What Career Should You Choose in the AI Age?
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What is the central question Daniel Susskind explores about careers in the AI age?
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Welcome back to Merrin Talks Money, the podcast in which people who know the markets explain the markets. I am Merrin Somerset Webb. This week, I'm speaking with Daniel Sushkind, an economist and one of the leading thinkers on how technology and artificial intelligence are changing our world of work. Daniel is a professor at Gresham College and King's College, London, and a researcher at Oxford University and the Stanford Digital Economy Lab. He has spent the last 15 years studying technology and work, and his previous books include A World Without Work and Growth, A Reckoning. Now, regular listeners to Merrin Talks Money will know that I often ask our guests, what should our children be studying?
What kind of work will survive the rise of AI? And how should young people prepare for what is coming? And how can we help them prepare for what is coming? Well, well done, Daniel. He has written a whole book about exactly that. not because we asked him to, but just because I guess it's interesting. It's called, What Should My Children Do How to Flourish in an Age of AI? It asks what the next generation should learn, which skills will matter, and how much we can prepare for a future we can't predict. Daniel, welcome to Maren Took's Money.
Thank you so much for having me.
Right. We are very lucky because we have got the perfect hook for our conversation, which is that the PISA education numbers came out this morning. And I'm sure that you've looked at them as well. We are talking, by the way, on the 8th of September. They came out this morning and they were really depressing. They showed a global decline pretty much across the board in maths and reading. They were even down from what we saw in 2022. And when we saw... depressing numbers for reading and mathematical skills around the world in 2022. We went, nah, COVID, it'll get better. It'll be fine. But it isn't. It hasn't got better. It's got worse. And I know that all generations look at the one below them and go, well, they're useless.
It's getting worse. And normally it isn't. But these numbers suggest that there is something going on.
I think that's right.
How do the latest PISA results highlight a crisis in literacy and numeracy for future workers?
I mean, the numbers appear actually early on in the book, but only up to 2022 because it's global data and it takes the OECD a good few years to gather it together. Many people have pointed to the particularly precipitous fall in literacy, but it's also numeracy as well. I think it's a disaster in itself, but it's a particular disaster for thinking about how we prepare the next generation for the age of artificial intelligence. I think there's two reasons why. One is, and this is a theme that runs through the book, And you alluded to it in your opening comments there, which is that it is incredibly difficult and impossible to predict the future. The way in which we have traditionally, I think, thought about preparing the next generation for the
future of work is to try and think as cleverly and as deeply as we can about what's going to happen in the future and what jobs will have to be done and then reason back and say, well, look, these are the sort of future-proof skills that we need to teach the next generation. I just think that's too difficult to do. We just can't predict. with confidence, particularly in this extraordinarily uncertain world, exactly what more advanced skills, perhaps it's creativity, perhaps it's judgment, perhaps it's problem solving, are really going to be in demand.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the central question Daniel Susskind explores about careers in the AI age?
0:00–3:00
2
How do the latest PISA results highlight a crisis in literacy and numeracy for future workers?
3:00–9:02
3
Why does Daniel argue that social media, not just AI, is eroding basic learning skills?
9:02–12:49
4
What should students focus on when choosing A‑levels for an AI‑driven job market?
12:49–17:21
5
How can young people shift from picking a job to solving a problem they care about?
17:21–22:08
6
Why does the book say adult education and lifelong reskilling are essential now?
22:08–26:00
7
How can AI act as a personal tutor and even help you learn a craft like horology?
26:00–30:00
8
What is Daniel currently reading and how does it relate to AI creativity and copyright?
30:00–32:42
Speakers
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