The Most Valuable Skill in the AI Era, School Will Never Teach

One

On my daughter's tenth birthday, I got her a second-hand iPhone 13.

It wasn't some ceremonial choice. She'd been asking when she could have her own phone, so she could stay in touch with classmates and friends. When I gave it to her, she was happy. She took it and started using it right away, like kids that age do.

About two weeks later, we were on the subway. The phone had no signal. She got bored and started tapping around.

Then she opened Chrome, tapped the little dinosaur on the offline page.

"Dad, look! There's a game!"

I froze.

I've been using smartphones since 2010. My first one was a Google Nexus S. Sixteen years now, and I never knew Chrome had a runner game hidden in the offline page.

How did she know?

She didn't know anything. She just tapped every place she could on a device that had "nothing to play."

Two

Dan Koe sent out a letter last week. There's a line in it I've read over and over:

"Most of what makes you interesting has been trained out of you. Your curiosity was treated as a distraction."

He's talking about adults.

Think about how we got this way. When you were little, you were curious about everything, taking apart alarm clocks, rummaging through drawers, looking for bugs in the mud. What did adults say?

"Don't touch that, it's dirty." "Stop messing around, it's dangerous." "Quit looking at that, go do your homework."

Every "don't touch" narrowed your range of exploration.

By the time you're twenty, you've learned: phones are for calling, watching videos, messaging. Fridges are for storing food. Doors are for pushing open.

You don't explore anymore. You just use.

Dan Koe calls this process conditioning. Family, school, social media, layer upon layer, training you from someone who "wants to try everything" into someone who "only follows the manual."

My daughter hasn't been fully trained yet.

That's not to say she's smarter. It's that her default mode is still "explore," not "use." She tapped every pixel on the screen not because she was "learning," but because to her, the world is still a place you can tap randomly.

What happens if you tap wrong?

Nothing happens. Nobody punished her every time she tapped randomly when she was little.

So the concept of "tapping wrong" doesn't exist in her head.

Three

This logic doesn't just apply to my daughter. I've been watching the tech industry lately, and the more I look, the more I see the same principle at work.

A lot of the great discoveries in human history weren't made by following a plan. Penicillin, X-rays, the microwave, all accidents. Someone was doing something else and happened onto something different.

Look at the two companies leading the AI race right now, OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither of them grew out of some tech giant. They're two brand-new companies.

Now look at Google, Meta, Apple. Companies that have always been at the forefront of tech. In this AI wave, they've fallen behind badly.

I use these tools myself, and I have a strong feeling about this: OpenAI and Anthropic give you the sense that they're tapping randomly. They dare to try anything, dare to ship anything. Google gives you the sense that they're in a product review meeting.

Giants have resources, talent, roadmaps. But they're also following the manual. They know how to optimize existing products, but they don't know how to "tap randomly" into something new.

OpenAI and Anthropic don't have historical baggage, don't have the inertia of "this is how we've always done it." They're experimenting, taking shots, and then they stumble onto GPT, they stumble onto Claude.

This is the same logic as my daughter tapping randomly on a screen in a subway with no signal.

The instinct to explore matters more than resources. At least at the beginning, it does.

Four

But here's the most ironic part.

Parents like us used to sign kids up for AI coding classes while using screen time management apps to chop their exploration time into fragments.

We worry our kids "aren't focused enough," while taking away their chance to daydream.

We spend a fortune on "AI enlightenment education," then tell them to stop playing with their phones and read a book when they're tapping around on their own.

The way my daughter found the dinosaur game was exactly "no steps, just tapping randomly, then stumbling onto it."

School will never teach "tap randomly and stumble."

School teaches: step one, do this; step two, do that; step three, take the test.

But the most valuable things in the real world often have no steps. Especially now, in the AI era.

Dan Koe wrote another line in that letter that I think could be taped to every parent's desk:

"The most dangerous lifestyle is one removed from continuous trial and error."

Adults have forgotten how to try things. Before we do anything, we search for tutorials, read reviews, ask "has anyone done this before?" If we can't find a ready-made answer, a lot of us just give up.

But kids don't. She found an Easter egg that's been hidden for over a decade, with no signal, no tutorial, nobody telling her anything.

Not because she's smarter than me. Because she hasn't learned yet that "if you can't search for it, don't try."

Five

After writing all this, I thought about my own state lately.

Honestly, I've been conditioned pretty heavily too. When I get a new tool, I look for a tutorial first. When I write an article, I first think "has someone already written about this topic?"

That "whatever, just tap first" energy my daughter has, I probably lost it a long time ago.

So I've set myself a direction. Not rules, just trying things out.

When a kid is tapping randomly on their phone, don't rush to say "stop playing." They might be discovering something you don't know about.

Try to leave some time each week with nothing scheduled. No classes, no screens, no filling it up. Boredom isn't necessarily a waste. It might just be that you haven't reached the discovery step yet.

Also, switch from "teaching kids to use AI" to "being curious with kids." Don't always think "let me teach you." Try saying "I don't know either, let's look together."

I've used phones all these years, and I had no idea there was a dinosaur hidden in Chrome.

My daughter had her phone for less than half a month, and she found it.

Maybe what our generation really needs to learn isn't how to use AI well. It's how to learn to tap randomly again.

I need to keep reminding myself: stay curious, dare to try things. For adults and kids, it's equally important.