What to tell your children as AI upends the world of work: David Richards
Two weeks ago, at a business meetup in Sheffield, the first question in the Q&A came not from an entrepreneur or an investor but from a mother in the room. “I have a 14-year-old and an 18-year-old. What do I tell them?”
I have been thinking about it ever since. I told her the truth. The world her children are entering is not an evolution of the one she knew. It is a different system entirely, and most families are still working from assumptions that stopped being true some time ago.
The IMF estimates that 40 per cent of jobs globally are exposed to AI disruption, rising to 60 per cent in advanced economies like Britain. Not factory jobs. The professions an entire generation was told were safe: law, accountancy, finance, software development.
The junior solicitor who spent three years and £50,000 in fees to review contracts that a machine now processes in seconds. The paralegal whose entire role was discovery. The graduate accountant whose first two years consisted entirely of tasks that AI completes before lunch. The junior developer competing with a tool that codes through the night without complaint, stock options or a pension.
These roles are not under pressure from recession or offshoring. They are being removed by machines that are faster, cheaper and, in many of these tasks, simply better.
I founded a coding academy because I believed learning to code was the surest route to a stable career. I no longer believe that. AI writes code, and it writes it well. Students are still being told to climb a ladder whose bottom rung is already gone.
So what do I tell her?
First, do not try to game the market. The last decade is full of people who chased what looked safe, only to find it gone by the time they arrived. Data science was the answer, until AI started doing large parts of that too. Chasing security is not strategy. It is lag.
Second, do what you enjoy, and understand why that matters now more than it ever has.
Passion alone is not enough. Depth is. The people who will survive this are those who think more clearly, go further, and bring judgment that no algorithm has come close to replacing. A paralegal who uses AI to clear the routine and redirects her energy towards clients and decisions has a future. The one who tries to out-process the machine does not, because that is a competition only one side can win.
What is forming is a permanent divide, not a gradual adjustment. Those who use AI to amplify themselves will move faster and compound their advantage with every passing month. Those who compete with it at the level of tasks will find their wages driven down until there is nothing left to drive.
The idea that a good degree in law or accountancy leads to a long, stable career is over. Not damaged. Finished. Universities have not caught up with this. Most parents have not either. The market already has.
To the mother in Sheffield, I would say this. Use these tools with your children, not as a shortcut but as a way of showing them what is possible. The curiosity, judgment and ability to earn someone’s trust remain stubbornly, irreducibly human, and no model trained on the internet has come close to replicating them yet.
The child who argues back, pulls things apart to see how they work and cannot sit still in a world that tells them to? That child is not the problem. That child is exactly what this age needs.
David Richards MBE is managing partner of Yorkshire AI Labs