Relevance: Peter Herford

Peter Herford’s assignments included CBS Bureau Chief in Vietnam, world pool producer for Apollo 11, CBS News producer covering the 1968 Presidential campaign of “the new Nixon,” as well as a variety of stories he producer for 60 Minutes. His last gig was teaching journalism in China for ten years.

As a young person, what did you understand about getting older, and how has that changed?

The acceleration of recent and future change far surpasses what my parents were able to prepare me for when I was young. Cultural and generational differences were our barriers as immigrants. While change is a clichéd constant, the acceleration of change is now exponential.

The impact of AI and AGI is starting to affect all of us. They are transforming all our futures. The luxury of generational change over the old 25-year cycles is long gone. Transformations in new tech and media can now be measured in a decade or even less. If the older generations are to be more than passive grandparents, we need to understand what is here now and what is coming to help the young on their journey.  

How can the older generation support today’s young people?

People now in their 70s-90s could not have imagined the present we now confront – other than in science fiction. Science is transforming fiction into today’s reality. Our children and grandchildren are living in what was once fictional. Preparing young people for the need to accommodate changes that narrow the scope of career, family, and economic planning has no road map, and some would say never has. The challenge for the young is flexibility imposed on them by technological and intellectual changes that define both opportunity and limitations.

What do you see looking ahead?

At 89, the final years of my life offer me a new challenge: Relevance. Health, as always, is the linchpin. Changes may affect your options of what you can do physically and mentally. Choosing traditional retirement life (travel, golf, and other pastimes) is an option as a reward for one’s working life. Traditional retirement may also be a path to a kind of irrelevance. Studies show that meeting the changing world by actively participating can sustain the mind and body and may even prolong life. The temptation is to say that there is nothing new here. Not so. There is always something more to learn.

We in the older generations need to be students of these new worlds so we can speak relevantly to younger people. We must learn to meet the challenge of technology, its new language, so we can understand how to help prepare our children and grandchildren for the world they face.