“If you can adapt, think for yourself and take ownership of what you build, you’ll be ready for whatever comes next”, says UNSW’s Professor Joel Pearson
Most people are getting AI wrong. They’re treating it like just another technology, like smartphones or social media. It isn’t. Every technology before this one automated muscle and machinery. AI automates intelligence, and intelligence built every job, company, school and city around you. When intelligence itself changes, everything that’s built on it changes too.
That might sound confronting, but I’m a technology optimist. We can build an incredible future with AI, robotics and technologies we haven’t imagined yet, however good futures don’t build themselves. They need curious, adaptable people to shape them. That means you.
The good news? The key to thriving through all this change is sitting between your ears. Develop what I call cognitive agility: the ability to change direction, learn new skills and let go of old ways of doing things. Adopt a beginner’s mindset. Experiment. Ask questions. Build the weird project. Get comfortable with not knowing where it leads.
Education will shift too. For a century, schools and universities have trained people to be employees. Over the next decade, I think that flips. The people who thrive will be what I call ‘ownists’: people who own their work rather than doing work someone hands them. Start practising now. Take on projects, use AI and every tool you can find and make them yours: choose what to build, choose how, take responsibility for the result. That agency has to sit at the centre of education’s future.
One warning, though. If AI lifts all the mental weights for you, your own thinking muscles won’t grow. Use it to test your ideas and tackle bigger problems, not to avoid thinking.
Your human strengths only become more valuable alongside powerful machines: creativity, empathy, judgement and the ability to earn trust.
Nobody predicts the future well, including me. You don’t have to. Keep learning, keep experimenting, keep taking ownership of what you make. The future is just another project. Make it yours.
Professor Joel Pearson,
Director of the Future Minds Lab &
Deputy Director of Human Readiness
UNSW AI Institute
Joel’s Pathway
- PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Sydney
- Research Associate, Vanderbilt University
- Academic, UNSW Sydney
- Director, Future Minds LAB
- Deputy Director human readiness, UNSW AI Institute
This article was first published in Careers with STEM: Technology.
