Watched an interesting clip yesterday equating the robotic revolution to horses losing their jobs at the turn of the century.

When motorize carriages entered the market in the early 1900's horses would have felt the change. But they were safe, the new motorized carriages were clunky and not that user friendly. No one had any idea how the car would make life so different. Now horses are unemployed. This is the fear humans have as they slowly see their supermarket checkout jobs go, the bank teller jobs gone, airport check in jobs going. Imagine when Google drive comes out (and it's real now) we won't need drivers. The robots don't have to be better drivers than us just nearly as good or just kill less than 40,000 people a year on the road. Which is what we are doing now.

So that leaves thinking, dreaming and imaging as the only jobs that are safe for now. So here in the USA STEM (Science Techology, Engineering and Maths) is gaining quite a foothold. 

Getting kids interested in science and technology early will ensure that (like me) by 12 years old they are not scared silly about how "hard it looks". I was really good at science at primary school. When I got to secondary I was scared out of it as a career. Memorizing the periodic table was the first hurdle - fail. So young scientists with a poor memory but wild imagination were immediately illiminated.

Now that we can Google the table it's more about imagining what the principals to come might be. I'd love to be a kid curious about science now. Opening the field to dreamers is going to bring exciting stuff to new science & tech. Look at what dreamer John Britten achieved when he allowed himself to imagine first and THEN find out the how. My hope is that the STEM coalition get this as well. Check it out it's interesting stuff with respect to the invention workshops we run in schools.

"The STEM Education Coalition works aggressively to raise awareness in Congress, the Administration, and other organizations about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leader of the global marketplace of the 21st century".