Mario, Me, and The Future of Work

GO TO YOUR ROOM, AND DON'T COME DOWN 'TIL YOU'VE CAUGHT ALL 150 POKEMON

May 29, 2025

This week, my daughter sat me down and walked me through her six-slide presentation on the albino African pygmy hedgehog. It was chock-full of cute pictures, alongside the sort of animal facts that my parents would have once sourced from an encyclopedia, that I might have found on a Microsoft Encarta CD-ROM, that my nieces would have scraped from Wikipedia, and that, for my kids, are only a prompt away. The kids are familiar with what LLMs can do—the phrase “Ask ChatGPT” gets used in our house a lot more than “Ask Google.” (In fact, our Google Home speakers have a reputation akin to the village idiot, compared to the latest and greatest offered by generative AI.)

A question, both at home and amongst other parents in my life, is “what constitutes cheating today?” A friend who works in Barcelona as an English teacher told me that even a few years ago, he could tell when kids handed in an essay written by AI: it was too clear and correct to have been written by a 12-year-old speaking English as a second language. But now, just like the raptors in Jurassic Park, the kids are getting smarter. They’re becoming prompt engineers—one piece of homework was handed in with a query accidentally pasted at the top of the page: “Write 800 words on the fall of Rome, but write it as a 12 year old Spanish child who studies English, and include the types of mistakes that would regularly occur for someone at that age.” Clever girl.

This line of thinking led me to retrieve this essay from the archive and give it a 2025 polish. It was written before the dawn of generative AI, but it was clear, even then, that we have no idea of the kind of work our kids will be doing in the future. The best we can do is keep an open mind and encourage them to follow their curiosity.

“Your Uncle Gerry is coming up this weekend.”

The timing was unpredictable. The visit, always welcome. Throughout the 1990s, a handful of times a year, my Uncle Gerald would spend his Friday evening in a Ford Transit van driving to Manchester. On his arrival, he’d unzip his weekend bag and unveil something I’d previously seen only in magazines, or in my wildest dreams: a pristine, boxed Super Nintendo, imported from the US—my sad NES instantly transformed into a relic; the imported copy of Street Fighter 2 Turbo that cost him £120—including the necessary country adaptor—and was worth every penny; the weekend spent jumping around Mushroom Kingdom with Super Mario 64 plugged into my tiny CRT TV, as it struggled to display the plumber’s stretchable moustache and stupendous gymnastic ability in three dimensions.

The anticipation would always be there, waiting to see what surprise would come up the motorway on his next visit. My most treasured weekends were those when he’d arrive with his PC. We’re not talking laptops—this was a towering, off-white desktop, with a monitor that must have weighed 20kg on its own, packed into the back of the van alongside his Dewalt tools. No matter how great the latest console game was, they played second fiddle to the graphics of a good PC: I’d spend the weekend flying a TIE Fighter around a galaxy far, far away, or exploring the Black Mesa Research Facility, fighting back hordes of aliens with my trusty crowbar. I’d be transfixed until Sunday evening came, and he’d head back to London, declining my requests to “Please, please, leave it here, until next time you come up.”

The same year Wayne Campbell was lusting after a white Fender Stratocaster, I was coveting a PC; both of us putting our intention out into the universe: “It will be mine. Oh yes. It will be mine.” I just needed to convince my parents that buying one was a solid idea—because they weren’t cheap. “It’s not JUST for playing games.” I pleaded (it ABSOLUTELY was). “It’s for writing, you can run a business on it, and who knows what else it could do in the future.” I didn’t know at the time, but it turned out I wasn’t completely full of shit. Whatever I said worked, and before long our dining table had been desecrated by a giant Gateway desktop PC.

I got curious about what else it could do—I’d dig around in files and folders, changing settings, fixing things I’d broken, and closing down Windows to mess around in the MS-DOS command prompt. Over time, I convinced them to let me buy a modem and connect it to the phone line, and before long, I was joining IRC networks, looking for warez groups that might lead me to RAR files that would hopefully unpack into a cracked copy of a new game. I turned 16 the same year Napster was released—all the songs I could eat at the same time my musical palette was opening up, convincing my parents (there’s a theme here) they needed a dual ISDN line in their office so that they could access company emails faster, when in reality it was to cut the download time of a track from 20 minutes to under 5.

With hindsight, I can trace the direct line that followed hobby to career—a young boy tinkering around with his first PC, to the part-time job fixing people’s computers for beer money in college, to the Computer Science degree I ended up graduating with, to my first job building a website for a record store, into the world of advertising, and eventually ending up at Google. Whatever comes next will still be that line, continuing into the future.

Building tomorrow, today

In 2016, the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report outlined the fundamental shift in the today’s workforce: “In many industries and countries, the most in-demand occupations or specialities did not exist 10 or even five years ago, and the pace of change is set to accelerate. By one popular estimate, 65% of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up working in completely new job types that don’t yet exist.” That was then, this is now: in 2025, we are amidst a revolution in AI that might upend our concept of work as fundamentally as it did during the Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. The 2025 version of the Future of Jobs report predicts one in five jobs will be different by 2030, spawning 170 million brand-new roles—14 % of today’s global employment—while automating away another 8% of roles (some 92 million people). They also predict that two-fifths of the typical worker’s skill set will become obsolete, and nearly 60% of the global workforce will require major reskilling within the decade.

