Kids have a thousand ways of breaking your heart.

Sentiment aside, Cole might well be correct. He’s a busy kid and I’m an older father. When he is 25 I’ll be 76. And while I don’t expect to be dead at that age, Cole quite pragmatically looks at my father — Grandpa Ray, who died at 70 — as a pretty good predictor. Cole actually thinks about this stuff.

And it has made me do some thinking, too, like what advice I can give Cole and his two brothers should I be unable to guide and protect them as long as I have been planning to?

Our society, culture, and economy have turned to quagmires all at the same time. Nothing is as it was nor is anything even like it appears to be, so how does a seven year-old prepare for the future?  “What will you be when you grow up?” is a much harder question than it used to be.

There are near term and longer term implications to this question. In the near term how do we creatively respond to jobs going overseas? In the longer term what happens if Ray Kurzweil is correct and the Singularity rolls along in 2029 or so and humans suddenly become little more than parasites on a digital Earth?

The easy answer to this problem has been the same since the 1960s — become Paul McCartney. But how many Beatles can the world sustain?

My friend George Morton has a daughter (I know nothing about those — wrong datatype) facing the same quagmires as my sons, so here’s a synthesis of our thinking.

Remember the old Robin Williams joke about his son’s future:  “Hello Mr. President” or “Do you want fries with that?”  Career planning at this point probably requires a combination of serendipitous opportunity plus being curious. This in turn requires an educated mind that allows for serendipity to play a large role in discovering opportunities and staying just outside of your comfort zone.

We start with a Catch-22: You can’t get a job because no one will ever hire you. Now what are you going to do about it?  The answer is of course everyone works for themselves, there are no employees, and everyone is just a subcontractor.

There are two times this really sucks — when you don’t have a job and when you see your current job going away.  Many of us are in both situations nearly all the time.  I know I am.

How do you educate yourself to deal with the changes in your business knowing that whatever you do is going to be replaced by a computer sometime in the future?  First concentrate on the structural parts of any enterprise that are likely to never go away, computers or no: 1) finance; 2) marketing; 3) production or service.

The key change in any industry is the delivery method.  Change the method of distribution and you change the business model.  iTunes destroyed record stores, digital cameras destroyed Polaroid and Kodak; the list goes on.  The key change was distribution.

Look, for example, at what’s happening to Electronic Arts (EA).  It was pinball versus Pac Man, then PC’s with retail distribution, then Internet distribution, now smart phones.  Every time the distribution system changed so did the price point, which is now down to 99 cents.  EA still doesn’t know how to build Angry Birds.  iTunes changed the distribution system for users and developers so now it doesn’t look good for EA at 99 cents.

Note on my EA crack from an EA employee — “Battlefield 3, an ‘old school game’ retailing at $60 just broke records and sold 5 million copies DAY ONE. FIFA 12 did 3.2 million end of September. There is plenty of life in the old dogs yet.” I’d note, however, that they are old dogs. 

Change like this is rapidly coming to every industry.  Talk to book editors, as I sometimes do, and hear the terror in their voices. What if books simply go away?

Getting, keeping or making that future job starts with understanding the distribution system and your place in that process.  And to survive even mid-term the key is to position yourself as the linchpin.  Your knowledge has to be critical to the success or failure of the process.  That would seem to call for specialization but specialists often don’t see the ball even coming.  You need a broader view.

But not an MBA. Those will go away.  So will MD’s, CPA’s, and even CCIE’s, replaced with new acronyms for new certificates, so be ready to get a new label every few years.

Where you live counts as much as anything else, too, so position yourself in a city that has high serendipity.  Any kid living with his parents in Palo Alto can get a job today simply because he already has a place to live. No skills required.

If you want to be in finance, going to Alabama is not going to help you develop the next big financial idea, but Boston, New York, London, Chicago will.  If you want to play with new business opportunities in IT, you get the picture.  So for an education; are you going to a school that helps you to develop serendipitous opportunities for your lifetime?

Go to a second or fourth grade teacher or even a high school guidance counselor with these ideas and they think you are crazy, but that’s part of the problem — the educational establishment is as reactive (and sometimes as reactionary) as any other government agency. They have no better ideas than we do what to do with our kids.

Jaron Lanier once told me that you can have enough money, enough power, but you can never have enough experience, so I plan to give my kids as much experience as they can handle, keeping in mind the fact that even post-Singularity it may still matter more who you know than what you know.

Live in the coolest place, I tell Cole and his brothers. Have the coolest friends. Do the coolest things. Learn from everything you do. Be open to new opportunities. And do something your father hasn’t yet figured how to do, which is every few years take off 138 days and just walk the Earth.

I’ve been thinking about this topic ever since I wrote a column on an iPhone.  It wasn’t easy to do, but I researched and wrote the column, loaded it to WordPress and added graphics, all by jabbing fingers at that tiny screen.  It was for me an important test of what was possible and confirmed to me what I’d been guessing — that the iPhone is the first real device for the new mobile platform.  Not a great device, but as Adam Osborne used to preach, it is an adequate device, and in the early days adequate is quite enough.

