What Future Are We Raising Them For?

This is a bit of a personal one.

I was at my eight-year-old daughter's school assembly today. She was sitting cross-legged, hair slightly chaotic, wearing the same squinted expression she pulls when she's trying very hard not to laugh (I may have stuck my tongue out when she spotted me). I looked around at the other faces, forty kids in their little uniforms, fidgeting, waving at parents, mouthing along to their school song, which is set to the tune of a piece of French classical music I really can't quite place.

Sitting there, I felt something I wasn't expecting. A sinking feeling, and a question I think most parents have asked themselves at some point: what kind of future are we raising them for?

I've asked myself this before, and it certainly isn't the first time it's filled me with a genuine feeling of concern. The reason I feel compelled to write this blog post today is more that I'd like to understand what other parents, and non-parents, think about this question.

The World Our Kids Are Walking Into

To understand the anxiety, you first have to look at what's actually happening.

The world these kids are walking into is being shaped by more than one force. Globalisation continues to shift where work happens and who does it. Political instability, automation, the rising cost of living, an ageing population that will need caring for. Any one of these would be enough to make a parent pause. Combined, they make the future feel genuinely hard to predict.

It has been written about a lot over the last few years, but the force that seems to be moving fastest right now is obviously AI. Now, I'm a big proponent of AI. I use it every day, and the efficiencies I've experienced have allowed me to build a pretty decent Executive Search business with a level of sophistication you might expect from a much bigger, better-resourced firm. AI has allowed us to build some pretty amazing tools. That much is true. But there are also very well-informed voices out there who understand the reality that most of us parents are still fairly ignorant to:

Geoffrey Hinton, the "godfather of AI" and Nobel Prize winner, said AI will have "the capabilities to replace many, many jobs" and that in a few years "there'll be very few people needed" in software engineering. He compared it to the industrial revolution making human physical strength redundant, but this time it's human intelligence at risk.

Vinod Khosla, Silicon Valley investor and early OpenAI backer, said "starting in about 2030, 80% of all jobs will be capable of being done by an AI."

Ford CEO Jim Farley warned AI will "replace literally half of all white-collar workers."

Walmart CEO Doug McMillon said it "is going to change literally every job."

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said: "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming. I don't think this is on people's radar."

And there are many, many more of these sorts of quotes.

The jobs most visibly at risk are what economists call routine-cognitive roles: data entry, basic document processing, certain kinds of customer service, administrative work, portions of legal research and financial analysis. Not because these jobs are unimportant, but because they follow predictable patterns, and patterns are exactly what AI is good at. The routine layer of almost every white-collar profession is being compressed or removed, and what remains requires more judgment, more communication, more genuine human presence.

At the same time, the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2025 report is unambiguous about where growth is heading. AI and machine-learning specialists, data analysts, green energy engineers, care economy workers, educators, and what the report calls human-AI collaboration roles. People whose job is essentially to be the adult in the room when the machine is doing the work.

That last category is worth considering. It's not a job title that exists cleanly yet, but it describes something real: the person who knows enough about the tool to use it well, enough about the problem to direct it, and enough about people to explain the result to someone who needs to act on it.

The growth sectors cluster around five broad areas:

1. Technology and digital infrastructure, but not just writing code. Operating AI systems, auditing data, designing ethical guardrails.

2. The care economy: nursing, social work, counselling, community support, mental health, aged care. Work that grows with an ageing population and that, by its nature, resists automation.

3. Education and training, expanding as reskilling becomes continuous rather than once-in-a-career.

4. Green energy and climate adaptation, where the physical work of building, monitoring, and maintaining new infrastructure is going to need millions of hands for decades.

5. Public services, which face the dual challenge of doing more with less and doing it digitally.

What's striking about this list is that several of the fastest-growing areas, care, education, public service, are the kinds of work that society has historically undervalued and underpaid. The future may require us to change how we view and remunerate these sectors.

This is the world those kids in the assembly hall are walking into. Not a world without work. A world where the shape of work has shifted, and where the old maps are becoming unreliable. At the very least, the map that was presented to my generation feels distinctly out of step with that which might be needed to guide the kids of today.

The Degree Problem

Which brings us to education, and to the question that's unsettling a lot of parents who've held a particular vision of the future in their heads for years.

