What is the best online skill for a better future?

An online skill? Artificial Intelligence (AI)

But I’ll soon explain why I believe another overall skill is actually more important.

Why AI? AI will soon be everywhere. It’s late 2023 now but the rate at which it’s being adopted is rising by the day by businesses and creators of all kinds of sizes. It will soon make a lot of positions and roles completely redundant and it’s started to do that already. Roles that we think, ‘nah, that will never be replaced.’ Yes. Even those roles will be gone. Tech is a strange thing, we first resist it, but soon enough we just accept it. Just how we all adapted to getting into Ubers with absolute trust, the same absolute trust will happen with AI and robotics in the years to come.

So my big advice is to start getting your hands dirty with AI now. But don’t just take courses and learn the theory. That’s very important sure as it gives you a deeper understanding of how an end product works, but the best way to learn with tech is to build. Build small play projects like chatbots until you feel confident enough to offer your services for free, whether at work or freelancing. Build something that can be used in the real world by the market. That will be the best way to learn and develop skills that will serve you.

Remember this maxim:

AI won’t replace people. People using AI will replace people.

And so what about the skill that is more important than learning AI?

I believe it’s the skill of learning how to learn.

We are now moving into an exponential growth phase in society. Technologies are growing and converging to meet creating new possibilities that we could only dream of decades before. This is all happening faster than we can keep up with. This means what we learn today may soon become redundant years or even months later if progress keeps at its current pace.

The solution to stay relevant and useful in this time is to be able to quickly grasp a concept and begin having a working knowledge and understanding of it. This is done by learning the few key principles that make up the subject. Like the branches of a tree. From these principles, there will be subprinciples, like the twigs of a tree. Having a very strong understanding of these will serve you well. From here there will be new insights that come along, like fruits and leaves, coming every so often, much like the seasons in a year. But these are only useful to you if you first understand the more permanent things such as the principles. The difficult part is that these are found within textbooks and dense materials like MOOCs. But if you make the time, it will be time well spent. An investment in yourself and your future.

Good luck learning.