This seminal role for the iPhone is mainly by chance, I think.  Its success is deserved no more than it is undeserved.  The role could have fallen to Android or WebOS if they had been earlier or even to Windows Mobile if it had been a bit better.  Steve Jobs proved his luck again by dragging his feet just long enough to fall into the sweet spot for a whole new industry.  That’s not to say he can’t still blow it, but he has the advantage for now.

It’s important to understand just how quickly things are changing.  Part of this comes down to the hardware replacement cycle for these devices.  A PC generation is traditionally 18 months long and most of us are unwilling to be more than two generations behind, so we get a new desktop or notebook every 36 months.  Mobile devices don’t last that long, nor are they expected to.  The replacement cycle is 18 months, reinforced by customer contract terms that give us a new device every couple of years in return for staying a loyal customer.  Mobile hardware generations last nine months, and 18 tends to be the maximum time any of us use a single device.

Think about it.  This means that mobile devices are evolving twice as fast as desktops ever did.  This just about equals the rate at which wireless network bandwidth is declining in price and matches, too, the faster-than-Moore’s Law growth of back-end services.  Think about those first iPhones compared to the ones shipping today.  In less than two years the network has increased in speed by an easy 2X and the iPhone processor speed has doubled, leading to a device that is at least four times more powerful than it was originally.  It’s a much more capable device than it was, yet the price has only gone down and down.

This is not a celebration of the iPhone: the same performance effects apply equally to all mobile platforms.

Now just imagine what it says for the smart phones to come.  In another two years they’ll be eight times as powerful as they are today, making them the functional equivalents of today’s desktops and notebooks.  If only we could do something about those tiny screens and keyboards.

The keyboard is a tough one.  In one sense it isn’t hard to imagine it being handled through voice input.  That’s how they did it on Star Trek, right?  But there was a problem with Star Trek computing: the interface is what I think of as interrogational.  Kirk or Scotty asked the ship’s computer (a mainframe, obviously) a question that always had an answer that could be relayed in a handful of words.  The answer was “yes,” “no,” “Romulan Bird of Prey,” or “kiss your ass goodbye, Sulu.” There’s never any nuance with an interrogational interface and not much of a range of outputs.  It’s okay for running a starship or a nuclear power plant, but by being only able to speak it is limited to what words alone can do.

I attribute this, by the way, to Gene Roddenberry’s work as a writer.  I doubt that he saw word output as a limitation, since his product was, after all, words.  TV is radio with pictures, and the words really count a lot.  But try to use them to simulate a nuclear meltdown with any degree of precision or prediction and they’ll fail you.

Our future mobile devices will use words for input, sure, but words alone won’t be enough.  Still, between voice recognition, virtual keyboards, and cutting and pasting on those little screens, there’s a lot that can be done.  It’s the output that worries me more.

I first wrote about this a decade ago when I heard about how Sony was supporting research at the University of Washington on retinal scan displays — work that eventually resolved into products from a Washington State company called Microvision.  They’ll shine a laser into your eye today, painting a fabulous scene on the back of your eyeball in what appears to be perfect safety, but I have a hard time imagining the broad acceptance of such displays by billions (yes, BILLIONS) of users any more than I expect that Bluetooth earphones will survive a decade from now.  Too clunky.

I think we’re headed in another direction and that direction is — as always — an outgrowth of Moore’s Law.  Processors get smaller every year and as they get smaller they need less energy to run.  Modern processors are also adapting more asynchronous logic — another topic I started writing about 10 years ago that offers dramatic energy savings.

We’re at the point right now where primitive single-pixel displays can be built into contact lenses.  They act as user interfaces for experimental devices like automatic insulin pumps.  This already exists.  A patch of carbon nanotubes on your arm continuously monitor blood glucose levels, driving a pump that keeps your insulin supply right where it should be.  Any problem with the pump or the levels is shown by a red dot that appears in your field of view courtesy of that contact lens.  The data connection between pump and eyeball is wireless. The power to run that display is wireless too, since the contact lens display scavenges RF energy out of the air to run, courtesy of that mobile phone on your belt and that WiFi access point on the ceiling.

As long as we’re personally connected to the network we’ll have enough power to run such displays.  No more airplane mode.

And while that display is a single pixel today, we can pretty easily predict at what point it could be the equivalent of HDTV.  Except I don’t expect we’ll ever get there.  That’s because, thanks to Ray Kurzweil’s singularity — that point at which everyday machines have more computing cycles than I do — we’ll soon have so much excess processing power that mere physical interfaces will be boring and not necessary.

Here’s my problem with the singularity: I don’t want to work for my computer, much less for my microwave oven, both of which are supposed to be way smarter than me by 2029, according to Ray.  My way around this problem, in the Capt. Kirk tradition, is to find difficult jobs for all that computing power to keep it from interfering with my lifestyle.

So there’s a platform transition happening. We’re in the middle of it.  The new platform is a mobile interface to a cloud network.  And the way we’ll shortly communicate with our devices, I predict, will be through our thoughts.  By 2029 (and probably a lot sooner) we’ll think our input and see pictures in our heads.

Think it can’t happen?  Twenty years ago was Windows 3.0 and Mac OS 6. Twenty years from now computing won’t even be a device, just a service.