What If Everyone Could Code? (Abridged)
This is an abridged version of my seminal piece: What If Everyone Could Code. I’ve condensed each paragraph down to its essence. I recommend using this as a primer.
Table of Contents
What If Everyone Could Code? — What would the world look like?
The Gig is Up — COVID-19 exposed America’s fragility
Workers' Demise — Americans fell behind while technology moved forward
A New Religion — The political landscape manifested from this economic deterioration
Critical Mass — The future Andrew Yang envisioned is here; everyone’s paying attention
Rip the Band-Aid Off — It's time to stop treating symptoms instead of the cause
IT’S TIME TO LEARN — It’s hard to build when you don’t know how to; let’s fix that
Action Items — Time to embody America’s ethos: roll up our sleeves & do the work
(Re)Build — A 21st Century New Deal to physically rebuild America
(Re)Unite — COVID-19 is America’s new Sputnik: it must be a similar unifier
(Re)Ignite — We need to look to the stars instead of bemoaning the status quo
(Re)Learn — The world changed; it’s time for education to change too
(Re)Train — The new pace of change means everyone must become lifelong learners
Practice Exam — COVID-19 gave us answers; we need to act on them
The Great Reconstruction — We have a bright future ahead of us if we work together
Darwin’s Prophecy — Everyone has a bicycle now. We get to teach them how to ride it
What If Everyone Could Code?
What would unemployment look like?
What would COVID-19 look like?
What would the world look like?
No better time to ask this question.
The world was needlessly unprepared for a pandemic & now we’re paying the consequences. The people paying the most had the least to begin with.
Most Americans aren't well off. We've been told that 40% can't afford an unexpected expense for a while now. They’re scared they don’t have job security. COVID-19 makes that worse. It also reminded us how important technology is.
As a society, we used to generally know how technology worked. People understood how cars drove, how planes flew, & how a light bulb glowed.
Now tech escapes our reach. Technical literacy vanished. Unlike last century, nobody wants to move to the distant future. Many dread it.
The consequences are severe: America is dwindling into a decline. We’ve neglected fixing what’s broken.
Contrary to prevailing sentiments prior to the pandemic, most of America was still reeling from the Great Financial crisis. COVID-19 pulled back the curtain.
The Gig is Up
Prior to COVID, 36% of U.S. workers participated in the gig economy. Forty percent of U.S. workers generated 40% of their income with independent work. This is the first crisis for the gig-economy, and it’s ugly.
Most walk a financial tightrope. These are the Americans from that FED study above. 85% of New York City restaurant employees lost their jobs.
Ironically, the jobs championed for the autonomous worker made workers more financially vulnerable.
A large reason a majority of the country isn’t doing well financially is because they’re working jobs that no longer matter & they don’t have the skills to get the jobs that do.
Workers’ Demise
Decades ago, U.S. workers had a great life. But much of this life evaporated.
Globalization increased competition, automation reduced job prospects, and healthcare & education saw massive inflation. The tech industry prospered, while almost everyone else floundered. Most of America doesn’t have the qualifications, let alone the knowledge, to participate in tech’s growth. It doesn’t help 63% of the U.S. doesn’t know how Google makes money.
The largest economic crisis in a century is coinciding with an economically imbalanced America.
The taxi driver is worried about losing their job to the Uber driver, and the Uber driver is worried about losing their job to self-driving cars. People are anxious about their future, in large part because they feel they aren’t in control anymore.
The anxiety already manifested politically. People are scared, angry, and eager for change.
A New Religion
The 2016 election unearthed these fears.
A 2018 Oxford study found that support for Donald Trump was significantly higher in local labor markets more exposed to the adoption of robots. Counties that flipped from blue to red all were areas that lost jobs. They didn’t find new ones.
These people were continuously promised a better future, but more frequently than not they’ve been duped, swindled, and ignored for the past decade. Being taken advantage of never feels good, and these people feel that Americans, their former employers, and politicians, are thriving at their expense.
