What every parent MUST know about the AI Generation

For all of human history, childhood has been a time of preparation for an adulthood you could see, and understand, and picture yourself living.

Whether you were learning to hunt or farm, apprentice in a trade, work the family business, or study your way toward a profession, the arc you needed to follow was always clear. You could look ahead and see the kind of adult you were likely to become. You could picture the work you'd do, the way life would look, the shape it would take. Things would always get more modern, but between your childhood and your adulthood they didn’t change all that much. Not really.

If you were a child in ancient Mesopotamia, or in feudal Japan, or during the Industrial Revolution, or in the suburban sprawl of the 1980s - you could see the shape of your future reflected in the adults around you.

That has been true for every generation in human history. Until right now.

Because now, for the first time in our history, children are growing up without a future they can clearly see. Without a clear picture of what they’re preparing for.

The arc that connects from childhood to adulthood is GONE.

This is the impact AI has had on the world. We’re at a very significant turning point - one that anyone working in software or technology can see clearly, but one that most parents don’t yet fully understand.

So, as someone with a platform like this that a lot of parents listen to - and as someone with access to the technology conversation that can sometimes feel a bit inaccessible - I believe I have a responsibility to lift our collective awareness of what the coming years are going to look like for our children.

If you know my work, you’ll know I’m the furthest thing from alarmist and click-chasing. But I promise you - we’re facing a huge change to the world, and our children are not prepared.

Please listen, and please share it with every parent you know. 

Show Notes

This section could be VERY long for this episode - I have read dozens and dozens of articles, papers, press releases etc. And a quick search will take you deep pretty fast. But the below is a good snapshot, and a good place to start without getting bogged down.

What REALLY prepares your child for adulthood (because academics won’t)

AI Job Losses Are Coming

Gone For Good: AI And The Future Of Work

These Jobs Will Fall First As AI Takes Over The Workplace

Walmart lays off Bay Area tech staff with 'Building for the future' email

Duolingo replaces contract workers with AI

Microsoft lays off 6,000 people

Mark Zuckerberg (Meta): “AI will replace mid‑level software engineers this year”

"AI Will Devastate the Future of Work. But Only If We Let It"

"AI Has Already Come for the Interns. You’re Probably Next"

Will AI wipe out the first rung of the career ladder?

Transcript

INTRO

Helloooo and welcome to the Life Without School podcast - here to help you and your children live the life you want, not just the one you're told you should.

I'm Issy, a home educating dad from New Zealand. If you’re enjoying this podcast, and want weekly episodes just like this one, go to starkravingdadblog.com and make sure I have your email address. I share a new episode to my full Life Without School Collection every single week.

Thank you so much for tuning in today, let’s do this.

/INTRO

For all of human history, childhood has been a time of preparation for an adulthood you could see, and understand, and picture yourself living.

Whether you were learning to hunt or farm, apprentice in a trade, work the family business, or study your way toward a profession, the arc you needed to follow was always clear. You could look ahead and see the kind of adult you were likely to become. You could picture the work you'd do, the way life would look, the shape it would take. Things would always get more modern, but between your childhood and your adulthood they didn’t change all that much. Not really.

If you were a child in ancient Mesopotamia, or in feudal Japan, or during the Industrial Revolution, or in the suburban sprawl of the 1980s - you could see the shape of your future reflected in the adults around you.

That has been true for every generation in human history. Until right now.

Because now, for the first time in our history, children are growing up without a future they can clearly see. Without a clear picture of what they’re preparing for.

The arc that connects from childhood to adulthood is gone.

This is the impact AI has made on the world. We’re at a very significant turning point, one that anyone in the software or technology industry can see very clearly, but one that is not being taken seriously enough yet. Least of all by our formal education system.

So, as someone with a platform like this that a lot of parents listen to, and as someone with access to behind the technology curtain that can sometimes feel a bit inaccessible, I believe I have a responsibility to try and lift some awareness of what the coming years are going to look like for our children.

And, when I mean lift awareness, I mean we need to take the vast majority of parents from having a vague awareness of AI, to a much deeper understanding of the impact it’s going to make on our children’s lives. Because right now, the vast majority are in the dark. I took a poll on Instagram and Facebook that was responded to by thousands of highly invested parents - and only 12% said that they feel they’re totally across where AI is at, and what kind of change we might see. About half said they have a kind of fringe awareness of all this, but nothing very deep, and then 35% - comfortably over a third - said that they really don’t have much of an awareness of all this at all. So, let’s call it what it is - it’s 88% of parents, in this particular poll, who do not have a deep enough understanding of how the world is about to change in order to guide their children into it with confidence.

