Imagining My Grandson In 2043 · Part 1 of 3
What does it even mean to be educated? What are you preparing for? How do you gain a sustainable advantage in the era of AI?
By Mark Whitney
In a couple of weeks my only grandchild will be six months old. My imagination wanders accordingly:
What might have been required of me as a father had my sons been born in 2025 instead of the 1980s?
When Mael turns 18 in 2043, how might his options be different from the choices my sons had when they turned 18 more than twenty years ago?
THE ESTABLISHED ORDER
When my sons, Michael and Christopher, were born in the 1980s, it was easy for me to imagine how their adult lives might play out. We lived in Norwich, VT, a bedroom community of 4,000 white people across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College.
My wife, Julie, and I grew up in redneck Vermont. Julie went to the University of Vermont. I did not go to college. When Julie graduated in 1981, I said “We settle in Norwich; some of that Ivy League just might rub off on us. We could do worse.”
Norwich turned out to be a great place to raise a young family. But eventually you have to move because a tiny Ivy League town is about as linear and rigidly moral as it gets. In utero is not too soon to start cobbling together the elements of your child’s college application.
“The status symbol here is not what car you drive but where your kids go to college," says Jim Kenyon, a longtime columnist for the Valley News. In his 2025 retirement piece, Kenyon gleefully republished his own 1996 characterization of his adopted hometown as “Disneyworld with maple trees.”
The elementary school and the high school are ranked #1 in their respective states by US News, a statistic made possible by an Act of Congress which established SAU70 as our nation’s first interstate school district.
Norwich has been noted by the New York Times and elsewhere for disproportionately producing Olympians. My son cut his figure skating teeth on the homemade rink in the photo below, and thereafter won a shoebox full of gold medals until he shot up to 6’5”. Chris’s skating coach was a retired treasurer of Dartmouth College and a benevolent Olympic Gold Medalist who established the Skating Club at Dartmouth, and generously shared his knowledge and expertise for $7 a lesson.
Norwich residents are masters of a system that was invented, layered and honed over many centuries by their forebears. Norwich was established in 1761. Its British namesake was founded in the tenth century. Norwich reflexively resists change, including changes like affordable housing, which it champions. Just not in Norwich, lest we, um, sully the character of the town.
The slogan at the 75-year-old general store is more to the point: “If we don’t have it, you don’t need it.”
That’s Norwich in a nutshell.
THE EARTH SHIFTS
My oldest son is 41. He’s never known a day on earth without a personal computer. When Michael was born in 1984, it was easy to imagine what the pillars of his life might look like as an adult. He will likely go to college, get married, have a family, and own a home that he will likely finance, not from a wage provided by an employer, but from a business he built with a keyboard.
It should come as no surprise that life as Michael experienced it in his formative years was indeed predictive of the aforementioned five pillars.
The earth shifted when Michael and Chris were still in single digits, as former Silicon Graphics Founder and CEO, Jim Clark, and then-University of Illinois programmer, Marc Andreessen, founded Netscape in 1994.
The world has been browsing ever since.
Netscape obliterated the Walled Garden that secreted elite information sources in cloistered conclaves. Suddenly every curious individual had direct, unfettered access to official documents and the individuals responsible for creating and curating them.
As for my family, nearly every dollar my adult sons and I have earned in the past 30 years has been via the Internet. AIRS, a competitive intelligence company I co-founded in 1996, and THELAWNET, the legal research company I founded in 1999, could not have been imagined before I experienced the magical, graphical Internet in the summer of 1995, through the window provided by the Netscape browser.
Thirty years of innovation later, from the mouse to the rollout of the browser to cell phones and smart phones, from 28K to 56K to ISDN to T1 to 5G, nothing about these technological advances invited me to reimagine what my sons’ lives might look like as adults.
But when I think about my little grandson, I’m like, “What does it even mean to be educated? What are you preparing for? How do you gain a sustainable advantage?”
Part 2 will upload next week.