Consider their perspective. You lost your job in 2014 to a factory overseas. You keep hearing how good the economy is doing, but all you see is large corporations outsourcing jobs, while tech companies swallow up the rest of the world. It’s a bleak picture. Your friends and family suffer. It feels like you’re forgotten. You don’t care who offers to help, you just want a future again. Then, on top of all this, COVID-19 happens. At first, you’re depressed. Then, you’re angry.
Americans searched for something to blame. It's not surprising what they chose.
Critical Mass
Automation is one of the scariest words Americans hear. It represents the idea that whatever job you're doing today doesn't matter and there's no guarantee you'll be able to do it tomorrow.
Automation, like COVID-19, bifurcates our workforce. Either you have a job that can be done remotely, or you don’t.
Too many Americans fall in the “don’t” category.
The narrative following 2016 was that Trump won. Instead, we should’ve realized that we had a leading indicator that Americans were not doing well economically. We ignored evidence that Americans were in trouble. The number of Americans suffering has reached a critical mass, and we’re finally paying attention.
Would you choose to become a truck driver, when at some point during your career, a computer program and an array of sensors will replace you before you retire?
Herein lies the problem: the future of automation is obvious and inevitable. For the truck driver, it’s in the rear-view mirror — and closing in.
Americans need an answer. They need a new rallying cry.
Rip the Band-Aid Off
Almost all policy changes in the past few decades have focused on minimum wages, taxes, and trade agreements. These don’t solve the underlying problems. They just address the symptoms.
Poor workers, disproportionally Black and Latino workers, as well as younger workers, have borne the heaviest employment and earnings losses. They entered the recession with little to no savings. Meanwhile, tech has become even more valuable.
COVID-19 gave us the future Andrew Yang talked about. A third of Americans are unemployed, and tech companies dominate more than before.
If you have a gash in your forehead, you need stitches. Band aids help stop the initial bleeding, but they’re not a long term solution. You still have a hole in your head. We’ve layered band-aids on top of one another, concealing our wound. Stimulus checks and rallying tech stocks don’t solve tech illiteracy, job prospects, or income inequality.
By ignoring the actual root problems, we’re exacerbating each. We’ve spent too long treating symptoms without treating the cause. We’ve put band-aids on top of band-aids! And this is a critical wound!
It’s time to rip them off. It will be painful, but we’ll stop delaying our pain and start confronting it head-on. No more band-aids.
IT’S TIME TO LEARN
It’s hard to build when you don’t know how to use a hammer. It’s even harder when you don’t even have one. Let’s provide that toolkit.
Marc Andreessen’s legendary call to arms reinvigorated the tech community. His solution: We need to rekindle the desire to build things in this country. We have the money, we have the know-how, but we lack the desire.
Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.
America must wake up and rebuild itself. I counter Andreessen though: I believe the desire is there, but ordinary people can’t build anymore, not when they don’t know how to use the tools of the 21st century.
The challenge of the next decade is not Artificial Intelligence, but Human Intelligence. Can we retrain the workforce as knowledge workers? Information is abundant. It’s all over the Internet. It's the desire to learn that's scarce.
Andreessen laid the foundation, and now we can build a movement to uplift and invigorate. It’s our job to catapult these ideas outwards and see them catch fire in the minds of Americans.
Technology destroys jobs and replaces them with opportunities. Let us provide everyone with these opportunities.
Action Items
Here’s how we do that:
(Re)Build
(Re)Unite
(Re)Ignite
(Re)Learn
(Re)Train
B-U-I-L-T.
BUILT invokes Andreessen’s rallying cry while distinguishing itself with separate actions. There is a reason for its past-tense. The tense emphasizes fundamental and everlasting principles. Work must be done.
Now — let’s address the (Re) prefix. None of these verbs are new. America has a rich history of building, uniting, igniting, learning, and training humans. These verbs represent the quintessential America — maybe not explicitly, but in spirit.
