Skills for the Modern World

The world has changed quite a lot in the last few decades, largely due to computer technology. One result is that there are now important skills that did not matter or mattered less in the past, skills that the previous generation mostly did not learn, this generation should. This post is an attempt to list as many as I, with some assistance from others, can think of. Commenters are invited to add more.

Obtaining Information: How to Drink from a Fire Hose

When I was growing up, if I wanted to learn a fact the first recourse would be the World Book encyclopedia, the second books in my parents' library. In college I had access to a university library and used it. All of those were filtered sources of information. The encyclopedia article or the book might be wrong but there was some reason the editors of the encyclopedia thought the author of the article was competent to write it, the publisher thought the book worth publishing.

Now if I want information — age specific mortality a few days ago for my previous post — I go to the Internet, which has enormously more sources of information. It is an unfiltered medium; anyone can put information up, true or false. It was always prudent to try to pay attention to the quality of the information I got but now it is essential. It follows that the ability to find information and filter it, to tell, largely on internal evidence, whether to trust something found online, is much more important than it was. It is something people need to learn and my guess is that very few of them learn it in school, K-12 or college. I have discussed some ways of doing it in past posts.

That skill is useful not only for the public issues people argue about online but also for information relevant to decisions you make. If you are buying a cell phone or a car you need to figure what information in online reviews can be trusted. If you are making medical decisions, deciding whether to have your eyesight modified by Lasik, you would like to supplement the advice of the relevant professional with information from other sources. You will find a lot of claims about nutrition online and elsewhere — figuring out which to believe is relevant to your diet and its effect on your health. A lot of information online was put there by someone trying to sell you something. You need to learn how to recognize it, what claims can be ignored, what tested from other sources.

AI

Artificial Intelligence, the newest large change, raises multiple issues. One is how to use it, how to design a suitable prompt and how to check the quality of what you get, tell whether the information it produces is true, whether the computer program it wrote you will run. Another is how to defend yourself against AI pretending to be a person. A third and older problem located between the two is how to interact with a more primitive form of AI, chatbots and the spoken equivalent, how to recognize that that is what you are interacting with, get it to provide the information you need or, failing that, connect you to a human.

Scams

Mass mailings cost almost nothing, making a scam with a .001 hit rate worth doing. That, when you receive an email with a threat to publicize your taste in online porn, is a reason to suspect that it is one of thousands of identical emails, none based on any real information beyond an email address. The same is true of phone calls purporting to offer you help collecting compensation for your recent auto accident. Even if you have had an accident, it is quite likely that the recorder of the phone call knows nothing about it, makes tens of thousands of robo-calls in the expectation that a few will be hits.

Defenses against online extortion, real or fictional, involve knowledge of passwords and other elements of online security, how to protect your computer from viruses and other threats, how to maintain air-gapped backups so in the worse case you can wipe your machine and restore, how to protect your identity.

Distorted Perceptions

Social media feeds you extremes, people prettier, richer, more talented than you would have ever have met in realspace. That can distort your perceptions of the norm, raise your standards, for yourself and others, to unrealistic levels. Conversations, depending on what corner of the net you find yourself, can make wildly distorted views appear the norm. Bubbles were common enough in the past but mostly geographical. If enough of your life is online you can end up seeing a view shared by almost none of your neighbors as what everyone believes.

Social

It has become, for a variety of reasons, less practical than it once was to make friends, find romantic partners, in realspace, church or job. The substitute is online, chat groups, social media, dating apps. People need to learn how to navigate those spaces. Finding a date among ten thousand people on an app requires different skills than among fifty fellow students. So does navigating a relationship with a stranger with whom you have no social links, no friends or acquaintances in common, no easy way of judging how much of the picture projected is true.

Photoshopping+

A picture was once good evidence, ceased to be long ago. Nowadays the same is true of a video or a voice recording. To decide what to believe you now need skills to distinguish computer generated fake from real, sufficient skepticism to not give undue weight to even the most convincing visual or audio evidence.

Computer Skills+

The first step is learning to work with your present environment, knowing what different file types, programs, interfaces are. Beyond that, in a changing world, you need to learn the skill of finding your way around a new environment, a social media app, a new program, game or gadget. When our children were young my uncle bought them both Gameboys with Pokemon cartridges, on which they spent many hours over the following months. The world they were learning was fictional but the skill of learning how to find their way around a new world was real and very useful.

Typing?

Typing became a much more important skill with the rise of the computer, still more with the replacement of the typewriter by the word processor. After using one to write my second book, a program running on an early personal computer, I concluded that prior to the invention of the word processor no books were written — it’s just too much work. When my ex-wife told me that our son, who lived with his mother but spent summers with us, was having problems with his handwriting I wrote him a typing game, later bought a better one. I saw little point to investing in an obsolete technology.

But that was some forty years ago. Typing may be becoming an obsolete skill now that voice recognition has become good enough to be a reliable substitute.

Education

The range of options for both self-education, largely online, and educating your children, online and in realspace contexts other than a conventional school, is larger than it used to be. I encountered one home schooling family some sixty years ago, no others for decades thereafter, but by the time we were home unschooling our children there were enough in our area to have a regular weekly meetup in a local park. Options intermediate between home schooling and conventional schools are becoming more common due in part to pandemic lockdowns. It is important to become familiar with the expanded educational landscape.

Tribalism

Humans have always classified each other as us and them, ingroup and outgroup. The rise of political polarization, possibly reinforced by the ability of the internet to both reinforce the cohesion of non-geographical tribes and put members of hostile tribes in contact with each other, has made it worse. One needs the skill to communicate across tribal boundaries, avoid both automatic trust for your allies and automatic hostility to members of your tribe’s outgroup, to recognize that the areas where the tribes disagree are relevant to only part of those where their members interact.