So I won’t get so dramatic that I’ll say this feels like an emergency episode, but it is certainly urgent. Because that poll is almost certainly reflective of the broader population.

I need you to understand that I don’t say any of what I’m going to say today lightly. If you’ve listened to any episodes of this podcast before, you will know that I am not a rash, reactive human. I put a lot of value in being considered, and reasonable, and rational, and calm. And so when I say that I’m extremely worried about how unprepared the current generation of children are to take on the world we’re leaving behind for them, I’m saying it from that position. And I am worried.

My two younger children are five and ten. I think a lot about the world they’re going to walk into. About what their twenties might look like. About what kind of life might be waiting for them.

And you know what? I can’t see it. I cannot picture it.

I - like you - was raised with a certainty about the future. Not perfect certainty, but direction. I knew that if I followed certain pathways there would be a structure on the other side that would hold me. A place to step into. A way to earn a living. To participate. To contribute. To belong.

But that structure is changing so quickly now. Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of work as we know it. Entire industries are being reshaped. Traditional employment is starting to erode. Even the very idea of employment is starting to erode, and if that sounds crazy just listen through this episode and see where you stand on it by the end.

The things we were taught to aim for - job security, linear careers, predictable professional paths, those ladders we get onto and then climb - are all going to reduce and in many, many cases completely vanish.

And yet… we’re still preparing children as if the arc, as if that the bridge from childhood to adulthood, is the same as it’s always been.

We’re still walking them through an educational model built for a future that simply does not exist anymore.

Make no mistake - today’s children are walking towards a future that doesn’t resemble anything we’ve ever seen.

And so the question becomes: if the world is changing faster than we can even predict, what exactly are we preparing our children for?

What on earth should we, as parents in this era, do to help our children get ready for this new world?

So I want to look at a few things today. I want to give you a sense of where AI is at right now - what it’s capable of, and what kind of things it’s already starting to do and replace.

Then I want to give you what I believe is a fairly conservative view of what the world is going to look like within the next 10 years. Which, for most of us, is when our kids are going to be somewhere in those early working years of their 20s.

Then, finally, I’ll throw around a few ideas for what education should look like as of now. Right now. As home educating parents, we don’t have to stay tied to the glacially slow formal system. Because, regardless of what happens, I can promise you the current generation of children going through school are going to be the most underprepared and disadvantaged 20 year olds in human history.

Before we start, I want to say it again, as clearly as I can - I’m not scaremongering here. I’m not just jumping on the AI bandwagon as clickbait. I live and work in this space professionally, I know a lot of people who live and work in this space professionally, and I am acutely aware that most parents are miles away from being as informed as they should be on the change that’s already happening. So, my goal today, is to change that. To have you listen through, and leave with a sense of - well, a bit of shock maybe - but also empowerment in what you can best do to support your children through their younger years, then their teenage years, and then into young adulthood in a whole new world.

So, if you’re feeling brave and ready to explore this with me, let’s do it.

<MUSIC>

PART ONE: WHERE IS AI AT AS OF RIGHT NOW

It’s very easy to think all this talk about AI and job disruption is still a conversation about the future. Something that’s down the track a bit. Something we’ll have time to figure out when we get there.

But that’s not what’s happening. That moment was five years ago.

This isn’t something that’s coming one day. It’s here. We’re living inside the shift right now - it’s just that most people haven’t realised how fast the ground is moving beneath them.

So let me put this as plainly and as clearly as I can - right now, in real time, artificial intelligence is supporting human work so effectively - across so many jobs, roles, and professions - that it’s now starting to replace the very people it was helping just a couple of years ago.

We already have systems that can:

• Write high-performing marketing copy, faster and more competently than most humans.
• Draft and revise contracts, legal filings, and financial reports.
• Summarise dense research papers and explain them so well that a child could understand them.
• Generate original art, design branding assets, and build entire websites from scratch.
• Analyse bloodwork, interpret scans, and draft medical notes.
• Respond to customer service requests with human-sounding nuance and empathy.
• Plan, publish, and optimise full-scale advertising campaigns.
• Create original music, video, essays, lesson plans, even emotional support scripts for therapy bots.

Not in theory. In practice. In businesses all over the world. Today.

Now, if you’re sitting here thinking ‘but I’ve used ChatGPT to edit something for me, or Gemini to write my emails, or some other AI tool to do some other thing, and you’re thinking ok, it’s pretty good, but I can’t see how it’s going to replace jobs’ then there’s something really important you need to understand. Please do not fall for that trap.