BUILT embodies the vision of America.
Things are broken. People are suffering. But(!) we have a say in what happens next.
The future isn’t preordained. This vision is attainable. We have to roll up our sleeves and do the work.
(Re)Build
American infrastructure is rated a D+. America has 50 million people unemployed right now. Both of these problems can solve each other.
All those infrastructure projects we've put off? Do them now. Doesn't matter if they turn a four-lane highway into one lane — nobody is travelling during rush hour!
Let's fix it. Let’s physically rebuild America.
We have 25+% unemployment, which means we have ample people who can be employed for these projects. Give everyone a mask, take their temperature each shift, & give people who'd otherwise be stuck at home something to do. Milan's doing it.
Let's future-proof America too. Let’s build cities with tomorrow's assumptions:
Ghost Kitchens
Drone warehouse hubs
Self-driving vehicle lanes
Energy efficient buildings
Bio-sensors to monitor air quality
The cities of the future already exist. All we have to do now is build our own.
(Re)Unite
America lacks an institution that forces people from all walks of life — urban and rural, rich and poor, black and white — to come together and work as a team toward a common goal. It’s impossible to build cities of the future when you view most of the country as “other people.”
The American melting pot is burning instead of melting.
Compulsory national service is one way to fix this. It would iterate upon (Re)Build, offering infrastructure, national park, and child care work. And more. This essay is the best exploration on the topic I’ve seen. Americans would interact with new people, gain new skills, and develop empathy for their neighbors, all while upgrading America.
We also need to upgrade leadership. America has triumphed in the face of darkness before — frequently due to leaders rising to the challenge. The difference today is that new leaders aren’t getting that opportunity. The ones that have are performing. Every institution ought to let promising stars lead.
Great leaders create external opposition to unite and motivate. They generate competition and mobilize resources. The virus was one enemy, but it lacks a physicality. There are other entities to compete against, even in amicable manner. Why not strive to beat Western countries in flattening the curve? Or in modernizing infrastructure? Or adopting renewable resources?
The Manhattan Project and the Space Race prove we can do this. A clearly-identifiable enemy fueled these movements. COVID-19 should become this generation’s Sputnik.
(Re)Ignite
America didn't suddenly walk on the moon. We wrote, dreamt, and obsessed about it. Soon after, we planted our flag on lunar soil.
If you watched the SpaceX launch earlier this year, you saw firsthand the power of aiming for the stars. This comment tells you all you need to know about its impact:
15 year old from Africa here who have dreams of becoming one of you😭
The boldest futures belong to those who motivate the rest of us to go there. Embracing these visions, as this teenager has, is how we collectively get there.
Large swaths of Americans fetishize our shortcomings. Reveling in our deficiencies, they bemoan without recognizing our strengths or outlining ways to solve them. They're beholden to their beliefs, but we don't need to broadcast their voices anymore. Reserve that right for the people who inspire, plan, and execute. Welcome constructive criticism and feedback, but only if it’s framed productively. Highlight problems, and suggest solutions.
America was built on a vision of improvement — a delineation from the status quo. America does not have a monopoly on innovation, but its aspirations are unchallenged. The world is full of people dreaming about making the future. Just like that teenager in Africa, we give them a destination for their goals. Let's continue this. If you don't want to participate, that's fine. That teenager in Africa is more than happy to fill that spot.
Children’s imaginations are America’s energy source. Cultivating it will revitalize our nation, and the best way is to teach it.
(Re)Learn
You could easily switch the title of this essay to what if everyone knew math? Not a lot would change.
Every American learns math, but few feel comfortable using it. Even fewer have proficient literacy. Most students’ access to quality instruction is poor at best. The problem isn't so much requiring that people learn math, or learn how to code, but rather we do such a poor job of teaching it. For technology — we don’t even have the courses. Only 45 percent of U.S. public schools teach computer science.
