What should my children study?
In a world of AI dominated by massive uncertainty, how are you advising your kids?
This is the transcript of a speech I gave at Melbourne Business School on May 21st, 2026
Every generation thinks it lives in uncertain times.
But I think the current generation can legitimately claim to be living in, if not historically the most uncertain, a time that feels the most uncertain because of the speed and pace at which bad news now travels in a digital world.
The challenges that face modern society are diverse and significant: climate change, increasing geopolitical tensions and the rise of populism, an ageing population putting pressure on our resources, and, of course, the coming of artificial intelligence, a trend that leads us to question everything we know about how we work, how we interact, and indeed, what it means to be ‘human’.
If you listen to some commentators, a future with AI sounds bleak. Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft’s AI CEO, has said that almost all white-collar work will be automated by August 2027. August 2027. That’s not far away! People: you have just over a year to get your house in order.
He’s not the only one making such predictions. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, thinks half of entry-level white-collar jobs will be gone within five years. And former US Presidential candidate Andrew Yang thinks that if your job is mainly sitting at a computer, the game’s up. In the next few months, says Yang, we will see – and I quote – a “great disembowelling of white-collar jobs”.
What are we to do then, in the face of such major disruption? Or, more importantly, what are our children to do? For it is our children – meek or not – who will inherit the earth.
For me, this is not a hypothetical question. I have twin girls, currently in Year 6. They are at that magical stage of life – betwixt childhood and adulthood, when they are becoming independent, learning how to ‘adult’, and finding their own way in the world. But it’s also a critical time. In the next few years, they will need to make important – and life-changing – decisions about their future.
How are they supposed to make those decisions when the world around them is changing so rapidly? When all the usual guidebooks have been ripped to shreds in front of their eyes?
In particular, when it comes to artificial intelligence, should my kids lean into AI, embracing all it has to offer? Become AI-native, AI-first, perhaps even AI-subordinate? Or should they recoil from AI, instead choosing to double-down on all things human?
(As an aside, if it wasn’t for the obvious ethical issues, I’d be tempted to run an experiment with my twins. I could have one twin go all in on AI, and keep the other well away from it. And see who turns out best. What a great experiment that would be. Alas, if it wasn’t for the pesky matter of ethics!)
In the absence then of a dystopian twins experiment, what should my children – or your children for that matter – do?
What should your children study?
Or a version of this question, which I am commonly asked is: What should my children study?
In a world of excessive uncertainty, does it make sense to study anything anymore – when there might not be any jobs to go to at the end of it all?
As a computer scientist, who trained in the art of artificial intelligence thirty years ago, I would love to stand here and tell you that your kids should study computer programming. That’s what we’ve been telling our kids until recently, after all.
But in recent months, that advice suddenly looks ill-placed. In 2026, AI coding tools have suddenly matured. They’ve gone from being, at the end of 2025, clunky tools used by only a fraction of software developers, to solutions that in many real-world situations can generate 90-100% of all the code in a product. Indeed, Boris Cherny, who leads Anthropic’s AI coding work, says their latest desktop product, Claude Cowork, was “pretty much all” built by AI.
In a world where AI can write all the world’s code, can I hand-on-heart tell my daughters to study programming? Every software engineer I know is having an existential crisis. Everything they’ve trained in has suddenly become obsolete. Yes, it’s faster and more fun than before — but livelihoods are also at stake. Excitement won’t pay the mortgage.
If I am not going to recommend programming to my twins then, what other options are there? The law, perhaps? We’ll always need good lawyers, right?
Just over a week ago, Anthropic released “Claude for Legal”, which has been described as “an orchestration layer for legal work.” It pretty much up-ended the specialist Legal IT industry overnight. And this development is typical of what is happening in other sectors: it used to be the case that sector-specific work required sector-specific experience. This was the moat that allowed software-as-a-service companies to thrive in law, finance, and other professional services. But we’re now finding out that a general purpose company, like Anthropic, can disrupt a sector it knows nothing about. It’s Saascopolypse for lawyers.
The general public will, no doubt, not lament the death of lawyers. And I don’t believe all lawyers will be out of a job soon. But it’s conceivable we’ll need a lot fewer — so advising my kids to study law is perhaps not the best choice.
Maybe I will tell the twins to stay away from knowledge work altogether. To go towards jobs less likely to be disrupted by AI.
But even here, we are seeing signs of disruption.
Take nursing, for instance. The caring professions are often held up as being immune to AI. But we’re already seeing robots in aged care. Australian company Andromeda has developed a robot, Abi, that can take a lot of the pressure off nurses by engaging with residents. Andromeda was started by a Uni Melb student during COVID, now has a $100M valuation, and has already deployed Abi in tens of aged care homes across the country.
I don’t think robots will replace nurses — but some employers might use it as an excuse to hire fewer.