Because everything I’ve just listed is still mostly about AI being a tool. Something we use. Something we guide. Something that has made people better in their roles. More efficient, faster, and so on.

But there’s a big difference between using AI to support human work… and using it to replace the human entirely. Right? That’s the jump most of us can’t see very clearly, and so we aren’t quite as worried about.

But this technology is right now - as we speak - crossing into a whole new space. One where these AI tools are being developed into what’s called AI agents. And this is where the risk of human replacement has become totally inevitable for a vast number of jobs we’ve always just taken for granted.

If you’ve never heard this AI agent term before, here’s the simplest way to understand it:

Most AI tools up to this point have been like clever assistants. You give them a task, they give you a result. They wait for you to act, to ask them things, to prompt them. You’re still in the driver’s seat, deciding what to do, when to do it, and how to interpret the outcome.

But an agent isn’t designed to just complete a single task. It’s designed to be given a goal, and then to figure out what it needs to do to complete it. It’s designed to make decisions. To take multiple steps. To loop through thinking and decision making processes on its own. To find and utilise whatever tools it needs to execute on completing that goal. It doesn’t need to be told exactly what to do - once it knows what its goal is, it will figure out how to get there.

It doesn’t need to be told how to do things.

You just tell it what you need.

And then it gets there — often using tools it chose, in ways you didn’t expect.

And I don’t mean this abstractly, or philosophically, or in a maybe-one-day sense.

You can spin up an AI agent right, and give it a goal like:

• “Build me a website that sells eco-friendly dog toys,”…and it will write the code, design the branding, set up a Shopify store, generate the product descriptions, and write a launch campaign - using tools like Figma, Stripe for payments, Zapier, and Canva, all by itself.

Or you could ask it to:

“Summarise this 200-page court case and highlight relevant precedent for a new brief.”

Agents can now scan legal databases, extract precedent, highlight key decisions, and flag contradictory rulings - tasks that would usually take a junior associate or paralegal hours or even days. This is something already in use by legal firms.

Or maybe you ask:

“Take these patient voice notes and turn them into a structured medical report,”

…and it will extract key symptoms, generate an SOAP note, check medication interactions, and prep the summary for the doctor to review - a process already being used by clinicians.

Or maybe you ask:

“Review last year’s expenses, categorise them for tax purposes, and generate a draft return,”

…and it will pull bank feed data, scan for anomalies, categorise transactions using rules, apply deductions, and output a tax report fully ready for a final review by an accountant - again, something already in use by accounting firms.

This is about autonomous software agents acting like they are an intern, a marketer, a coder, designer, analyst, researcher, legal assistant, accountant, medical scribe, HR coordinator, project manager - the list could go on and on.

And they’re getting faster. More accurate. And more capable.

This is the key shift most of us just aren’t giving enough weight.

Because once you give a machine a goal — “launch this product,” “plan this campaign,” “write this code,” “fix this bug,” “summarise this research,” — and it can break that goal into tasks, choose the tools it needs, and run through them without you?

You just don’t need a person sitting in that chair anymore. Where you needed 10 people, maybe now you just need one or two.

Again, this is not a theoretical future. It’s already happening. So please understand that all this AI stuff is not about ChatGPT writing an email for you. It’s about entire job functions being carried out, start to finish, by programs that think, plan, act, and improve themselves without needing to be watched.

That’s the line we’re now crossing. Right now.

So if AI agents are already capable of launching products, writing legal briefs, compiling tax reports, and drafting medical notes, is it really that hard to imagine that in 10 years they’ll be monitoring patient health in real time and adjusting treatment plans without a doctor’s input, running entire logistics networks from port to doorstep without human dispatch, overseeing farm operations with drone surveillance and precision automation, optimising energy usage across cities without a team of engineers, running full-scale construction projects from blueprint to build, and handling financial planning for thousands of clients simultaneously?

And if you bring robotics into the picture, the shift becomes even more tangible. We're talking about machines that don’t just think - they physically act. Machines that can stock shelves, prepare food, deliver parcels, clean buildings, assist in surgeries, care for the elderly, build homes, manage warehouses. Machines that don’t get tired, don’t need wages, and don’t stop for lunch. When the cognitive power of AI is paired with the physical capability of robotics, there are very few industries that remain untouched. It’s not science fiction - it’s already starting. And in another decade, it’s hard to imagine a single sector that isn’t reshaped by it.