For most of the last forty years, the answer was relatively straightforward. You worked hard at school, chose a sensible degree, got a job, and progressed. The path had ruts worn into it by millions of people who'd walked it before you.

Degrees like computer science, in particular, felt like the modern equivalent of a guaranteed ticket. Learn to code. Build things. The world runs on software now; it will only run on more software tomorrow. That was the logic, and it felt watertight until recently.

Then something shifted. This year, enrolment in computer and information science programs dropped 8.1 percent in the US, the steepest fall of any field of study. Computer science specifically fell 11.2 percent. More than 60 percent of universities are reporting declining enrolment in CS programs. Students are anxious that the very tools they'd be learning to build are becoming capable of building themselves.

The degree that was supposed to be the safest bet has developed, as someone once said about currencies, a confidence problem.

Medicine still feels different. You cannot yet entirely outsource a bedside manner, a physical examination, a judgment call made at 3am with incomplete information. But even there, the tasks are changing fast. Diagnostics are being transformed by AI. Administrative medicine, the enormous paperwork mountain that consumes so much of a doctor's day, is already being automated. The shape of medical work in twenty years will not look like the shape it looks like now.

Law. Finance. Accounting. Teaching. Journalism. Architecture. Pick any profession that once came with a certain job security, and somewhere in its near future there is likely a moment of forced reinvention.

I'm not saying these fields are going away. I'm saying that the map we were handed, study this, become that, is no longer reliable. And I don't know what to replace it with. Not yet.

What's Keeping Parents Awake

I'm not alone in that assembly hall feeling. A survey published in late 2025 found that 97 percent of parents believe their child's career, or potential career, could be disrupted or replaced by AI within the next decade. Ninety-seven percent. That is essentially everyone. The anxieties cluster in predictable ways: parents worry about fewer job openings, unstable short-term roles, lower earning potential, and the specific fear, shared by more than half of parents, that their children will have fewer opportunities than their own generation.

One in three parents is not confident that schools are preparing students for AI-era jobs. And perhaps most telling: despite all the noise about digital careers and tech skills, parents report that their children are still gravitating toward skilled trades, corporate jobs, and government or public service roles. The reliable. The tangible. The things that require you to physically show up.

There's a particular anxiety that I find most interesting: the fear of being caught in an educational rat race. Research from the University of Chicago found that parents are pushing their children toward AI tools partly out of fear that other children are using them, and that their child will fall behind if they don't. The concern is that this short-term competitive logic might actually harm children's cognitive development. That outsourcing thinking to tools too early could hollow out the very foundations that make a person genuinely good at thinking at all.

It's a real tension. Not a reason to ban AI from childhood. But a reason to be careful about what we're teaching alongside it.

What the Research Actually Shows

I've been looking at research mapping entry-level roles to school subjects, and the results are both reassuring and a little humbling.

For technology and digital infrastructure jobs, the pipeline runs through mathematics, computer science, and statistics. Not to produce coders per se, but to build the underlying logic and systems thinking that makes someone useful when the tools change. Computational thinking. Data literacy. Troubleshooting. The ability to explain your reasoning, not just produce an output.

For healthcare and the care economy, the path runs through biology, psychology, communication, and what the research calls "active listening": the ability to hear what someone is actually saying rather than what you expect them to say. Empathy. Calm decision-making. Basic digital fluency for tools that keep changing.

For green energy and climate work, it's science, earth science, physics, and mathematics, alongside measurement, systems thinking, and something the researchers frame as "environmental stewardship." Which sounds abstract but really means caring enough about the outcome to do the work carefully.

For public services and administration, it's civics, writing, data literacy, and the surprisingly underrated skill of translating information for different audiences. Taking something complicated and making it simple enough for someone who needs to act on it.

What runs through all of these is a small set of capabilities that keep reappearing regardless of industry: clear communication, analytical thinking, the ability to learn new tools without panicking, and some version of emotional intelligence. The capacity to deal with other humans who are complicated and sometimes frightened and always more contextual than any dataset.

McKinsey's most recent analysis is characteristically blunt: job postings requiring AI fluency have risen nearly sevenfold in just two years. But the human capabilities that matter most, judgment, interpersonal skill, creativity, adaptability, are becoming more valuable, not less, precisely because the tools are getting better at the other stuff. LinkedIn's CEO put it plainly: "The future of work belongs not to people with the fanciest degrees, but to the people who are adaptable, forward-thinking, ready to learn."

