these skills will be increasingly apparent.

Clarity

Clarity too is an issue. There is a meme that floats around Facebook occasionally, about some research purportedly from Cambridge University (it isn’t) showing that we can still understand words if the middle letters are jumbled. It’s nonsense (as this page points out), but there’s an interesting idea often made as part of the post: spelling and grammar don’t really matter as long as the message is carried across.My issue with this idea comes back to the signal to noise ratio. The low friction effect of digital technology means that we are being swamped with more and more channels of communication. More and more people and companies have access to those channels of communication. This means more noise.Filtering the signals we want from that noise is hard enough without the extra computational and mental overhead of dealing with unclear communication. We may be able to understand some jumbled and misspelled words, and extract the meaning from poorly punctuated sentences. But that doesn’t mean it is easy: our brains have to work harder to do so, and so will our computers.We should always aim for clarity in communication, for everyone’s sake.

Beauty

What none of these exhortations speak to though is beauty in communication. There is an inherent beauty in a perfectly constructed statement: one that is clear and concise. But it is only enhanced when it contains great rhythm, description or humour.If we achieve clarity, efficiency and precision in our communications at work, tomorrow’s world will certainly be a more efficient, more productive place. And I believe the combined effects of social networks like Twitter, and exposure to imported aspects of the gig economy like Fiverr, will start to reinforce these values.But we also need to consider the value of beauty in our communications. Its power to engage and compel, excite and entertain. Signals stand out most from the noise when they are imbued with this uniquely human quality in language.

Turning future skills into crafts

While all of us should be learning these three core future skills, it is only through their application in the relevant contexts to our work that they become shaped to the particular needs of our work. These skills, honed in a particular context, I would call a craft. For example, public speaking shares a lot of the core requirements with other applications of communications skills. You need a strong narrative thread, often wrapped around a coherent argument. But it's only through repeated practice that a good essayist can become a good public speaker.One of the things we can do to advance our careers, or even get a head start before they begin, is find other places to apply these skills in relevant contexts. If the job you want requires public speaking, or writing, or one-to-one communication, get a head start by applying those skills elsewhere. Do it in volunteering, or charity work, or for your sports team.

How to learn future skills? Get a hobby

This leads neatly to the question how how we acquire new skills in the first place. One way I think we can practice all three of the Cs, is by getting a new hobby.Hobbies are fantastic contexts for self-driven learning, a critical component of the ‘curate’ skillset. You need to identify the gaps in your knowledge and abilities, source and absorb materials to help you overcome those gaps.Hobbies are also often creative. I don’t mean that we all need to take up painting or writing. Sports are creative. Coding is creative. Games are creative. The critical creative skills are more about practice, repetition and refinement than they are about lightning-strike great ideas.And hobbies almost inevitably involve communication, whether you are chatting on shared interest forums, strategising with team mates, or negotiating at a swap meet.Personally, I took up rollerskating a few years ago. It was a humbling experience, being surrounded by kids — my own included, having introduced me to the sport — who knew more than I did. It has taken an enormous amount of practice, and a few injuries (including a broken rib, a sprained wrist, and a very squishy elbow) to get to the stage where I feel pretty competent at a few tricks.I’ve learned by watching others, watching YouTube videos, and practicing, over and over again — creative iteration. It has been a great exercise for these critical future skills, as well as for my general fitness. But perhaps just as important is that humbling. One of the most valuable things to be reminded of, is just how little we know outside of our own domains.If you want to improve your future career prospects, go and get yourself a new hobby. And get humbled.

