How Are You Preparing Your Kids For AI?

The impact of AI on jobs is one of the biggest fears of our times. Pessimists will tell you that humans will be out of jobs and it doesn’t stop there—a recent article I read spoke about a prediction that thanks to AI the human population would drastically drop as humans would see having children as a hopeless exercise. Though, there is also the theory that humans have traditionally had more kids when times were tough—survival of the fittest; so, who knows?

Optimists on the other hand will tell you this is all just hype—they will remind you that there were fears of mass job losses when computers first entered businesses in the 1980s; many trade unions saw computers as villains and one of my memories of Kolkata from many years ago was a bank trade union protest against computerisation, with a never ending relay of speakers repeating the war cry that they wouldn’t allow it.

As we all know, technology won and thank God for that. In fact, technology changed how we bank—most of us would not have visited a bank branch in years. And computers did impact jobs, though we never saw mass layoffs that the unions feared. The impact of AI however may be different. Firstly, because we can’t really predict with any certainty when it comes to AI—when Artificial General Intelligence arrives, all bets will be off. But what we do know is that in many sectors there is already an impact.

The tech sector in the US for instance is bleeding jobs as companies try and brace for AI impact. AI has impacted some jobs in the Indian software sector too. I know some services firms are wondering what to do with armies of junior analysts as models based on proprietary LLMs do many low-end tasks at such firms in a fraction of the time taken by humans. Design outfits are watching the emergence of many AI-driven tools with considerable trepidation. And it’s not just white-collar folks—driverless trains have been around for a while now and if you’re using a metro system in India (especially some of the recently inaugurated ones), you may notice there’s no driver.

Earlier this year we learnt that Waymo, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, had captured 22% of the taxi market share in San Francisco, going by journeys. Of course, while someday we will see autonomous cars and cabs on Indian roads, it will be a while thanks to Indian driving conditions.

The challenge requires a response from all stakeholders, and we are part of the opportunity or the problem, whichever way you look at it. With services contributing a significant chunk to India’s economy and generating jobs for India’s youth graduating every year, the government needs to have a strategy for dealing with AI taking away some of these jobs, especially at the junior levels. We also need to ensure that our companies are among the most competitive in these spaces because laggards will fall away first. As individuals, rather than fear AI we need to learn to harness AI tools to be more productive, use AI to help us do our jobs better and ensure we are AI-natives. And most importantly, we need to ensure that our kids don’t just learn to use AI wisely, but are also aware of the fact that the nature of jobs are changing—our parents often stuck to one company through their working life; our generation has changed companies but has stayed on one career path; but our children will may likely change career paths as they go through their working life.

I would love to hear from you on this question—tell me what you think will happen and how you are preparing for AI and how we can mould our children for this new era that we are entering.

Meanwhile, here are some of the top stories around AI from the past few days:

Agentic AI Is Key To Unlocking Real, Scalable Impact Across Enterprises

Cricket Has Always Been A Data-Driven Sport, AI Revolutionises It: Rahul Dravid

Nvidia’s Huang Sees Quantum Computing Reaching Inflection Point

Qualcomm Demonstrates New Processor For AI-Based Smart Glasses

AI With Humans Is The Actual Force, Says Arundhati Bhattacharya

Sundar Pichai Supports Human Talent As Google Inflates Engineering Amid AI Boom

Apple Intelligence Takes A Backseat To Design At WWDC 2025

Google Rolls Out 'Scheduled Actions' Feature In Gemini For AI Pro And Ultra Users

Apple’s watchOS 26 Brings Personal Trainer To Your Wrist With New AI-Powered Update

Meta In Talks For Scale AI Investment That Could Top $10 Billion

NVIDIA To Build India's First AI University In Andhra Pradesh, Announces CM Chandrababu Naidu

OpenAI And Benchmark Back New Startups From Ex-OpenAI Staffers

OpenAI's ChatGPT Suffers Global Outage, Thousands Report Disruptions

See you next week!

-Ivor Soans