Generation Chatbot is Off to College, and Then to Your
Business
They are like no other
cohort, all raised in the iPhone age. They know everything and nothing because
they've largely relied on their phones for information, or at least what passes
for information.
Expert Opinion By Howard
Tullman, General managing partner, G2T3V and Chicago High Tech
Investors @howardtullman1
Aug 6, 2024
The summer's almost over
and we're about to ship another generation of kids off to colleges across the
country, accompanied by the typical quotient of parental instructions, cautions
and pithy life lessons drawn from our own experiences. Sadly, these traditional
cautions and sage constructs have increasingly less value and application in a
world of constant and radical change that they're about to enter. Not that we
ever exactly listened to what our parents had to say on these subjects, but
these days so many parents seem to have no real idea of what to say in the
first place. Interestingly enough, professional college counselors will tell
you that the biggest part of their job is often to serve as a neutral
intermediary and communicator between their client kids and the paying parents,
since the kids don't talk to them.
This isn't all that much
different than the dilemma that so many employers are facing in terms of what
they need to be sharing with their newest employees. The old guidelines, goal
posts, aspirations and even career objectives have changed to such an extent
that it's actually hard to imagine what useful guidance anyone should offer.
Everyone also seems to be very wary of saying something politically incorrect
or offending the snowflakes. Employers are walking on eggshells.
That's not the case for
omniscient college professors, who in their moral certitude feel free to
lecture their captive audiences on all matters large and small. Inevitably,
owners and managers in the real world will then have to deal with a wave of
incoming newbies whose world views and expectations may often be uninformed,
misdirected or simply wrong, but rarely in doubt.
While there's plenty of
shared blame and many explanations for how rapidly things have changed, I think
the critical chronological starting point is pretty simple. The cohort about to
enter college was largely born in 2006. The iPhone was introduced in January of
2007. They will be the first group of kids raised entirely in a world of global
cellular connectivity, on-demand and effortless access to "answers"
for any inquiry, and a non-stop, interruptive, manipulative and dopamine-driven
flow of algorithmic, exploitative and garbage regarding every topic, concern
and conflict in their lives. No wonder that they've come to believe that they
already know it all because it's all right there in living color, 24/7, in the
palm of their hands.
Nature abhors a vacuum
and when parents and leaders don't know what to say or how to say it, the
phone's right there with a simple skewed and stilted response. One of the most
frightening recent developments is the acknowledgement that the outputs of nearly
all of the new chatbots are optimized, not for truth or accuracy, but for
believability and faux authenticity. Selling the story - creating the
comforting reply -- is more critical than the credibility of the underlying
substance. Just like sincerity-- once you can fake it, you've got it
made.
The dream of enhanced
transparency, expanded and extended enlightenment, and especially peer-to-peer
education has collapsed and been corrupted into a social media sewer: a little
of everything and a lot of nothing that prizes engagement and enragement, speed
and superficiality, and form over substance. Nothing matters for more than a
moment. Lady Gaga called social media "the toilet of the Internet"
and never looked back.
What's abundantly clear
is that technology and the web aren't going to help the next generation learn
anything about managing the substantial and perilous transition they're facing.
Even worse, all of the tech-saturated conversations of the last decade or two
have reinforced a single, overwhelming message. Which is that they should
forget the lessons and the ways that things have always been done in the past
(often for good and sufficient reasons) and press ever forward. No one becomes
a raging success in the past. It's not really nasty nihilism as much as
negligent indifference and the continued reinforcement of the belief that
there's nothing new to be learned by looking backwards.
So, it's becoming
increasingly difficult to figure out what suggestions that anyone with even the
best of intentions can offer. I've noted that many of us may have been focusing
on the wrong things when we've offered advice to our kids. The most basic and
important ideas that will withstand the test of time are those that relate to
building our kids' ability to bounce back, to learn to preserve their options
and roll with the punches, and to not be embarrassed or afraid to ask for help. All the rest
is "Rah! Rah!" and rarely suited to offer much real help.
One thing for sure is
that parents today don't do their kids any favors by suggesting they follow in
their own career footsteps. The worst thing you can wish for your offspring is
that they plan on spending their working lives doing one thing and only that
for decades. We all thought that the long understood vision of stability,
security and longevity was something that everyone should aspire to, but that's
not what the future holds for our kids. The good news for them is that it's never going to happen anyway.
It's not even clear that
- at any moment in time - any of them will simply hold a single job. The gig
economy, side hustles, fractionalized employees, and shared positions are all
becoming more common as employers try to adapt to the post-pandemic normal, a
world of remote workers and the need to make their personnel costs as flexible
and variable as possible. What the working world will look like four years from
now is anyone's guess. The only thing that seems certain is that the answers
aren't going to be generated by a magical chatbot because it's absolutely
known that you can't Google the future.