8 ms·

Employers Say Students Need AI Skills. What If Students Don't Want Them?

29 points by hdvr 2y ago

TimGlowa 2y ago
[dead]
zingababba 2y ago
My company fired devs and replaced with AI... It's coming.
Onavo 2y ago
For the STEM students, what they need is statistics (with a focus on high level Bayesian and statistical learning theory, not just frequentist regression tricks) and differential equations. Then they can build AI. AI, or specifically deep neural network enabled machine learning, isn't some sort of magical black box solution with no weaknesses. (I will however admit that it is the best universal function approximator that we currently know of) Otherwise you end up with an uneducated public whose main education is from Hollywood and ChatGPT. You need to start from high school, the AP classes need to be revamped. Currently they are focused on purely frequentist statistics. Frequentist statistics is great for most empirical sciences like biology. The formulas are mostly plug and play and even pure life science people with no mathematical talent can wield them without trouble. The problem is that they are very far from statistical learning. Here's the current AP stats curriculum, it is meant to be equivalent to Stat 1. https://library.fiveable.me/ap-stats https://library.fiveable.me/ap-stats If you want to develop a strong foundation for ML, Unit 6, 7, and 8 ought to be thrown out entirely. The level they are taught at doesn't really teach anything more than plugging formulas. Unit 4.5 (Conditional Probability) and Unit 5 (Sampling) need to be further developed to cover the Bayesian theories, perhaps a segue into graphical models and Markov chains. Generative ML for example interprets likelihood as an information generator (since in the Bayesian formula, it is roughly the "inverse" of conditional probability), unfortunately most stats classes outside of physics and high level ML theory will never mention this. Heck most classically trained statisticians won't ever encounter this idea. But it is the bread and butter of generative AI. Having a vague idea of KL-divergence and what Metropolis-Hastings is coming out of high school is infinitely more useful for their career in ML than knowing how to fiddle with a p-value. You can teach most of these concept without calculus if you simplify some things and replace integrals with their discrete summation versions. Rejection sampling for example is very easy to teach. The Common Core needs a revamp, and perhaps it's time to shift away from the historical focus on calculus/pre-calc as the central tenet of pre-college mathematical teaching.
- kubb 2y ago
  But that’s how employers understand AI. It’s ChatGPT.
- throwaway314155 2y ago
  The article is more discussing a sort of tool-level competency that is lacking. This looks more like adding classes to teach how to incorporate generative AI into learning and way less like the very advanced curriculum you're prescribing. Think "how to effectively use a search engine" (or even just typing) classes but for ChatGPT. Believe me, most students of the common core don't know or care about the difference between Bayesian and frequentist statistics. Are you only interested in helping the straight-A students that have better chances getting into Harvard? Did you read the article?
- dxbydt 2y ago
  Throwing out units 6,7,8 is a horrible, horrible idea. That’s the only useful part of the curriculum. In fact, most of the rest of the sections are not even stat. They are just plain math. Rest of your suggestions are just plain wild. If there is some unicorn high schooler out there who meets your wild template - knows no calculus but knows rejection sampling and MH - I would like to see which foolish employer hires this clown.
  - Onavo 2y ago
    > Rest of your suggestions are just plain wild. If there is some unicorn high schooler out there who meets your wild template - knows no calculus but knows rejection sampling and MH - I would like to see which foolish employer hires this clown. The point is to build intuition, those take time and unless the student is particularly mathematically inclined, you can't rush it. That's why you have to start in high school. Right now, the focus of pre calc is to induce them into calculus through slopes, limits, and derivatives. But a good chunk of high level statistics don't need that to build intuition. For example, we generally teach students y=mx+b in middle school and high school. This is considered a perfectly normal part of math education. It's accepted that the students may not understand the full meaning of linearity and regression at first, but at higher levels the formula would be second nature to them. This is the point I am trying to make about statistical learning (not specifically Bayesian theory in particular, but the key concepts around it). Generative ML and stuff like LLMs require a specific frame of mine and view of the world, and it's best to develop it early. The way we are teaching statistical learning theory, at the lower levels, is essentially dumping a massive bag of tricks on them and hoping for the best. We need to change that approach and start treating it like pre-calc and algebra, something to be taught level by level, with building intuition as a core focus. It's not easy to communicate the idea that "the next word prediction of the LLM (depending on the model) is generally the joint probability of all other words that come before it by sampling from a multidimensional probability distribution" to most 14-16 year olds.