Now, I know, I know, it’s easy to hear all of this and think, “Sure, but that’s decades away. That’s definitely still science fiction, especially the robotics stuff.”

But it’s not.

This isn’t a vision for 2050. It’s happening right now.

Amazon already runs fully automated warehouses where robotic arms pick, sort, and pack goods - all guided by AI systems that optimise routes in real-time.

In fast food chains across the US and Asia, robotic systems are cooking fries, flipping burgers, and serving customers - not in some prototype mode, but in live daily operations.

In hospitals, robotic assistants are transporting supplies, prepping surgical tools, and even performing ultra-precise micro-surgeries under the direction of human surgeons.

In aged care facilities, robots are being used to help residents dress, take medication, and even reduce loneliness through social interaction.

And in Japan, autonomous construction robots are laying bricks, pouring concrete, and inspecting worksites - replacing what used to be teams of skilled tradespeople.

This isn’t speculative. These aren’t lab tests. These are functioning systems already reducing the need for human workers today. And we’re still early. Give it five years. Ten at most, and none of this will not feel like science fiction anymore - it will just feel like daily life.

At that point, we’re not just talking about a few job categories being affected.

We’re looking at the dismantling of entire sectors of human labour - across medicine, transport, agriculture, education, infrastructure, finance, you name it - all shrinking under the weight of systems that can operate faster, cheaper, and more reliably than we ever could.

If you talk to any CEO at any forward-thinking company - in almost any industry, anywhere in the world - chances are they’ll tell you they’re working hard to figure out how AI agents can replace human workers at scale. And the moment these tools can perform at the level of a competent employee - which maybe is a few years away, but also might literally be 12 months away - companies will start making that shift as quickly as they can. Why? Because humans are expensive. They need salaries. Time off. Management. Support. Healthcare. Laptops. Offices. HR departments. AI doesn’t need any of that. Once it works, it just works - 24/7, no overhead, no burnout, no salary negotiations.

It’s obvious that millions of people’s jobs could - no will - cease to exist in a relatively short period of time. And yes, past technological advancements have wiped away a lot of jobs at different times in our history, but we need to be very clear that we have never seen anything like this.

Because those past transformations - from the industrial revolution to the internet age - happened over decades. They gave society time to adapt. They eliminated certain roles, yes, but they also created new ones at a similar pace. When the typewriter disappeared, it was because the computer replaced it - and with it, came a need for operators, IT support, systems architects, designers, engineers.

But this?

This is different.

Because artificial intelligence isn’t replacing a task or a tool. It’s replacing thinking itself. It’s stepping into the cognitive realm - into jobs that were once considered too complex, too human, too protected to automate.

And it’s not doing it over decades, but over years and even months.

And it’s not just the speed that makes this different. It’s the breadth.

Every other major technological shift in history has hit a relatively narrow band of industries at first — agriculture, manufacturing, clerical work. The people affected were usually in specific roles, in specific sectors, doing specific types of repetitive or manual tasks.

But this?

This is horizontal.

It’s not targeting one industry. It’s sweeping across all of them — law, medicine, education, design, finance, software, marketing, journalism, logistics, customer support. It’s not starting with “low-skill” or “entry-level” work. It’s eating into high-paid, high-status, university-trained professions. The very roles we used to hold up as safe. Respectable. Worth aiming for.

And that’s what makes this moment so different.

Because when disruption comes for everyone - not just a few industries, not just one type of worker - we can’t just shift people around the economy and expect everything to keep running.

There’s nowhere left to move to.

A month ago, in May 2025, Microsoft laid off 6,000 people. That’s 3% of its entire global workforce, gone in one pass, and you better believe that’s just the beginning. As part of that, Microsoft’s CEO has said that 30% of the company’s code is now written by AI. How long before that’s effectively 100%? How long before that 6,000 people becomes 60,000 people, 100,000 people, gone from one company? And do you think they’ll be able to apply for roles within other tech companies? Or are all those other tech companies downsizing their human headcounts in the same way? Where do those people go now?

IBM have just replaced hundreds of HR roles with AI agents capable of handling tasks like vacation requests and pay statements.

Walmart is cutting 1,500 corporate jobs - not as a cost-saving move, but as part of their shift towards automation and AI. They’re streamlining operations, rolling out robotic systems, and increasingly using artificial intelligence to manage everything from inventory to ad campaigns. It’s not just retail work changing - it’s the corporate engine behind it.

Duolingo have gone through layoffs recently, and they have come straight out and said that they were directly tied to the adoption of AI. Tasks that used to require human writers and translators are now being handled by large language models.