Before the AI race, the next big thing was “the metaverse”, a loosely defined umbrella term for something previously existing only in the imagination of science fiction writers. Author Neal Stephenson coined the term in his 1992 novel Snow Crash, painting a dystopian future where people entered virtual worlds to escape the horrors of real life. In Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, reality was similarly seen as something to escape from and not to live within. New employees of Oculus, the company that Facebook acquired and integrated into its metaverse team, were given this book not as a dire warning, but as inspiration. Today, the metaverse is no longer theoretical: people are building and participating in it every day, although they know it by different names: Roblox or Fortnite. Technology writer Clive Thompson wrote, “The truth is, a thriving metaverse already exists. It’s incredibly high-functioning, with millions of people immersed in it for hours a day. In this metaverse, people have built countless custom worlds and generated god knows how many profitable businesses and six-figure careers. It’s Minecraft, of course.”

The media is quick to jump onto the negative aspects of gaming and how they’re allegedly corrupting the minds of our children. (I’m reminded of the observation that if Pac-Man had affected us as kids, we’d all be spending our lives as adults in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive electronic music.) But these games can’t be easily dismissed as a waste of time. They’re teaching kids how to build: both the structures inside the games, and the economic worlds that support them.

In 2023, Roblox paid out $74 million to people making games and goods on the platform. 3,500 developers—many of them having grown up playing the game—earned at least $10,000 a year from their Roblox creations, 750 of them crossed the $100,000 mark, and a lucky hundred have become millionaires on the back of their digital avatars. People are building careers by streaming their escapades inside these worlds: MrBeast started by posting Minecraft videos before expanding his empire, and now commands over 200 million subscribers and reported earnings of more than $54 million in 2023. These stories are only the tip of the iceberg, one growing in size every year.

I dipped my toe into Fortnite a few years back: as an industry observer, a parent, and a player. And whilst I didn’t have the chops to make my way to a Victory Royale, or the patience to outplay kids with an intimate knowledge of every corner of the map, you could see there was something wholly fresh here: an always-on, ever-evolving world where people could come together, learn through play, and express themselves through their avatars. Visiting a friend’s house a few months later, and watching their 8-year-old boy construct a make-shift protective tower while preparing for the last stages of the game, was akin the feeling of watching a Rubik’s Cube world record video: I understood what this person was doing, in theory, but my head could not process the speed that their hands were doing it.

If we turn the screen time debate on its head and look forward, optimistically, rather than backwards based on entrenched beliefs, what skills might our kids be learning for tomorrow’s world? Uncovering opportunities to build businesses. Understanding how people collaborate in virtual worlds. Performing under pressure. Building capabilities for communication, teamwork and leadership. The Future of Jobs report said future employers will search for candidates who demonstrate “problem-solving, active learning, resilience, stress tolerance and flexibility.” All five of those can be found with a sweaty DualShock controller in your palms. And that’s what we know is valuable today. Who knows what the world looks like when our children settle into their future career paths?

Do you think MilesMusicKid’s parents were clock-watching screen time while he was in Garageband, a five-year-old remaking Radiohead in his living room? After winning chess tournaments as a kid, Demis Hassabis took his earnings and purchased a ZX Spectrum, taught himself how to code, and started on a path that eventually led to Google buying his AI company Deepmind for $650 million, allowing him to continue pushing artificial intelligence—and the world—further, one previously unsolvable problem at a time.

Every job I’ve had, my parents wondered: “Huh?” When I started working for Google, they still had no clue what I did—but at least they knew who I was doing it for. Who knows what jobs our children will do? My time spent with screens, and my growing curiosity about technology, gave me an advantage over others trying to break into the advertising industry when the economic shit hit the fan in 2007. Our future will be built by a generation who will use materials, tools and techniques that are only just coming into focus today. Just as one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, today’s waste of time could be tomorrow’s competitive edge.

Is seems hard to believe. But that’s precisely what happened with me.

It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.

After a particularly egregious school report, my Auntie Anne searched for a punishment that would force my young cousin to change his ways. So she went after the thing he cared about the most: his beloved Xbox 360. In the era before cloud-based saves, she booted up his Xbox and formatted the hard drive, rendering his hundreds of hours of effort across multiple games to nothing. She didn’t realise the severity of her actions until she saw his devastated face.

We won’t make those mistakes. We’re the first generation of parents who grew up playing games ourselves, and now watch our children play them too, with a more nuanced understanding of the concept of screen time. As I spend more time talking to dads aligned under this banner of modern fatherhood, I see many who trace a similar line between the time spent “wasting time” then and what they get paid good money to do today. Creativity wasn’t only the byproduct of time spent drawing or playing outside—it was fueled every time you flicked that power button on and were transported to an all-new, pixellated world.

Thinking back to my first PC, that hulking beige box—overclocked, overworked and underpowered, weaker than the watch I wear on my wrist today—I had no idea of the potential lying within. Could my Uncle Gerry have known that by occasionally lugging his machine up from London, it’d lead to his nephew getting a job in that same city two decades later? Could my parents have imagined that buying that dust magnet would, 25 years later, send their firstborn son to California, in a modern-day gold rush that echoed the 300,000 who followed a similar path 200 years ago?

It’s impossible to predict what time-wasting hobby today might have an oversized impact on your child’s future. But it sure is fun to think about.