I joined a dinner with some successful people in the semiconductor industry a few months ago. During the dinner, one of them asked me a question: "What do you want your children to do when they grow up?"

What I can see is that this is such a common anxiety among parents, especially for those successful ones. They are used to reduce uncertainties and control risks, and certainly, they want to make sure their children will have a good life. Naturally, they tend to set a path for their children.

As parents of a 2-year-old, our views on what we want from our children's education and careers have become clearer after many long discussions since pregnancy. One thing becomes obvious is that we can not reliably predicate what job or industry will be the most important in 30 years.

30 years is a long time. Think about what we had 30 years ago. PC was on the rise, and the internet was not a thing. It's hard to imagine a large neural network could even work. Hardware engineer was one of the best careers you could have. Who knew that software engineers would be paid more than hardware engineers after 10 years or so, and the then-unknown machine learning engineers after that?

Jobs are ephemeral. Careers are changing. What is way more stable is human desires, which have been there for thousands of years.

What we focus on our children's education, is to establish good personalities and leadership. We want them to have mindfulness, determination, kindness, integrity, and humbleness. These are the most important traits to find out what is important, collaborate with others, and get things done.

Physically work has dramatically reduced with machine automation in the past centuries. Informative work has also rapidly reduced with software automation in the past decades. Any repeating labor/work with mass demand will be automated and replaced by machines somehow. Doing a job is easy with established industries, and finding a solution will be easier and easier with AI on the rise. What is and always is hard all the time, is to figure out what problems need to be solved, and why we should care about them.

All value in the world is based on human desires. We need to be mindful to realize what is valuable. It's all start from the inside.

So, we want our children to know what they want, on their own, instead of we telling them what is important to them. The good news is that they know that without us putting any effort into developing it. The bad news is that we need a lot of effort to not control them without making our own lives too miserable, since most of the time they won't do what we want them to do. This can link back to LaoZi's philosophy that we should build an environment and mechanism to solve the problem. It requires way more intelligent work upfront, but much more automated afterward.

It sounds simple, but it's not. As they grow up, they will explore even more things in the world. And that requires tremendous social resources to set up their environments to influence their behaviors.

We can't control their careers but we could influence it. The way to do it is by showing them what is possible. We could show them the enjoyment of arts, we could show them the power of science and technology, and we could show them how politics and the financial world work. Naturally, they will be attracted by the beauty, the power, and the satisfaction in those works, for the same reasons as ours. They will dig into those fields and keep learning how to achieve their goals.

If they really know what to do, they can lead. If they have the determination, they can achieve. The rest traits are helpful but less important.

Finally, the easiest part is to watch them figure out a job to do in their fields. It's easy because it's out of our control. The hard part may be how to accept the consequences if that is any different than what we expected.