CrowdStrike, a Texas-based cybersecurity firm, cut 500 jobs - 5% of its workforce - citing what they called “a market and technology inflection point.” Their words were blunt but accurate: AI is reshaping every industry. And they’re restructuring accordingly.

Mark Zuckerberg recently said that in 2025 - that’s this year - Meta and other companies like them working on this - will have AI that can operate at the level of a mid-level engineer. Not junior. It will write and ship complex code, contributing far beyond what a junior employee could. In his words - ‘this will reduce the need for humans to do that work.’ Shortly after he spoke about that, Meta announced that it was shrinking its workforce by 5%. That’s close to 4,000 people, gone. Again - which tech company is going to hire them?

Most people familiar with what’s going on in this space will tell you something that’s honestly kind of hard to hear, and equally hard to believe, but we have to listen to it - AI will likely replace half of all global entry level white-collar jobs within the next five years. Five years! In the scale of our children’s lives, that’s effectively tomorrow.

Now, to keep drawing this line through, there are two other things we really need to get our heads around. The first is that the jobs being replaced aren’t just the ones we thought were “at risk.” Or would assume were most at risk. It’s not just factory lines and cash registers and repetitive manual work. It not just low skilled jobs.

It’s the jobs that for the past fifty, sixty, seventy years we’ve been telling our children to aim for.

The jobs that come with university degrees. The ones that are supposed to mean security. Stability. A middle class life.

Did you know that the highest paying job in the US is an anaesthetist. They train for over a decade. They’re responsible for the critical seconds between life and death in surgery. And they’re predicted to be replaced by machines quite soon. Not all anaesthetists will be replaced, of course, we’ll need human oversight there for a long time yet, but we just won’t need as many. You might have one working alongside and monitoring five machines that are extremely capable. Instead of a team of 6 people. If AI can step into that role, as its quite clearly predicted to do... what exactly do we think is off-limits?

And the second thing is that entire rungs of the career ladder are vanishing - the most significant of those being the very first rung.

Entry-level roles - the ones that used to let a young person get a foot in the door, learn on the job, and prove themselves - are being absolutely swallowed by AI.

Customer support. Junior marketing. Legal research. Assistant roles. Data entry. Editing. Internships.

These were the gateways. They gave young people a way to move from education into the working world.

But now, in field after field, industry after industry, those gateways are being closed.

AI doesn’t need an intern. It doesn’t need someone junior to shadow and learn. It doesn’t need a graduate looking to build experience. It just gets the task - and does it.

Which means the very structure we’ve told kids to climb - study hard, go to university, start at the bottom and work your way up - no longer exists.

Many CEOs, already, are asking their teams to tell them why the more junior role they want to hire someone to fill can’t just be performed by AI. It needs to be justified. And often, the answer is, well it can be done by AI. So often the CEO will say, well then do that. That’s the lens now, in a lot of companies. And that is very quickly becoming the norm.

And hey, just to qualify this further, I work in this space. I’m Head of Go To Market for a software company, which means I run the sales, marketing, customer success, and customer support functions and teams. And a good deal of my headspace right now, and our CEOs who I work very closely with, is how I scale those functions with as few people as possible. It honestly feels strange to do that…but now that we have this technology available it just makes commercial sense. We want a profitable business, and the biggest cost in most businesses is its salary bill. It’s paying people. So if we can have a smaller team building a bigger business, that’s what we’ll do. I did a similar thing for another software company from 2013 to 2021, and back then the way we grew was through headcount. To scale, we had to have more people sitting in seats and doing the various jobs we needed done. Now, just 4 years on from wrapping up that journey, that’s no longer the case. And those 4 years have been the very early days of AI, not the exponentially more advanced state we’ll find ourselves in in another few years.

We need to look at this from a commercial perspective, right, because that’s how every company on the planet is going to approach this. A machine won’t forget. It won’t need breaks. It won’t miss or push back on deadlines. It won’t call in sick. It doesn’t care about meaning or purpose or work-life balance. It doesn’t struggle to leave its baggage at the door, because it doesn’t have any baggage. It just does what it’s asked. Instantly. At scale. And doesn’t stop until it gets it done.

So when we walk our children through an education system designed to train them for the world we’re used to, we’re asking them to become good at things technology has already mastered. And it’s only a matter of time before it’s mastered almost any professional skill you can think of, at a level way beyond what any of us could perform them at.

All of this is going to accelerate at a pace that takes us all by surprise.

