What Birthdays Teach Us About Resistance
250 years of change and getting ready for what comes next
The Patrick Dempsey: #0121
I write weekly articles about possibility, reinvention, and the courage to begin something new.
Milestone Celebration
Yesterday we celebrated my great uncle’s 90th birthday.
When you hear 90-years-old, you probably think of someone shriveled, using a walker, perhaps late-stage of some kind of mental decline.
Not Uncle Bob. He doesn’t look a day over 70.
He drives everywhere. Plays canasta and/or mahjong daily. Goes to the symphony weekly. Vacations regularly.
He’s been retired for nearly as long as I’ve been alive.
And, as we celebrate the country’s 250th birthday—which seems so long—I’m completely mind-blown to consider that Uncle Bob has been alive and witnessed more than 35% of it. 🤯
That’s incredible to me. And it makes me realize that the saying is true: the only constant is change.
And Then There’s Education
Here’s something really strange to me.
In education, it seems we’re fighting against AI is if it’s the last disruption we will ever face.
We’re resisting as if, if we can somehow stave off this AI thing, we’ll be able to preserve our current way of doing things forever more.
I’m genuinely curious . . . why do we think like this?
Why, when we supposedly house all the expertise in the history of the world and all the change it has experienced and indeed brought about, why we think change is best fought?
Technological Revolution
Think about 250 years ago, or if it is easier just 90 years ago.
Could anyone have imagined these inventions that we just take for granted today:
Shopping carts (late 1930s)
Television in the home (1950s)
Credit cards (1950s–60s)
Automatic dishwashers (1960s)
Countertop microwave ovens (1970s)
Cable television (1980s)
Personal home computers (1980s)
VCRs (1980s)
The Internet (mid-to-late 1990s)
Email as a normal form of communication (late 1990s)
Cell phones as an everyday possession (early 2000s)
Google (early 2000s)
Digital cameras replacing film (early 2000s)
Facebook and social media (mid-2000s)
The iPhone and modern smartphone (2007)
Streaming television (2010s)
Video calls as an ordinary part of work and family life (2020)
Generative AI (2022)
The Logical Next Step
And each step, it seems to me, felt like a logical end.
Google made information ubiquitous, we don’t need anything else, right?!
Similarly, AI feels complete, but history shows it won’t be. Today, we just can’t imagine anything that comes after it. But something surely will.
So, while education is arguing whether AI belongs in educations, here’s what else is happening right now:
Quantum computing
Air taxis and “flying cars”
Upcoming human missions to Mars
Driverless taxis operating in more cities
Humanoid robots performing routine physical work
Gene-editing treatments curing diseases that previously required lifelong care
AI agents completing purchases, scheduling appointments, writing documents, and performing entire work processes
And that’s all current state-of-play.
Necessarily, I can’t imagine what else comes next. But whatever it is, it will.
The Next 250 Years . . . or 18
I’ve used this experiment before.
Imagine America’s 500th anniversary. What will life be like in 2276?
Let’s make it closer to home. Imagine life just in 2044.
We’ll assume higher education exists in some form then, therefore someone born today is getting ready to go to college.
What will THEIR life look like?
And, more importantly, when will higher ed treat today for what it is—one of the few remaining days it has to get ready for the incoming freshman class in 2044?
Things are going to continue to change.
I don’t understand why higher education feels uniquely positioned to both fight it and survive its resistance.