I bet you’ve seen these headlines:
AI is coming for your job. AI is coming for your kids' jobs.
They tell us that nobody's safe.
For years we were told to teach our kids to code—that it was the only job security left, but then, no wait, don't bother, the machines can code now too.
Nothing, it turns out, is safe from the robot revolution. Might as well just pack it up I guess. Sorry, humanity, we had a good run.
Look, I'm not saying AI isn't a big deal. It is. It’s huge! And it's moving really, really fast. It's powerful, and the disruption is real. It should absolutely be taken seriously.
If you’re someone who tried ChatGPT a year ago and dismissed it because it “just makes stuff up,” then you’re already way behind. AI is a legitimate force to be reckoned with.
But here’s the thing the viral doom articles always leave out: We have done this before.
Over and over and over again, actually.
When the first knitting machine went into use in 1589, people were sure it was the end of honest work. When ATMs debuted in 1967, everyone knew bank tellers were finished. One article predicted the machines would wipe out three-quarters of them within just a couple of years. There's even a story about London tellers sneaking out at night to smear honey on the ATM keyboards.
You know what actually happened? Between 1985 and 2002, America went from 60,000 ATMs to 352,000. And the number of bank tellers grew. The machines made branches cheaper to run, so banks opened more of them, and tellers moved on to work that actually needed a human.
Same story with barcode scanners. Same story with the internet, which was supposedly going to kill retail and instead created e-commerce, content creators, and whole new industries nobody could've even imagined in 1994.
Every new wave of automation triggers the exact same panic, and every single time, the people who thrived weren't the ones who were afraid. They were the ones who looked at the new tool and asked a different question.
Not "is this going to replace me?"
But "what can I do with this that I couldn't do before?"
That one question is the difference between the banker in 1980 panicking about the ATM, and the banker who thought, great, the machine handles the boring stuff, now we can actually help people. One of those framings leads to fear. The other leads to thriving.
Our kids are going to grow up in the most opportunity-rich economy in human history—if they're the kind of people who see opportunity instead of threat.
A kid with an entrepreneurial mind looks at AI and sees a tool that lets one determined thirteen-year-old build something that used to take a team of twenty adults. A kid without that mindset just sees something scary coming to take what's his, and if he listens to the media, he might just think that there’s no point in even trying because the deck is stacked against him anyway.
But here’s the thing most parents miss: that mindset isn't something you're born with. It's a skill that can be taught, and you can start way earlier than you'd think.
That's why we built our new Business Basics curriculum.
It's a full financial literacy and entrepreneurship curriculum, and it's brand new for kids as young as 8. But don't let that fool you into thinking it's just play money and pretend for little kids, because it’s not. We’ve built 36 hands-on lessons that kids actually use to run their first business, and the things they learn will follow them through every next phase of life.
The lessons follow Ethan and Emily as they navigate lemonade stands, customer problems, and real money decisions. They learn the difference between needs and wants, how supply and demand move prices, and how to set a goal and make a plan and manage their time to hit it. It’s cool because it’s all taught in a way that is relatable to kids—in a way that makes them think, “Hey wait! I can do that!”
(They even get the chance to plan a giving project of their own, because despite what the socialists say, making money and doing good were never meant to be opposites.)
The best thing is that the kids who use this curriculum aren’t memorizing definitions for a test or role-playing a bunch of far-fetched scenarios. They’re actually building something for themselves, and while they build their own business, they're also building the exact muscle that determines who thrives in a world that is never going to stop changing.
Because the truth is, we can't predict what the economy looks like when our eight-year-olds are twenty-five. The jobs half of them will do probably don't even have names yet, (exciting, right?) but we can absolutely raise kids who meet all that change and see a door where everyone else sees a wall.
They’ll be kids who don't wait to be picked, because they already know how to build. Kids who hear "AI is coming for your future" and think, I’m going to capture it and use it to build the life of my dreams.
You can check out Business Basics Grade 3 here.
— Connor