If we don’t pause, right now, and work hard to see this all clearly, and to stop pushing our children through a model that is built for an entirely different world, then we are actively setting them up to fail. They will hit their 20s feeling all at sea.

The main point I want to make here is that…no, most jobs haven’t been replaced by AI yet, most people on the planet are still just heading off to work this week like they’ve always done. So, is this really all as full on and imminent as what I’m making it sound. To which my question back would be, based on everything you’ve just heard, would you bet on things still being the same in 10 years? 5 years? Even 2 years? Most experts say it will be nothing like the world of today.

And, for what it’s worth, I absolutely agree with them.

QUICK BREAK

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“For anyone on the fence, Issy’s episodes are pure magic; he’s a huge reason that I had the courage to take the homeschool leap, and he’s the encouraging voice in my ear along the way…best thing I ever signed up for.”

Love hearing that so, so much. Ok, with that said, let’s get back to this episode.

/END BREAK

PART TWO: WHAT WILL THE WORLD LOOK LIKE IN 10 YEARS

Ok, again, I don’t want to scaremonger here, I’m working hard to stay rational and grounded because that’s just who I am. I don’t buy into hype. But at the same time, I strongly believe we need to start looking forward very seriously at the way things are about to change.

So let’s take stock, and feel out where things might land. Actually, in my view, are pretty likely to land. If AI is already replacing high-paying roles, swallowing entry-level ones, and displacing the very people we’ve raised our children to become - where does that road lead?

What does the world look like when today’s five- or ten-year-olds enter adulthood?

First, the main one: the whole concept of the 40-hour work week is going to die.

Not because we’ve finally reached a point where balance and wellbeing are prioritised - though I wish that were the reason.

But because full-time employment is becoming economically unnecessary for companies to engage in. We’re entering a world where ****it simply won’t take as many people to run a business anymore.

In some industries and countries it’ll happen gradually. In others, it’s already moving fast.

But across the board, what we’re seeing is the steady - and almost certainly soon to be quite sudden - breakdown of the structures that once held up stable, long-term work: permanent contracts, predictable hours, benefits, career progression, job security.

AI agents will confidently and comfortably handle what used to be done by full teams - marketing, design, finance, customer support, legal, product development, HR, etc. etc. etc. Instead of fifty or 100 people in-house, a founder might use one or two, or maybe 5 people, and a whole network of tools and agents and maybe some freelancers here and there.

Even in industries that once felt “safe” - education, healthcare, software, journalism, logistics - the same pattern is unfolding: more automation, fewer humans.

And as this becomes normal - and as the cost saving and efficiency benefits start stacking up for businesses you better believe it will - the need for all the costs and management of having to carry full-time employment of large teams will seem crazy.

So instead of hiring full-time staff…

• They’ll contract a freelancer for two weeks for a specific project.
• They’ll spin up AI agents to run certain tasks and areas of their business.
• And they’ll pay a relatively low, flat monthly fee for a set of tools that do a bunch of amazing things for the.

Most businesses, in the very near future, will no longer need to hire large groups of people to grow. Like I said, the business I work for is in that headspace as we speak. We’re asking ourselves - how do we grow a business to the size of something that would have needed 500 people a few years ago, with just 30 of us.

That’s not a small shift. It’s a total redefinition of how work fits into society, and who gets to participate.

And that shift - the reduction in human demand - is what makes the entire structure of traditional employment unsustainable.

The idea that you would train for a single career, work a consistent job for a consistent company, and exchange your time for predictable pay for 40 hours a week, for 40 years and then retire…is being dismantled right before our eyes.

And in it’s place, we’re quite seriously looking at a very different world. I mean, it just has to be different, right. Even if we suddenly had a need for 20% less employees, that’s a seismic shift. Think of the tens of millions of people that represents. And most people are saying that kind of number is conservative as we get into the 2030s. So we could have this scenario where we have a major mix of both underemployment and unemployment. Where millions of people may still have jobs, they may still be working, but where we have overqualified adults doing gig tasks, freelance scraps, or part-time roles that barely cover their life costs. Simply because the jobs that once offered decent pay, long-term growth, and security don’t exist anymore.

And in that kind of space, governments will have no choice but to respond.

Because when large swaths of the population are no longer earning enough to spend, contribute, or pay taxes in meaningful ways…the entire economy falters. Consumer spending drops. Demand dries up. Social unrest builds. Governments cannot ignore that - they will have to step in.

