Skills for Life

Looking Beyond Digital and AI Literacy Skills

In the context of technology adoption and AI, a discussion of skills often leans towards digital literacy and AI literacy skills. It could also lean towards the degradation of cognitive / critical thinking skills potentially associated with overdependence on technology and automation via AI.

Here’s another angle: Skills for Life, and I mean life when we’re not staring at a screen.

Three things this past week converged to bring this idea front and center for me.

First, I looked into a closet that had been untouched for several years and came across a bundle of yarn and a pouch of crochet needles. They had belonged to my youngest daughter. I have never done any stitching, crocheting or sewing. I suddenly had an urge to figure out if I could learn to crochet. After all, the tools were in front of me. I knew there was even a book of easy crochet projects somewhere in the house. I even found that. No excuse not to try. It was a clear urge to do something with my hands and the fact that I would have to pay attention to my hands and not a screen was appealing.

Second, I attended the second annual Digital Navigator Summit in DC last week (7/11). There were good conversations about the challenges of bringing digital literacy to many more people who need to keep up with employer requirements, remain competitive in the job market, etc... and the new challenge of integrating AI in digital literacy programs. One comment, which I heard twice during the day, was that screen fatigue and some resistance to AI-generated art and music for example, would (almost inevitably) lead people to seek more human-generated art, more live concerts, more hands-on crafts.

Third, I’ve set a scheduled task for ChatGPT to suggest an essay for me to read every Saturday. Saturday’s suggested essay was “Skill Nostalgia.” It recounts how, throughout history, technologies that have replaced certain skills have induced a form of nostalgia for the way things were done earlier and a return to craftsmanship.

Taken separately, these are just three unrelated events. Together, they suggest a different question than the one we usually ask about AI.

We spend a great deal of time asking which digital and AI skills people need to acquire. That is an important question. Perhaps an equally important one is this: What human skills become more valuable because our digital tools become more capable?

The answer probably isn’t “go back” or “reject technology.” It may be to deliberately cultivate activities that engage parts of ourselves that screens rarely do: our hands, our senses, our patience, our attention, and the satisfaction of making something tangible.

I don’t expect to go very far with my first crochet project. Maybe I will discover I’m terrible at it. That isn’t really the point. We talk a great deal about the skills AI requires us to learn. Perhaps we should spend more time asking which human skills AI makes worth preserving, and here I’m not talking just about critical thinking skills needed for AI but rather a much broader range of human skills needed to enjoy life beyond the screen.