Introduction
Last week, Jensen Huang, the CEO of NVIDIA, the AI-fuelling chip company said that we should no longer encourage kids to learn programming and coding. For the last couple of decades, IT jobs were one of the main drivers of the economy, so should we be asking ourselves: what are the skills of the future, and what should we learn next?
Story
Huang offered this advice: learn how to farm. 👩🏻‍🌾
I myself have been thinking about it for quite a while. In the world today we see large forces coming together – climate change adaptation, the explosive growth of AI, and worrying geopolitical uncertainty. Those three big disruptions are going to change the job market.
For some time economists have been warning that the ultra-productive automation that will come out of this latest Industrial Revolution will mean many people will not be needed in their current lines of work. We are also seeing the impact of climate change on human health with poorer harvests and decreasing nutrient levels in food. So it’s actually not such a crazy idea to learn how to grow your own nutritious food. However, we do have a problem in that area…
A few years ago I was leading an urban regeneration project, greening a street and flowerpots with a group of 40 volunteers – mainly high school students from large cities around Europe. Their motivation was infectious and the project was really rewarding.
The unexpected challenge that we had was that they did not know how to plant things – how to use a shovel to dig a hole, how deep to dig it, that the dirt needed to be pressed down around the roots, and that you need to take a plant out of the pot before putting it into the dirt!
Conclusion
It’s easy to jump to conclusions and be judgmental about what went wrong in the education of those youngsters, and how far we’ve become separated from the soil our food grows in, but many of us don’t have much deeper skills when it comes to understanding basic farming processes.
I think it’s not a bad idea – on top of your next AI course – to add a quick “grow your own food” class! 🍏👩‍💻