What about blue-collar work? The trades are being disrupted too. While I don’t think we’ll have robot plumbers any time soon, AI is already impacting expertise in the trades.
As an example, I recently had an electrical problem with my car and so called an auto electrician. After looking at my battery for a few minutes, the guy turned his back on me, pulled out his phone, and started consulting ChatGPT on what to do next. I’m not really sure how I feel about that. Does AI risk degrading specialist expertise in our blue-collar workers?
Leaning into the uniquely human
At this point, I’m struggling to know what to advise my kids – not computer programming, law, nursing, or the trades. So what then?
In his latest book, British author Daniel Susskind offers us some advice. The secret to a successful future, he says, is to lean into those skills that (at least for now) make us uniquely human: judgement, critical thinking, empathy, and system-level thinking.
I agree with Susskind — but I’d add one more set of skills, which might be more important than all the others: the skills of business.
Let me briefly cover three of these skills, that I think will become increasingly important in an AI-dominated future.
First, there is human values and ethics. One of the great unsolved problems of AI is that of ‘alignment’ – that is, how do we develop AI systems that act in alignment with human values? This is a problem as old as AI itself. Isaac Asimov wrote about it in 1950. His solution was the Three Laws of Robotics, rules hard-coded into any AI system to ensure no harm would come to humans.
In practice, however, hard-coding such rules into AI is not so simple. Modern-day AI is essentially a large-scale statistical pattern matching machine; and wherever there is statistics, there will be error. Machines are still notoriously fickle when it comes to values and ethics. If you want to teach your kids something useful, then, teach them to be ethical decision makers.
Second, there is leadership. There are 8 billion people in the world today. And the UN projects this number to grow, peaking at around 10 billion in 2080. That’s a lot of people. And people need to be led.
It’s possible we will end up in a situation where these people are led by an AI. You might have heard examples of AI CEOs – but all of these have either been hoaxes or publicity stunts. For the foreseeable future, at least, AI CEOs don’t seem likely.
People lead people. And people leaders need to be able to interpret the nuances of human-to-human connection to get anything done. That’s just not something that AI can do. At least not yet.
Finally, there are the business skills of entrepreneurship. And this is where I think we, as humans, should lean in most heavily. Entrepreneurs are already using AI to grow businesses in a way they couldn’t before. New products can be vibe-coded in a matter of hours. Purely AI finance or HR teams are realistic for a small start-up. In April of this year, the New York Times reported what may be the first example of a “one person AI company”: telehealth provider Medvi which, allegedly, grew from nothing to $400M in sales using AI to automate everything, and did all of this with a single founder and no employees.
The other week, I tried my own experiment in becoming a one person AI company.
I had an idea for a business. I’ve had many business ideas in the past, but mostly I’ve never pursued them because of lack of time, lack of skills, or lack of motivation. But for my latest (and greatest) idea, I was determined to do things differently – and the secret to doing this must be AI, right? Could I use AI to take my idea and quickly turn it into a successful business?
First, the good news. I went from idea in my head to fully-working prototype in just 4 hours. That’s from nothing to an iPhone app that I could potentially sell in just one evening. Pretty cool, huh?
But what I quickly realised is that building the tech is a minority of the effort in building a successful business. We now live in a world where ideas can be realised in hours rather than months — you can short-circuit all that initial work. But paradoxically, when building products from ideas is easy, having the right idea becomes ever more important.
The hard part of building a business – even a tech-driven one – isn’t the technology. It’s the human relationships. You still need the skills to convince investors, talk to partners, and build an ecosystem that can sell and distribute your idea. And all of that relies on human-to-human connection — something AI will never replace.
Business skills then – leadership, innovative thinking, values and ethics – have, in my mind, suddenly become prime currency in a world of heightened uncertainty. They were important before, but they are absolutely essential now.
This is the reason why I joined Melbourne Business School just a few months ago. People often ask me why – I’m an AI geek after all. But for me, the reason is clear: AI is disrupting every business, and business schools are training the next generation of leaders; business schools therefore need to be on the front lines of the AI revolution. And I want to help to get them there.
What should our children focus on then?
They should develop their business skills. If the future really is as bleak for jobs as some would suggest, we will find ourselves in a world where “hustle” is critical to survival; and hustle means business skills.
The future is a team sport
I’ll finish with a story about my twin girls. About a year ago, they joined a netball team. It’s been transformative for them. It’s given them a new network of friends. They love going to school because they get to hang out with those friends. And, as they grow into independent teenagers, they head off after school to hang out with those friends at the shopping centre or at Macdonalds.
As a father, I look upon all of this with a sense of pride. My kids are growing up. They have their own team. And that team is teaching them the human-to-human relationship skills that they’ll need in their future lives.
Team sports do this. They teach us the value of human-to-human connection. And I think business does that too. Business is a team sport. And while some of our team mates in the future might be artificial, the most important ones will remain uniquely human.
