On building for learning in an age of disruption
In 2019, I attended the World Economic Forum at Davos to discuss education and disruption. The conference theme was transformation in an age of AI and automation. Most of the conversation was about retraining, reskilling, future-proofing the workforce. But something felt off. We were talking about people like they were capital that needed updating, instead of humans who needed grounding.
Yes, skills are becoming obsolete faster. Yes, people need to keep learning. But what's really disrupting education is simpler and harder: we're no longer agreeing on what learning is for. Traditional education assumed a stable future. You learned things that would still matter in 20 years. Now we're asking: how do you educate for instability? How do you teach someone to thrive when you don't know what the rules will be?
The one skill that becomes more valuable as everything else disrupts is the ability to learn. Not specific knowledge — the ability to sit with uncertainty, ask good questions, adapt, and keep going when the ground shifts. That's what I built into No Desk Project. Not a course on how to work remotely. But a community structure that forced people to ask better questions about what they actually needed, and to support each other through that uncertainty.
Education is transforming, but not because technology is disrupting it. It's transforming because the world is disrupting, and we finally have to admit that education's job was always to help people feel grounded in uncertainty — we just pretended for a long time that there wasn't any. Davos understood that. Not always explicitly, but in the best conversations, people were asking: how do we help humans stay human when systems are changing faster than we can follow? That's the actual question of education right now.