In some places, it’s almost certain that we’ll see:

• Ideas like the Universal Basic Income - regular payments to citizens, not as a welfare stopgap, but as a structural foundation of life.
• Maybe reshaped tax systems, where companies that deploy AI at scale may be expected to fund the societies they no longer hire from. Because, as you can imagine, those running the AI companies will hold all the aces. Financial, and more.
• And potentially, an interesting cultural pivot - where success is no longer measured by what you earn, but by what you contribute, create, or care for.

It’s also highly likely that we’ll see the rise of what some are calling a post-work economy - not meaning that no one works, but that paid employment is no longer the central organising structure of adult life.

And hey, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

In fact, there’s a version of this future where humans finally have more time. More space to create, connect, raise their children, support their communities, all that good stuff, because their labour is no longer required to keep the system running.

But here’s the catch.

That kind of transition will only happen if we prepare for it. If we rewire how we think about value. If we support people not just financially, but emotionally. Because a society where work no longer defines worth could be liberating…or it could be devastating.

Because for generations now, we’ve linked identity and dignity to productivity. To employment. To job titles. If you take that away without replacing it with something else - with new ways to belong, contribute, feel needed - you don’t get some utopia. You get a kind of collapse.

So all this is critical for us as parents:

The roles our children were once told to aim for - the secure jobs, the respectable careers, the stepping stones to a stable life - they will not be there when they arrive. They won’t.

The rungs have already started to disappear. And unless we prepare differently, we’re not just sending them into a hazy fog - we’re sending them onto a tightrope.

One of the pillars of formal education — credentialing — is already beginning to collapse. And within a decade, its role - surely - will be entirely obsolete. For decades, we’ve relied on degrees and qualifications to signal competence: if you studied hard, passed the tests, and got the piece of paper, you were deemed ready. But AI is undermining that entire model. When a machine can recall, apply, and explain complex knowledge faster and more reliably than a university graduate - and when employers are already turning to portfolios, case studies, and real-world proof over formal credentials - the value of those credentials vanishes. Companies are already losing faith in education pipelines that aren’t producing adaptable, job-ready people. And in their place, we’re already seeing a rise in skill-based hiring and project portfolios that actually show what a person can do. That show how a person thinks, and solves problems, and adapts. The future won’t care what’s written on some certificate. It will care whether you can build, solve, adapt, and contribute in ways that a machine can’t.

Which means that within the next 10 years, the school system as we know it will be totally redundant - because the world will have outpaced it entirely. School will still be promising to prepare children for future employment, even while the jobs that promise is built on disappear before our very eyes. That’s already happening. I absolutely believe that the formal education system is already broken, and already doing a disservice to any child sitting in it. And within 10 years, there won’t be many people left who don’t agree with that.

Education is just too locked into slow-moving cycles of curriculum reviews, policy reform, and standardised testing. Meanwhile, AI is evolving at an exponential pace. What’s relevant one year is already outdated the next - and school just isn’t built to adapt at that speed. So the gap between what children are being trained for and what they’ll actually face in adulthood is widening so, so fast. At a certain point, that gap will just become too big to ignore.

This system doesn’t need reform. It needs replacement. And unless that happens soon, it won’t just feel broken - it will be impossible for anyone to take it seriously.

So with all of this - in my opinion pretty likely short term future bubbling away - the question becomes:

How do we guide children in a world that’s no longer structured around graduations, qualifications, employment, performance reviews, entry level roles, and corporate ladders?

What becomes important…when work as we know it disappears?

<MUSIC>

PART THREE: WHAT ON EARTH IS THE ROLE OF EDUCATION NOW?

If work is changing this fast - if traditional employment is shifting, the 40-hour work week is going to become less and less common, and the ladder we told children to climb is being pretty rapidly dismantled - then the obvious question is:

What exactly are we educating them for?

Because the current system is still just pretending that the old world is intact.

School is still built to produce workers. It’s still pushing children to meet deadlines, pass tests, follow instructions, memorise facts, and output information on demand. It’s still rewarding compliance over creativity, speed over depth, and right answers over good questions.

In other words - it’s preparing children to compete with technology. And the technology is already winning. Good luck beating it on any of those things.

Because AI can now:

• recall facts instantly,
• generate text and solve problems faster than any human,
• learn from feedback in real-time,
• and work 24/7 without needing a break or time off over Christmas or a raise.

So if the purpose of school is to train kids to do what technology is already doing better, what exactly are we doing?

And school, in its current form, won’t just fail to prepare children for what’s coming. It will actively train out the qualities the future will need most. And as home educating parents, this is what we really need to tune into.

