The thing about teaching A.I. skills

The UK government wants to get 7.5 million people using AI effectively by 2030. Sounds ambitious. But I wonder if they've got it backwards.

Some numbers that raised my furrowed brows:

• 50% of working-age adults in the UK can't complete the 20 foundational digital tasks deemed essential for modern work.
• 8 million have no basic tech skills at all.
• 3 million have no access to the internet or digital devices.

I'm betting the UK isn't an outlier here.

Meanwhile, separate research warns that up to 3 million low-skilled jobs could vanish by 2035 as AI and automation reshape work. So we're going to train people for AI while their jobs disappear and they can't attach a file to an email. Cool.

If over 20% of the population lacks basic tech skills, why are we racing to teach AI skills? Especially when wealth gaps keep widening?

This isn't really about hard skills anyway. Someone smarter than me pointed out that hard skills are getting softer while soft skills are getting harder.

The real challenge isn't understanding how an LLM works or rigging up automations.

It's knowing when to use it. What questions to ask. How to spot when it's wrong. The judgment call, not the technical one.

Which brings us to the teaching problem. Or more accurately, the learning problem.

You can't just announce "we're teaching AI now" and expect people to show up curious.

You have to spark the desire to learn in the first place.

What's the incentive? What changes for them? Why should they care when they're already overwhelmed?

Then you make it possible. Make it relatable. Strip out the jargon. Lower the barriers to entry.

Good pedagogy. The kind that provides scaffolding, enables reps, develops critical thinking.

The kind that starts where people actually are - not where a policy document says they should be.

So if you're building AI training programs, your first question shouldn't be 'what should we teach about AI?' It should be 'who's actually in the room?'.

Future skills matter. But only if people can actually get there from here.