I teach a technology class to students from Kindergarten to fifth grade. The accelerated development of truly impressive AI models recently — especially ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion — has made it clear to me how dramatically different technological literacy will be when my students eventually enter the world as adults.
As we move into a future with increased technological automation, forward-looking curricula across all subject matters must focus on fostering creativity in students. Although AI can make new connections between elements in its training data, it is humans alone that are capable of generating truly novel ideas.
I believe teaching young students how to code will continue to be important to some extent. However, with the rise of code generation technologies like GitHub CoPilot, the most durable programming skills might be spec-writing, debugging, and revising. Physical electronics and robotics will arguably rise in relevance for the foreseeable future. Understanding and debugging systems will be an important skill here, too.
It would be great to hear from other educators that are thinking through similar topics right now.