When I was around ten or twelve years of age, I used my first digital photo editing tool, which was a pirated version of what I think was Photoshop, or something similar. It was on a brother's Amiga 500 and I didn't spend much time with it, since there were also pirated games that were more attractive to a kid. However, I know many people around my age and older, who got their start in their IT careers on cracked software.
I was talking to a client about the lack of specialized welders and their need to import skilled workers from other countries, a large and expensive challenge at these times. One of the questions I asked was what was the average age of the specialized welders, which tended to be a little older. I then asked, how did the specialized welders learn, which was through experience. I added, but you have automated a lot of the basic welding tasks.
This happens in many areas now, where the basic tasks have been automated, which sets up the problem of, can't do the job without experience, can't get experience as there are no jobs to do. In the case of software, a lot of the pirating has been stopped due to cloud access, which means that a child would have to convince a parent to spend significant amounts on what is unlikely to become a hobby. Having the cracked software available, essentially allows experimenters to become enthusiasts, enthusiasts to explore all the way into becoming professionals - people who have to buy a licence.
In Finland, there are very few fast-food jobs for teens, and only holiday work is common these days, yet there are skills and commitment lessons to be able to consistently be employed, even if it is only a short shift or two a week. There is of course the added experience of earning and managing money, scheduling, messing up and going without involved to, as well as the satisfaction associated with being able to buy something with money earned - ownership.
This continual move away from skill development in favor of automation and convenience affects other areas also, including social ability. While I had to learn how to socialize and flirt in order to get a date, "kids today" swipe left or right and that's pretty much that, the understanding is there. This might seem convenient and effective, but the problem is that the process of getting that date and flirting teaches skills in how to build and maintain a relationship past the first date too and without those skills, relationships can struggle.
For example, while a child born today might not need to read and write much in their future, there are other skills that surround or are made possible from the ability. Automating the process might be like teaching a child how to use a calculator instead of basic math, as while they might get the answers, the process becomes a blackbox to them, and the logic that will affect their intuition and decision making on a host of other areas will be affected. Not teaching the fundamentals could mean that vital skills and mental patterns are never learned, which could have profound effects on the child's future.
I personally see that sitting young children down in front of screens for passive entertainment or gaming, could lead to them missing out on various types of mental development, which could severely hamper their potential later. Skipping these basic activities is to discount the skills that are developed by completing them as unnecessary, often by people who have already developed them as they grew up in a time where automation wasn't possible, or encouraged.
The world we have created through innovation and our use of technology is driving how we learn and develop and therefore, the directions we take in life. While we value convenience as it saves us time and energy, we are very poor at evaluating the counterfactual situation where, we didn't automate the processes, we did it the hard way and learned the ropes. When we are conditioned into the automation, we really don't know what we are missing out on and we cannot know how limiting it could be on our future self.
While there has always been diversification of skill based on many factors, there has never been a time in our history where there is a clear distinction between the skilled and unskilled, with the unskilled increasing having less to trade with, as automation replaces them. "Unskilled" might be the wrong term, appropriately skilled might be better. I think that this is creating another divide between social groups, that is further going to create civic unrest and the continued disintegration of community.
While it is hard to know what skills will be valued in the future, whatever they are will likely require early development to build the foundation skills, the precursors to brilliance. I get the sense that whatever those skills will be, the value will be created because they are both in demand and, hard to get, but I could be wrong - it could be that the perfect traits for the future are inexperience, low-motivation, passivity, ill-health, uncoordinated, emotionally unstable and compliant.
These types of people are now and will be increasingly valuable - as Consumers of Things connected by the Internet of Things.
Maybe, we might want to think about being a little basic as a pathway to being very skilled, rather than something to be automated away for convenience.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]
I can usually rewire my brain pretty quickly but apparently only parts of it can be rewired as despite my best efforts I can't seem to get it to accept video tutorials the first time like I can do with text, and "everyone" does video tutorials for Blender these days as apparently it's easier to just screencast your nonsense than screenshot and write pages about it XD
There's no real need to pirate anything these days when there's FOSS/FLOSS stuff that's somewhat equivalent in most cases though some people still have the outdated stigma that the free stuff is worse because it's free. I had this huge argument about Photoshop vs GIMP with my sibling which I didn't really have much of a chance in as I never used either beyond the basics for photo editing XD I find Krita much, much better than either for digital painting but in fairness I don't have a recent version of Photoshop to compare to and I've been putting my kids onto freeware stuff, though I suspect my middle child may have some cracked software because all the editing tutorials she watches uses Adobe crap and she doesn't know how to translate that over to what she has.
Seems like a natural expansion of the other long running problem of everyone wants someone experienced to do the job but no one will give anyone a chance to get any experience.
A startling number of people aren't self aware enough to figure out how they developed the skills they have or got to where they are today so probably have no idea that they're undermining their kids/next generation/whatever.
And then the kids who have no way to know any better can't see the point of knowing how to do long division when short division is quicker and easier or why you'd even bother with that when everyone has a calculator in their pocket. I see it in my kids and their schooled friends who disregard some lessons they consider irrelevant because the most obvious thought of "what if you don't have [this thing that currently does it]" seems impossible.
I am not great with video tutorials either - they move too fast for me :D
I have used Krita a little, but it isn't the same use case perhaps. I also wonder when it comes to the free stuff, where is the monetization coming from, as there must be, right?
Yep. When I mentioned it to my client they went a bit quiet. It is kind of like they expect other manufacturers to train the people they steal :D
This is what I assume.
I think that this happens often now - when the internet is unavailable for some reason. We see how reliant we are for most of our lives and then sit around with "nothing to do" - soon, we really will have nothing to do.
