Rahim Hirji on Inside Learning: the five rungs from survival skills to SuperSkills, and the boat at the bottom of them

Aidan McCullenLet's tell the story of the boat, because people are going to say, what the heck are these guys talking about?

The real icon of the book is the boat. I start off with this journey that my forefathers took, leaving India a long time ago and moving to East Africa. The boat becomes this icon throughout the whole of the book. It starts in the prologue in the beginning and goes right through to the end. I really want people to think about AI and the phase that we're in as a journey. Everyone goes on a boat, and you want to end up somewhere. That's really what this is about.

The real thing about the boat is I've been able to align it with different phases in my own personal story. The dhow that my forefathers got onto was really because of a time of survival. They led a very pauper's type life in India, and they wanted to step up a level. The skills that they had at that time were survival skills. Getting on the boat, they needed to eat, they needed to drink, and so they aspired for a better life. Those are survival skills.

Then my grandfather was in Tanzania, in Dar es Salaam. He had a shop. He needed a different set of skills. He also needed his survival skills, but he needed street skills. In his shop he needed to communicate with people. He needed to speak the language of the locals, which was Swahili. He needed some commerciality to be able to run his shop and sell at discounts and make some money.

Then my father and mother came to the UK. They needed a different set of skills. They needed a vocation. I call them specialist skills. Those specialist skills were to learn a job. My dad was an accountant and my mum was a midwife. In a similar way people do that on a regular basis. They learn a vocation.

Then many of us who have grown up especially in the West have realised over the last ten, fifteen, twenty years that you need these additional layers of skills. I had this business, EtonX, and in that we taught soft skills. Things like communication, critical thinking, being able to lead a team, being able to work within a team. Ten years ago I would think that's all you really needed. You need these four layers of skills and they have been growing over every generation.

As we know, the world has changed significantly over the last two or three years even. Because of AI, we need this new set of skills, which is what super skills are. This is really what my ladder is. You've got the survival skills, you've got street skills, you've got specialist skills, soft skills, and then super skills. It starts off with that boat, and then it starts off with, we're going on a new journey, all of us.

Aidan McCullenA lot of people feel that this period of change is treacherous, and there's a lot of negativity about it. I felt from the book that you shine more on the positivity of AI change.

The issue that people look at is that for a very short period, and it feels like a long time, there's the missing rungs. People can't advance within their career. They're worried about their job. If you look in the US right now, lots of tech jobs being slashed, and that's been going on for quite some time, and some people blame COVID, some people blame AI.

Really I see this phase that we're in right now as one of the greatest periods of all time, because what we're able to do now was probably impossible five or ten years ago. Some of the things that I'm able to do as a solo guy in my study, I wasn't able to do before. I created a video with all of these AI clips, which looks very cinematic, just to describe the book that I've created.

But I'm not naive. There's a bunch of other stuff going on in the world, anything from AI as the new oil. That's one of the ways that people look at it. I don't like it, and I don't think many people like it, the fact that AI is being used in war. There's a downside to that as well.

But I do feel that what's going to happen is the skills that we're able to elevate to will allow us to get rid of the stuff that we've been doing for the last fifteen, twenty years, which has been boring work. I call it busy work. There's things like writing reports when actually you just need to pull out the information, and AI can do that for you. Things like AI notetakers. Three years ago it seemed crazy that you'd allow this machine to record you and deliver you the notes and deliver the actions. But that's what's happening right now.

I remember the days when I was an analyst of sorts and would be moving these boxes on PowerPoint by one or two or three pixels, and you're spending hours doing this stuff, and now you just press a button and it just happens. I think that there's all of this dross, busy work, will go away, and we start to elevate ourselves into doing higher order thinking, which is really what humans are really all about.

Aidan McCullenThis tees us up for one of your central arguments, drift versus design. I experienced this firsthand this morning. A friend of mine who runs a business was telling me how Claude has changed how his colleagues work with him, and that people who he'd never get an email beyond a few lines from were now sending him twelve-page documents. I asked, were the documents any good? He said, that's the problem. One guy sends a document, he meets him, gives him feedback, and the guy says, that feedback's really helpful. And he says, of course, I'm your manager, I want you to get better. And he says, what do you think? And the guy says, oh, I didn't actually have time to read it. The document he had created using AI.

Exactly. That's part of the main thesis of the book actually. I call it algorithmic drift. For many years we've been, we just haven't realised it, but we're slowly going towards it. You might have been using Google Maps to pick your destination, or you would watch the next thing on Netflix or listen to the next thing on Spotify. Sometimes you'll be in the city and it's been algorithmically designed by AI to be focused really on less traffic. A lot of these things are in our daily lives and we don't really realise it.

The antithesis of that is this concept called design. I'm very well aware that AI is here to stay and I'm pro-AI. But this world of design is actually having the agency to really think about what it is and decide when to use it, having the awareness that it actually does exist. A lot of people don't realise that they're doing these things and they don't realise that they can do anything about it. And I call these people sleepwalkers. There's a few people who have the agency about it, but don't realise it's going on, and I call them programmed. They're really working very quickly. And then there's those who realise that things are going on, but they don't know what to do about it, and I call them the stuck.

