Predictions

I love a bit of futurology as much as the next geek, so when this came to my attention, I was happy to read. Buried amongst all the talk of freezing your poo and the lack of any mention of planning for environmental catastrophe was a very interesting point about the future: be prepared to learn for your whole life. The pace of technological change means that none of us, regardless of our occupation, will reach a position where we have learnt it all and are experts. In reality this has always been the case, but the difference now is scale. Whereas before CPD might involve reading a few articles and attending a few seminars a year, now a whole new language can spring up in a year. No one is going to have time to learn a whole new language each year whilst also working with the existing ones they know, so a new approach is required.

A few times recently I have heard some of the older developers at work complain about people who ‘code from Stack Overflow’. This is meant as a snub, an illustration that these people don’t know their field and somehow lack the knowledge to be ‘real’ developers, but this is an increasingly outdated idea of what it is to be a developer. Stack Overflow is just another tool, no different in essence to those giant thick books that still sit on the desks of some of those same colleagues, except that it takes seconds to find what you’re looking for on Stack Overflow and it is the equivalent of having a desk piled high with those massive books, leaving no space for a laptop. Even in the ‘old’ days, people didn’t retain the knowledge about every single function in their head, hence the well guarded wedges of paper that held all the secrets to SQL or C or whatever, it was just you were a more efficient coder if you retained most of the details of a language in your head rather than spending half your time leafing through a telephone directory. Now, as long as you understand the core concepts of a language, you can work the rest out as you go. Of course the more you code, the more you learn; it’s just that you don’t have to wait to lean so much before you start to code.

I have been talking in terms of pure programming, but as the digital realm comes to dominate all aspects of our lives, the same principle will apply to all work. Beyond an understanding of the core principles, what will shape our careers will be how we react creatively to our work. In adults creativity has a certain mystique about it, as if it is some special gift bestowed upon a lucky few. I’m sure some people are more naturally creative than others, but that isn’t to say the others aren’t creative at all. As children we all create, through play, but traditionally we were taught that growing up was about putting such ‘childish’ things behind us. For children, play allows them to explore the boundaries of the possible and even to imagine the impossible and enact it. By attempting to reach beyond their existing reality through play, children at least establish what the limits to that reality are, and at best expand them, not necessarily as far as their imagination, but further than they previously knew. This is really just experimentation that leads to discovery; it is learning. As adults we dismiss it because the majority of discoveries that children make are about things that are commonplace to us, but this is only because we familiarised ourselves with them through such learning. As we outsource the retention of knowledge to the digital realm and accumulating reams of knowledge becomes a pointless exercise, we will need to rediscover playful experimentation as at least an aspect of our work. I am not talking about the gamification of work, as gamification is too often a reductive and patronising exercise. It is the kind of nudge nonsense promoted by tories who think that ‘small government’ means not making the rich pay any tax whilst keeping the plebs anaesthetised enough that they don’t mind generating wealth for their masters.

Talking of games, another complaint old people like me can be heard to make is that computer games are too easy these days. “Manic Miner, that was a proper game. It required real skill and dedication, not like games today. Anyone can finish them.” Is the sort of thing you hear. Now whilst I honestly can’t remember the last time I played a computer game, I can’t help but observe the games people play on public transport. Whilst many of these are brain training type puzzle games (especially those played by older players), I am surprised how many these days (especially those played by younger players, especially in East Asia) appear to involve no discernible on-screen action. They are games that involve lots of decision making, essentially management games. In the medium term future, whilst most AI remains essentially dumb, some form of decision making management role will probably remain a key human job. Requirements for this job will be the quick absorption of information and the ability to make decisions based on it.

The kind of Victorian-style wrote learning favoured by the reactionary elements in our governments of late do nothing to nurture and support either creativity or management-style decision making. Defenders of this type of curriculum will say “look at China, it works for them.” I would argue that China succeeds despite its education system. There are a billion people in China, so some creativity will surface however poorly it is s but China’s success has mainly come not from creativity, but from management decision making: they have gathered the evidence of products and services created elsewhere and made the right decisions about how to manage them better. China’s youth are learning effective management not from school, but from computer games. They will succeed despite their education system not because of it.
Our education system in the UK is preparing our children for the 19th century and current computer games may help to prepare them for some part of the 21st century. However, unless we change our approach to creative play, we’ll be creating the managers of the future, but not the leaders.