Teaching technology isn't about the economy, it’s about democracy

I recently spent some time at Raspberry Jamboree, a day of education and sharing, based around the credit-card sized low-cost computer, the Raspberry Pi. The demographic here is wonderful. Yes, there are the middle-aged men with beards you may have expected. But there are also plenty of women and children — boys and girls. The atmosphere is inquisitive, open and discursive. Everyone is learning. People point to the various components on sale to accessorise their little computers and ask strangers: “What does that do?”I had a great time.Two weeks later I got a phone call from the BBC. Will I come on and talk about Theresa May’s plans for the internet following the London and Manchester attacks.Here we go again, I thought.Theresa May, like many politicians, likes to talk about ensuring that terrorists can’t communicate beyond the surveillance of the state. It sounds pretty reasonable to the uneducated — which is most people when it comes to the inner workings of the internet. Why would Google, Facebook and Apple want to allow terrorists to communicate? Surely they can allow GCHQ a little peek into people’s messages if it will prevent a tragedy?Of course, it isn't that simple. There are all sorts of reasons why it just isn't practical — or desirable — to give the security services a key to our secured communications. Cory Doctorow sums them up best.To put it even more succinctly, interfering with encryption would collapse many of the services on which our modern lives are increasingly dependent, while leaving terrorists free to access a separate range of entirely secure technologies.The problem is, most people don’t understand this. They’re ill-equipped for the technical argument, let alone the moral one.This is why events like Raspberry Jamboree and the wider initiative to educate people about technology is so important. Yes, digital skills are crucial to the economy, but they are also crucial to all other aspects of modern life.Participation isn't just about the skills you need to access services, it’s about a reasonable proportion of the population being able to make informed choices about the controls placed on those services.

The future human will be more educated than augmented

When we discuss the future human it is so often a question of physical and mental augmentations. Of our health, fitness, strength, knowledge and capabilities. Personally, I would like to be able to operate at my optimum mental capability for more of the day and more days of the week. All it takes is one poor night’s sleep and a day is lost.How much more could we achieve with control over such factors?In reality, these will be expensive and hard-won enhancements. Even when the technology is available, social acceptance and legal approval will take time. After all, I could have experimented with Adderall or Ritalin to overcome my sleep-restricted focus, but I haven’t. Perhaps if I were a generation younger they would be as normal to me as paracetamol.Without drugs, or genetic engineering, or digital prosthetics, we know there is a massive gain to be made in human capability. One that affects everyone rather than the privileged few. And one that requires no great advances in anything other than political will.Genetic gaps in learning between individuals are generally not that great. The largest ever study of the impact of genetics on educational attainment found a difference of 3.2% on the number of weeks of schooling an individual would complete given the maximum genetic potential versus the minimum. To put that into context, someone with two copies of the gene with the strongest influence might complete just nine weeks more education than someone with no copies.In this context, environment is everything. How much raw intelligence is genetic is still the subject of frenetic debate. But we know that education is a good predictor of life outcomes. As this blog documents, in two studies accounting for all other factors, Steve Machin, Olivier Marie and Suciča Vujić showed that increased education has a significant impact on crime rates.Part of the reason for this they suggest, is the ‘incapacitation effect’. Simply, if you’re in school or college you’re not elsewhere committing crime. As automation ramps up and begins to wipe out more jobs, it’s likely this incapacitation effect will start to become more important.It is increasingly clear that this wave of technological unemployment is structural rather than temporary. AIs replacing call centres, administration and back office jobs. Drones replacing delivery drivers and postal workers. Robots running production lines and warehouses.These technologies don’t completely replace people. But they allow a very small number of people to do the jobs of tens or hundreds. The AI I saw demonstrated recently could realistically replace 80% of call centre workers. A million people are employed in call centres in the UK. Imagine if the same maths applies to manufacturing (2.6m), and logistics (1.7m).This technological revolution will undoubtedly create new jobs but there is little visibility of new employment on the scale and at the education levels of those already being replaced. Human beings remain cheaper than robots for many physical tasks right now, due to their complex combination of capabilities. But this won’t last. Humans may be more attractive as carers than machines, but how high can we afford the ratio of carers to clients to be? One to one would be incredible, but it may not be economically realistic when jobs are the privilege of the few.What we see is a likely future of people without purpose. And we know that people without purpose are more likely to cause problems.How do we give people purpose? Well, perhaps education is it. Life long education as a route into the jobs that are available. Life long education as a way to move between careers as industries change ever more rapidly. But most importantly, life long education as a respected goal in its own right.Imagine a nation of philosophers, a word that literally translated means ‘wisdom lover’. People hungry for knowledge and respected for its acquisition, with or without commercial application.Perhaps this is straying into the realms of fantasy. But one thing is clear. Future humans may be augmented in all sorts of ways. But at a societal scale, we can achieve much more, much faster through education than augmentation.Education might not be able to offer people a higher wage. But it might be able to offer them a purpose.