What I'm trying to do with this book, and the seven skills are the things to get you there, is to help people towards this world where they become designers. They own the future. They're not being governed by anyone else. They decide when they're going to use the algorithm. It's not just for themselves, it's for their family, for the organisation that they're in, the teams that they work within. And then they're able to really qualify the decisions that they're going to make. They're going to have judgement and they're going to have discernment.

Aidan McCullenYou talk about the augmented mindset. It's not that we're less, it's that these two things come together.

Exactly. The augmented mindset is my seventh super skill. I love the idea of a centaur. I align it a little bit more to Iron Man, so Tony Stark with his exoskeleton, when he puts it on. It's very similar in that regard, where you're choosing when to use AI, when not to use AI, and when to really dig in and use it on a regular basis.

There's this concept that people talk about all the time. It's called human in the loop. People say, okay, you need a human to decide different parts of the process, and especially in organisations, that's what's going on. My concept, and I'm sure someone else has come up with this, is human at the start. So HATS is my phrase. What I recommend to people is to sit down with a problem first and decide what it is that you want to do. You might want to come up and use your own brain to decide what the framing is before you go to the AI.

I'm pretty bad actually at that, because I use Whisper Flow and I just talk out at Claude on my walks in the park. But what I'm doing is I'm stepping away from actually framing before I go to the AI. So I have to take a step back. This augmented mindset really is this one plus one equals three or three plus, because you're able to do so much more, especially when you put the human right at the centre first. A lot of people think about outsourcing themselves to the AI, which is the wrong way to do it. If you've got these amazing superpowers as a centaur or as Iron Man, you choose when to do that to really accentuate yourself.

Aidan McCullenJudgement is bigger than decision making. Decision making is what you do with information. Judgement is what you do with your values when the information runs out. Share a little about this.

Judgement is one of those things that really sits throughout all of the super skills and throughout the book. That, and discernment, and taste, and all of these concepts, they should be sitting across everything that you're doing. It's very easy to make a decision. But judgement is a little bit different. It takes the context within which you're in, the information that you've got, but it also takes the wisdom that you've got over many years. You may have been in a different situation, you may know certain pieces of information that AI doesn't necessarily know. It's only trained on data. So it's up to you as an individual to say, based on all of the data that I've got, this is what I specifically want to do. That's very different to just making a very quick decision.

Aidan McCullenLet's get stuck into the seven.

Some of these are not rocket science, by the way. They're things that have existed since the Greeks, or even further back. My first super skill is curiosity. A lot of people say to me, curiosity, that's not a super skill, that's not new. And I say, curiosity is actually the art of asking the right question and continuing to ask the right question. And people say, that's an easy thing to do. But what people are doing is they're outsourcing their curiosity to the AI, whether it's Claude or ChatGPT or Grok or whoever else. Curiosity becomes really important, to take that step back. And by the way, it's not an either or of the super skills. They work in tandem.

Then there's change readiness, which is the ability to work through a world where everything's changing. But also, specifically in change readiness, is knowing what doesn't change. You need to know what doesn't change in a world that is changing. So what is your anchor in a world that's changing?

Big picture thinking, which is a very strategic way to think about the world and what you're doing. I talk about different altitudes. You could be thinking in multi years or you could be thinking in a year, you're thinking about months, you're thinking about days. They're all big picture thinking, but you need to decide which is the right altitude you're thinking in.

Principled innovation is the fourth one. Principled innovation is really around doing the right thing as we're trying to solve problems and change the world.

Empathy is the one that I think AI will never have, because it will never have lived through the situations that humans have.

Global adaptability. The world is very close right now. And then the last one we've already talked about, which is the augmented mindset.

Aidan McCullenGive a word to the different audiences, managers, parents, educators, on how the book plays out for them.

I did a lot of research into getting to these seven skills. Spoke to a lot of companies, spoke to educators on the other side as well, to really understand what is happening to the world, how people are thinking about it, and what's working and what's not working.

It's adults in the workplace, and there is this kind of fear, what do we do. Managers especially. If you look at some of these organisations, the leaders at the top deciding AI strategy don't necessarily know what's going on, how it actually works, what they should do, what they shouldn't do. They don't realise how humans play, because some companies look at AI as cost reduction or revenue upside. But actually, it's an accentuator of who humans are.

So adults in the workplace, those who are thinking about coming into the workplace, but really for educators and parents to instil these ideas into their kids. The way that I've written this book, and I'd love everyone to read it, it's not a textbook. It's written with my personal story within it, as we talked about at the beginning. Also there's lots of case studies in there, and written in a very cinematic type way.

For example, people may not like football, but there is a story of Jose Mourinho coming to Old Trafford when he was the manager of Porto and beating Manchester United. I'm a Manchester United fan, for my sins. The whole point of that is that he used this deep curiosity in really looking at what the problem was that he was trying to solve, and that's what got him to win. So it's not about his curiosity today. It's really about instilling these ideas, and then you'll see, and this is what my early readers are saying, wow, this all really felt as if it was coming together. Because it wasn't an AI book, and people were worried and said, oh, it's an AI book, and I'm going to read about this worrying period that we're in. Actually it solves part of the problem that people are going through, and psychologically they don't realise that as humans we are all powerful to some degree. This is our time if we treat AI in the right way.

Aidan McCullenOne of the things that I loved about this book is that most books about AI start with the technology, but this one starts with a story of a boat.