People Who Know How to Play May Live Better in the Future
What people will need most then is not the ability to work, but the ability to live well and make themselves happy.
No hustling this weekend. Just writing whatever comes to mind.
Lately, I've been struck by how quickly AI is developing. Its rate of evolution is bound to exceed the speed at which humans can learn—even the smartest among us.
In a time of such profound technological change, the abilities people need are more multidimensional and diverse, rather than narrowly directed or standardized.
This brings me back to choosing courses at university many years ago, and to how I felt when I ran into difficulties at work a few years back. The feelings seem remarkably similar.
It feels as though I've reached another version of the same question: how do we judge what is ‘useful’ and what is ‘useless’?
I remember writing a post on WeChat Moments in October 2020. I'll share it here:
‘When we're young, it's hard not to be utilitarian.
When we're young, the things we want to study and do are the ones that look ‘useful.’ We tend to dismiss anything that seems ‘useless.’
At university, for example, we were all keen to take business-school courses like accounting, finance, and marketing, which seemed very useful. We generally wouldn't think of choosing commercial law or OB (organizational behavior), which looked boring and useless at first glance.
At the time, and even in the first three to five years after graduation, most people probably didn't think much of it. But after five years, you slowly start to appreciate the importance of OB.
Whether it's a startup or an established company, an awkward bottleneck will eventually arise: the business might grow faster than the organization can develop, or the business structure might be undergoing a transformation.
That's when OB reveals just how crucial it can be to a company's transformation—and how its absence can hold everything up.
Why else would there have long been a dedicated role called change management?
It's specialized work, and it's definitely at the senior-management level.
So it often takes years to realize just how narrow your perspective once was. It's a matter of the level of understanding you had.
That's why I've never thought going straight into an MBA after graduation was a good choice. A lack of practical experience and understanding can greatly reduce what you get out of the knowledge.
About ten years ago, the average age of MBA students at Nanyang Technological University was around 37. Now they're getting younger and younger; the average can be below 30.
This may also reflect the influence of the global new economy over the past decade. Rapid changes in markets and business models have accelerated changes in the skills people need and the talent companies must develop. Of course, universities' commercial interests may also play a part.
In any case, we often discover we're unprepared only when a problem appears, and then we scramble. I imagine that will become even more normal in the increasingly unpredictable business environment ahead.
So, whether we're talking about personal development or a company's next stage, how should we judge and approach things that seem ‘useful’ or ‘useless’?
It's worth thinking about.’
Learning about AI lately has felt just like this. It keeps bringing those familiar feelings back.
Things or knowledge you once thought unimportant or useless—the things you abandoned, overlooked, or neglected because they offered no immediate benefit—may now be becoming important abilities that help you expand your thinking and foundational capabilities, and create valuable products in a new era.
Meanwhile, what you learned by following the standard curriculum at school may not be much help at this particular moment.
Sometimes the things you play with or learn in your spare time are precisely what sink deepest into your mind, activate your creativity, and extend and grow a ‘new brain’—new abilities.
These abilities, developed outside standardized training, may be the ones that help you find new directions and paths in uncertain, unstructured, ambiguous, and chaotic circumstances.
I call abilities that grow this way ‘the usefulness of the useless.’
(I previously wrote a similar piece: The ‘Usefulness of the Useless’ and Some Thoughts on AI)
So I've increasingly had this feeling lately: in the future age of AGI, people who know how to play—who read whatever interests them, play games, while away time, and enjoy life—may actually live better.
Compared with us so-called ‘good students,’ they're much better at experiencing life and finding enjoyment in it. They may be more sensitive to people's needs. They may be more likely to create products that help people live better.
I absolutely believe that AI will free humanity from most work in the future. What people will need most then is not the ability to work, but the ability to live well and make themselves happy.
So if ‘utilitarian’ surroundings and pursuits are wearing you out, stop for a bit. Take a break. Do something you enjoy in your spare time. That's fine; it will end up having an effect on you anyway. (Who knows, maybe this is your quantum entanglement with your future self.) Hahaha~
So, starting now, give yourself permission to play and do some ‘useless’ things.