Think about it:

• Originality is punished as going off-topic.
• Independent thinking is called disruption.
• Risk-taking is discouraged because it might lead to failure.
• Deep learning is replaced by broad, shallow coverage - just enough to pass the test.

But what happens when the world no longer values anything that was on the test?

What happens when we stop needing human beings to memorise content and start needing them to think flexibly, create new paths, and bring something irreplaceably human to the table?

That’s where school - as we know it - will collapse. It just will. Quite soon.

The world of work is undergoing the most rapid transformation in all of human history, and yet we’re still educating children like it’s 1980. Like the path ahead is stable. Like the rules haven’t changed.

So, if you’re considering leaving that system, or you’ve already left it, I believe you’re a step ahead. But that’s where the real work starts. How we prepare our children for the world they’re actually going to live in. What does an inverted commas good education look like in this era.

What do we build instead?

Well, we get serious about a different kind of preparation - one that has nothing to do with spelling tests, curriculum coverage, or “keeping up.” One that accepts, fully, that the future will not reward people for what they memorised - it will reward them for what they can build, navigate, initiate, and solve.

I’ll do an entirely separate episode on this sometime soon as a follow-up, and if you haven’t heard the exclusive episode on my website called ‘What really prepares your child for adulthood’ then you should jump over to starkravingdadblog.com and search for it, but I want to quickly share five real-world capabilities I think we should be focusing on right now. The kind of attribute preparation that will actually matter:

1. Self-management and personal agency

In a world without job structures or set working hours, your child will need to know how to manage themselves - not just their time, but their energy, attention, output, and emotion. These are skills most adults were never taught. Your child should start learning them now.

2. Deep work and independent problem-solving

Surface-level knowledge is everywhere. What matters is the ability to go deep - to focus without distraction, to stay with complexity, and to work through problems that don’t have obvious answers.

3. Real-world skill development

Instead of ticking boxes, help your child build tangible, functional skills. Not just academic ones - practical, creative, technical, and interpersonal. The kind that lead to useful output, adaptability, and confidence. It’s almost certain that a lot of those skills won’t actually be needed for employment, but all the good stuff they develop internally as part of that process will absolutely serve them well.

4. Relationship-building and collaboration

The most resilient people in the future will be the ones who know how to find their people, build things together, and communicate across difference.

5. Identity development and direction-finding

In a world of almost infinite choice and no fixed paths, children are going to need a strong sense of who they are, what they care about, and how to move toward it. That kind of direction doesn't come from outside. It gets built, internally, over time. Make sure they develop that deep, strong sense.

These five things, they’re not a loose alternative to formal education. They form a much more deliberate and demanding kind of education.

A child raised this way will build the muscles they’ll actually need in this changing world:

• Motivation without any external pressure.
• Adaptability when things change, because they will, over and over again
• Confidence to try things they’ve never done before.
• Patience to get good at something hard.

I believe we’re at the edge of one of the most fascinating periods of human history. But I also think we are woefully unprepared for it. So, this is a call. This is a call to parents who want to get ahead of this. This is a call to families who want to spend the next 10 years building resilience, and confidence, and adaptability, and purpose. Because I strongly believe that families who take this seriously - that parents who step into this big unknown space to help their children develop skills and attributes and qualities that will serve them well regardless of where all this goes - well, they’re giving their children a real head start.

CLOSE

So here we are.

In a moment of history where, for the first time ever, our children are growing up without a clear picture of what adulthood will look like.

We can’t point to a stable workforce. We can’t plan for careers.

We can’t describe what “success” will mean.

We can’t even tell them with certainty what kind of work will exist.

And that’s uncomfortable. Especially for those of us who grew up being told the world was linear. That if you just worked hard, stayed on track, followed the steps, you'd end up somewhere solid.

That’s gone.

The other side of that bridge is no longer visible. And while that’s not our fault, it is our responsibility.

Because if the world is changing this fast, we can’t cling to the way things were. We have to lead. To adapt. To prepare our children not for the system that’s always been, but for the reality that’s coming.

And that means shifting the question - from “How do I make sure my child keeps up?” to:

“What kind of human will thrive in the world that’s coming?”

That’s the work now. Raising children who can think for themselves. Guide themselves. Ground themselves. Who can walk into uncertainty and still know who they are, and what they have to offer.

There’s no roadmap for that. But there’s a path. And we build it with every choice we make - every day, every conversation, every opportunity we give them to grow in the real world, not just rehearse for one that’s disappearing.

Our children are being asked to walk a very different road than any of us were.

And it is so, so important, that whether we like where it’s headed or not, we stand up and walk it with them.