What's your use case? It was designed for painting in which is what I do, and you can animate in it now as well but I haven't been game enough to try to figure that one out, it's been A Very Long TimeTM since I did 2d anim and I find it harder than 3d XD
LoL! That is EXACTLY how it works XD
J and I usually joke about going into withdrawals on Christmas Island as they still use archaic quota systems over there so we have to really restrict internet usage XD
I feel sorry for people who can't find something to do, I always have something to do :D
a lot of the time it's stuff I don't want to do but you know adulting
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.Relationships built online are rarely valued.
For instance when they have a quarrel, instead of communicating with each other both parties just fall back to phone pressing.
These days many people just want the delivered on time. Take for example freelancers, they do not need to meet up each other for business to happen.
A child that learns the basic arithmetics has an advantage compared to the cold that skips the basic process.
The former has knowledge on syntax because using a calculator is based on hand written principles.
But with the way things are going in this age, one might need to enforce these social skills on the youngers as they grow so that ot sticks with them. I feel I didn't learn all that I know now from my parents and I'll definitely teach my child all that I learnt to help them in their day to day lives
Knoeledge and some logic based around it. I suspect that pretty much every valued skill is a cluster of many, many skills that without them, the valued skill is unavailable. People end up very disjointed from themselves, especially when they essentially have mental development gaps that are no long closeable.
Culture plays a big part in what we learn, as parents are very limited. the problem being though is that many kids are going to group - "birds of a feather" and end up surrounded by people just like them - and think it is normal.
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.A lot of repair shops have closed up because it is simply cheaper to buy a new device when the current one breaks. I started out a long long time ago working in an electronics repair shop, TV's, Radio's, tape recorders, home electronics basically. I had to learn Ohm's law and a lot of other how to trouble shoot things. I am actually glad I did not continue along that line for a profession. It was dying and I could see that even at the age of 17. It was just simpler and cheaper to buy a new one.
Quality control for electronics took a nose dive, things were made cheap, made to fail, and throw away. Kind of like what society is doing for today's youth, make them cheap, make them fail, then throw them away when they can no longer consume.
The interesting thing now is that even the things that are made well, "fall apart" as they are no longer supported by the latest updates to software or, the software itself makes the device look like it is failing. Crazy.
Crazy is right, and yet we continue to feed the machine. I used to have to get a new computer every two years, next year I likely will need to get another new one, as this one is going on 5 years old now. It over heats, the fans are dying, but that just means I need to turn it off and let it cool for an hour or two.
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.I agree with you automatic jobs are killing the chances of new inexperienced workers to become skilled as they do not have a chance to learn. But that happens in industrial environments. On the contrary, in digital jobs, there is a huge ecosystem of learning material online you can start from.
Society is migrating from an industrial one into a digital one, the former keeps pushing workers out of it and the latter welcoming them. But at the same time, those highly skilled in industrial jobs may end up being well compensated as there always be a small need for experienced workers.
Yes, I agree. However, how many of those digital jobs will be automated away soonish?
The high-skilled industrial jobs are definitely well paid already - Yet, there are few teens taking up the trades - not glamorous enough for instagram selfies :D
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.Oh there's still ways around all the cloud confirmation licensing stuff. The software needs to be satisfied it's licensed and can be fooled into thinking so by some nifty injected code. As I was deep into this once, the 'bad habits' are hard to change.
This is true and I am no stranger - but for a 10 year old? It is a different skillset again, but not necessarily the wheelhouse of a designer (Photoshop) or something like that.
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.The US Navy teaches people to weld all the time. It's a basic skill that can be improved on. I'll guarantee you that Electric Boat (Nuclear Submarine Builder) doesn't have a certification path to be a hull welder but the Navy does.
The problem being that the candidates have to motivated and available ie In the Navy.
The apprentice program for most trades is in trouble. Carpentry does a pretty good job but most every other trade is begging for apprentices. I think we not only need apprentices in the trades, but also in business to teach new employees to be a good and ethical worker and supervisor.
Tangent again. It's about learning basic skills and functions. I am genuinely concerned for mathematics with the current education system. Math is pretty foundational to who we are and what we do.
This is the problem - as the availability is very, very low for people wanting to come through the "ranks"
This is a problem these days too, as school teaches a lot of theory - but speaks very little about personality and how to use your own. Culture disconnects us so that we think our personality doesn't matter. We witness it on Hive all the time.
Math is one of those keystone skills that has a cluster around it. Even the basics as a child (cutting up a pizza mentally for fractions) has a multitude of skill areas that cross into other skill areas. Without those skill bridges, a person is quite useless.
Yeah. I really do worry about 'foundational skills' that are being discarded. I do not have the imagination to ponder life without math skills.
I check my gas mileage on every tank I run through my motorcycle (the car too for that matter). It gives me a working benchmark that I can use to assess how the bike is actually running. What do you do without it? Trust the fricking on board computer?
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtokens.When I see my nephews, I feel they have many skills that I hardly had at their age. But I also think, socially, they have lost some of the ease that past generations had. There is an interesting phenomenon going on in Venezuela and that is that all our lives we were taught that we had to get university degrees to do things. Unskilled labor was very poorly paid and outsourced. With the crisis, university professionals have left the country and many factories and companies have had to resort to workers who do not have as much experience in their professions. And as an irony of life, the professionals who have left the country have cried tears of blood because in spite of being doctors, oil engineers or architects, they have had to work in other professions like waiters, tinsmiths. That is to say, they have had to learn "a trade", to do tasks even though they are not qualified. A strange and crazy thing. Greetings and good Saturday, @tarazkp
I agree that fundamentals can't be skipped. Technology can't replace forming productive brain networks for young minds. That is done by traditional education and putting the mind to work
!ENGAGE 20
ENGAGEtoday.