We need to teach Americans how to live in the Internet Age. We need to focus on four pillars: health, wealth, our self, and technical literacy. Adding coding and computing lessons in high schools is necessary. We make the very same argument about math, writing, and reading.
Becoming a digitally literate nation is a worthy goal. It shouldn’t even cost that much because most of this can be delivered through computers, tablets or phones.
Learning is a skill. The more you exercise it, the easier it becomes.
We cannot mobilize our workforce without getting them up to speed. There isn’t a magic switch, but we can increase our momentum by re-purposing education.
(Re)Train
By the time we teach everyone what they need to know, the world will have already changed and we will have to update what we need to know. And by the time we have adapted, the world will have changed again.
At the center of every significant change in our lives is a technology of some sort. Technology is humanity’s accelerant. Which means that change is also accelerating.
The best way to get there, is to embrace change and most importantly, to embrace automation. It is, after all, the common feature of human progress. We don’t hand-sew our own clothes anymore. Nor do we plant seeds one by one. We have always automated, and every time we’ve worried about job security. The key is making sure that everyone has the skills for the next wave of jobs that technology creates.
The pandemic will end. What jobs do we want to return to?
Practice Exam
To summarize:
(Re)Build: Bridge the gap
(Re)Unite: Get on the same page
(Re)Ignite: Dream about the future
(Re)Learn: Gather the skills needed to go there
(Re)Train: Experiment, iterate, and automate what we can
Good ideas rearrange the world in ways that make the things in it more valuable. BUILT is the beginning of my contribution to seeing positive change.
Life is filled with tests. COVID-19 is a rare case where we got answers to the next one. Some answers will work better than others, and some might not be that useful at all, but we have a general sense of direction. All that matters is if we choose to follow it.
The Great Reconstruction
Hopefully, this COVID-19 will do for society what a near-death experience can do for a person: help us realize what’s important and what’s not.
There is a bright path forward where we solve these challenges. The opening of this essay attempts to visualize that path. How would the world look? If this is a world we want to live in, how do we get there? It’s not an easy path, but it’s attainable. If executed, it will be a triumphant moment in history.
A continuously trained workforce, coupled with a culture of entrepreneurship to invent and disseminate new technology, will cultivate a future where nobody is left behind. A future everyone feels confident about. A future we are empowered to create.
My hope is that in this future, when humanity looks back at this decade, they’ll say we rose to the challenge.
Darwin’s Prophecy
Technology transformed the world, and it’s not going to stop doing so. Humanity farmed for millennia until all of a sudden, there was a vertical takeoff a few hundred years ago.
Our trajectory as a species went celestial. We went from worshiping the stars to walking on the moon.
We have the potential over the next century to profoundly advance the quality of life for virtually everybody. Technology is the lever humanity uses to take natural resources and make something better out of them.
If we don’t allow more people to participate in these changes, we’re going to be dealing with a two-sided battle: compounding inequality and the absence of preparation.
Steve Jobs had a famous aphorism that the computer was the bicycle of the mind. Meaning, that compared to other animals, humans weren’t that special. Our tools changed that. Tools aren’t something we can immediately use — we have to learn and practice first to reach proficiency.
We’ve successfully given everyone a bicycle over the past decade, now all we need to do is teach people how to ride it.
I’ll give Darwin the final word.
“It is not the strongest of species that survive; nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the most adaptable to change.” — Charles Darwin
I encourage you to read the full piece here. As always, please reach out via email or Twitter with your thoughts. If this resonated with you, I ask that you help spread the message.
Acknowledgements
This took a while to write. This wouldn’t have been possible without the help, advice, and inspiration from the following:
Naval R; Balaji S; Shahin F; Tyler C; Marc A; Anton L; Trevor N; Matt R; Mike M; Josh W; Hunter G; Ben T; Morgan H; Kevin K; Eric W; Joe W.
And more… directly and indirectly.
