What shall I teach my son?
- ID
- 37781
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 21 Oct 2026, 1:25 AM
- Fetched
- 21 Oct 2026, 2:15 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://stevekrouse.com/ends
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 6.0
- Created
- 21 Oct 2026, 2:16 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_codersai_ml_learnersstartup_founders
What happened
Steve Krouse’s essay, discussed on Hacker News (340 points, 405 comments), asks what to teach his soon-to-be-born son when his programming skills feel less valuable in an AGI era. He draws on Neil Postman’s 1995 The End of Education, Thomas Edison’s 1913 claim that books would be obsolete in schools within ten years, and his own failed 2013 MOOC prediction to argue that schools have survived past technology panics via the Lindy effect. The piece ends by questioning whether captured intelligence in a bottle finally changes that pattern.
Why it matters
For anyone building edtech, reskilling products, or deciding what to learn next, the concrete takeaway is to treat AGI-driven “school is over” claims with the same skepticism as Edison’s 1913 and Krouse’s 2013 misses; institutions often persist for prosaic reasons such as endowments, prestige, and childcare, so product or curriculum bets should identify which retention forces they actually change.
Discussion angle
Ask the room: what one skill or habit would you teach a child in 2026 that survives AGI, and what evidence from the last century of education-tech predictions should make us doubt that answer?