Which is a nice thing to say. And also deeply unsatisfying to a parent sitting in an assembly hall trying to work out what to actually do to best prepare their child for an unpredictable future.

The Education Gap

Here is where I want to be careful, because it's easy to write an article like this that ends up as a kind of pastoral lament, "bring back woodwork and start emotional intelligence classes," without grappling with the real structural difficulty.

Schools are being asked to prepare children for a world that does not exist yet, using systems designed for a world that no longer quite does either. The OECD's future-skills framework talks about teaching knowledge alongside skills, attitudes and values. Not just knowing things, but knowing how to think, how to adapt, how to make ethical judgments in ambiguous situations. That's good. It's also very hard to teach, harder to assess, and resistant to the kind of standardisation that educational systems tend to fall back on when under pressure.

The research on what actually works in primary education points toward project-based learning where students have to explain their reasoning, peer teaching and collaborative problem-solving, making and building things, and experiences that require revision and iteration. These aren't revolutionary ideas. They're mostly things good teachers have always done. The question is whether systems can be rebuilt around them at scale, under the financial and time constraints that schools face.

There is also a question about university that many families are starting to ask openly: is a degree still the best path for my child? More than half of parents say that AI has changed how they think about the right post-secondary route for their child. Apprenticeships, vocational training, and certificate programmes are getting a second look they haven't received in decades. This isn't anti-intellectualism. It's a rational response to a world where the credential-to-employment pipeline is less predictable than it used to be, and where adaptability may matter more than the specific content of any particular qualification.

What Might Actually Help

None of this is reason for despair. I want to be clear about that, because it would be easy to finish reading this and feel more anxious than when you started, and that's not the point.

The skills that seem to future-proof people, across industry after industry, across the research I've read and the conversations I've had, are not esoteric. They are not things that require access to elite schools or expensive tutors. They are things that any child can develop: curiosity, the ability to communicate clearly, comfort with being wrong and trying again, the capacity to care about other people and to show it. Critical thinking. Adaptability. The willingness to learn continuously rather than once.

These are also, not coincidentally, the things that make a good human being. Not just a productive one.

The WEF report, for all its corporate language, lands somewhere pretty radical: the fastest-growing jobs in the world include nursing, social work, and teaching alongside AI specialists and data engineers. The future doesn't belong only to people who work with machines. It belongs to people who work with people. Who build things. Who fix things. Who help other people navigate systems that are confusing and sometimes frightening.

It belongs, in other words, to humans who are good at being human.

And Then?

If you've read this far and you want to email me or drop a question in the comments: but what's the actual answer? What should I tell my kid? What should they study? What will be safe? I'll tell you what I'd tell you if we were sitting across from each other. I'll answer you the same way a scientist might answer someone who asks a question like,"Why is there life?"

A good scientist, an honest one, will pause. And then they'll say: "I don't know."

Not because they haven't thought about it. Not because the question isn't worth asking. But because it's the cleanest answer available, and the most true. All the other answers, the frameworks, the forecasts, the five-point plans, are attempts to outrun that fact. They're useful. I've offered several of them here. But underneath all of it, that's still where we land.

I don't know what the world will look like when your child or mine walks into it as an adult. Nobody does. And I think pretending otherwise, dressing uncertainty up as strategy, is a disservice to the question and to the kids.

What I do know is that the fog has always been there. Every generation of parents has stood at this edge. And the children turned out, mostly, to be more capable of navigating what came than anyone predicted. Humans are nothing if not incredibly resourceful and adaptable.

That's not nothing.

So. I want to hear from you. What are you thinking? What are you telling your own kids? Are you reassuring them, redirecting them, quietly panicking and burying your head in the sand?

Leave a comment or send me a message. This is a massive topic that really does keep me up at night.

Research cited in this article draws on the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, OECD Future of Education and Skills frameworks, the Zety AI Readiness Gap 2025 Parent Outlook Report, University of Chicago Becker Friedman Institute research on AI adoption in schools, McKinsey Global Institute analysis of human skills in the age of AI, and Elicit-sourced academic literature on school subjects and future roles.