Will our kids become astronauts?

“When I grow up, I want to be an Astronaut”, she said.

We were lying on the grass under a starlit night sky. I showed her Sirius, pointed out Mars and Jupiter, and the Orion constellation. From that point on she’s been fascinated by outer space.

“Why do you want to go to space when there is nothing there?” my wife asked, “It’s called space because it’s empty”.

My daughter looked at her in shock.

“That’s not true at all Mummy”, she said in amazement, “In space there are so many stars. You can walk on the Moon, fly around the Sun, visit Mars and meet aliens”.

She pause for a bit to take a breath, thought carefully and said,

“Mummy space is not empty, it’s just very big. That’s why we call it space”.

You can’t argue with the crystal clear logic of a four and a half year old and their dreams.

I believe having dreams and ambitions are important, even at a young age. Dreamers young and old can achieve what we think is impossible, such as walking on the Moon in 1969. Our greatest weakness as human beings is to shun those dreams and lack foresight. Think about these prediction made in the past:

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons” (US magazine Popular Mechanics in 1949)
“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers” (Thomas Watson, the chairman of IBM in 1943)
“The Americans have need of the telephone but we do not. We have plenty of messenger boys”. (Sir William Price, Chief Engineer at the Post Office in 1978)

The future is very difficult to predict and our children will probably inhabit a completely different world to what we know today. As a dad, I can’t stop thinking and reading about it.

I worry about my children becoming slaves to their jobs, working in an ever expansive digital world where the speed of everything picks up to unimaginable levels. But then perhaps work-life will improve for them with flexible work hours and technology to make things easier. In the future, the professions they take could be very different to the ones we know today, tackling problems from the comfort of their home offices in globally connected teams of experts, like in Lynda Gratton’s book The Shift.

Or perhaps the economy won’t exist in the conventional sense. Capitalism will be replaced without the need for an invisible hand to allocate resources. Jeremy Rifkin’s describes a future world (The Zero Marginal Cost Society) where resources are shared and looked after in a collaborative commons.

In this reality, the world shifts from scarcity to global abundance thanks to new technologies and improved efficiency. The Internet of Things, accessible renewable energy distributed by smart-grids and free online education become the new order. Resources aren’t be owned – they are shared and looked after for the next generation.

It sounds all very nice, but I can’t help think what if killer robots do actually rise up and exterminate us?

Robotic automation is already starting to transform the structure of our economies. Labour costs in China have been rising and automation offers a cheaper and more efficient alternative. Robots don’t get sick, don’t require a salary and can work 24 hours a day. Production can also be carried out closer to home or “onshore”, saving on transportation costs and being closer to the end market.

So far, technological advances that have improved efficiency, have been hugely beneficial to us. Despite laying off low-skilled workers initially, it has generally led to job creation in higher-skilled roles which pay better.

However, we may be at a turning point, especially with the advances now being made in artificial intelligence. It’s true that we are nowhere near to being able to emulate the human mind or surpass its intelligence. However, it doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the not so distant future, especially when you consider how Moore’s law in computing – the doubling of transistors in a dense integrated circuit – has played out so far over the last 50 years.

The effects of automation have already started to be felt. In the last few decades in the US, compensation hasn’t kept up with rising productivity. Meanwhile, job creation has been in decline. And, corporate profits by contrast, have risen quite substantially as a proportion of GDP. (Graphs taken from Martin Ford’s book The Rise of the Robots).

An standard iPhone 6 weighs 129 grams, which is substantially less 1.5 tonnes. There 1.9 billion smartphones users around the world, which far exceed the number five users. Furthermore, smartphone users have no need for message boys, the telegram or pigeon mail.

I don’t know whether my daughter will have a better work life balance or live in a fairer and cleaner society, or even be made redundant thanks to a robot. Her ambition to become an astronaut seems out of this world today considering that since the 1960s only 12 people have walked on the Moon and roughly 10 people visit space a year – nobody apart from crazed abductees have met aliens. However, anything is possible because the future is unpredictable.

I’m going to keep her dream alive, help through school, put a little money aside and invest all I can in her. I’ve decided to share her dream too.