bamboozled 2y ago
Who cares what people want \s
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I expect most people don’t want their preferences to be coddled in a way that leaves them at a disadvantage when they graduate. AI is improving fast enough that maintaining fluency with its benefits seems like a credible “very good idea” for a lot of people.
  - bamboozled 2y ago
    I mean, we're getting "ai" whether we like it or not so yeah
  - amonith 2y ago
    Tbh, as a AI power user (dev) - what is there to learn? Maybe one day to figure out that you have to write prompts in a certain way but you don't have to learn that "before the job" in any shape or form. It's way more important to know what to ask about and if the AI is not hallucinating (so, the actual stuff those students learn currently) than any tools. It's pointless like wasting time teaching highschoolers how to fill tax forms.
- joegibbs 2y ago
  It's not really a representative sample of what people want, only 2% responded to the section about AI and only half of those are anti-AI. You'd have to assume as well that the people most likely to respond to the AI section would be the people who hate AI the most.
Almondsetat 2y ago
Perhaps AI will achieve what Excel, scripting or programming failed at? Education is slow, people still don't know how to use a spreadsheet software or scripting language to enhance their lives/work. Students don't use Excel or python to cheat on their homework or exams, so they don't really have reasons to learn those tools. Meanwhile, user-facing AI tools are often extremely intuitive and feel quite natural to interact with, so by the time young people reach working age they already have familiarity with what they need
- tourmalinetaco 2y ago
  I truly hope so, even IT majors at my college gave me weird looks when I said I used Excel and later Python to quickly do our math homework. I was taught very explicitly in my engineering course to do so, as my teacher had an Excel sheet made for calculating hydraulic cylinder requirements which inspired me to do all the work ahead of time. “Do everything to reduce downtime”, he’d say, because downtime is lost revenue.
- amonith 2y ago
  There’s a high possibility that AI will have exactly the opposite effect on work productivity for young people, at least for this generation, because technology in companies around the world lags years or even decades behind for simple economic reasons. In a similar way, the overuse of simplified touchscreen-based devices makes them unprepared for working with computers and other “old tech” permeating the modern office. Many of them do not even know what files are, and their tech skills make them almost completely unhireable.
  - eru 2y ago
    I suspect the average tech skill is about the same as in earlier generations. It's just that for older folks amount of time spent with computing devices was a decent proxy for tech skills. That correlation has probably broken down.
    - amonith 2y ago
      I'm not sure about the average but I have 0 data. We will see in the future because the generation currently entering the workforce still used computers a bit due to tablets and phones not being that powerful. It's all about peeps currently in school. You need to spend time with computers to learn how to use them so if average PC usage drops I'd expect the average skill to drop as well.
cheema33 2y ago
AI is just another tool. A pretty good one. And there is a skill to using it efficiently. If you ask it dumb questions, you will get dumb answers. Garbage in, garbage out. I am a software developer and I hire devs as well. If somebody is ignorant of AI or refuses to use it, that is hard pass for me. It is not all that different from an accountant not wanting to use computers. Sure, you could still do some work. But, you will not be competitive.
- kachapopopow 2y ago
  Some people are just really good without AI so I wouldn't immediately hard pass on them.
  - jillesvangurp 2y ago
    They are still going to be slow doing things manually.
    - kachapopopow 2y ago
      You write automation tools for that.
  - kolinko 2y ago
    Perhaps if they are super specialised in one narrow niche. The moment they need to write code in a new language/framework/algorirhms/domain, they benefit tremendously from chatgpt. Or even just redacting their documentation entries. I’d say the main devs that don’t benefit is mid-level ones. Good enough to do some programming, but not good enough to figure out how to benefit from gpt.
    - kachapopopow 2y ago
      AI's are currently not helpful since they make shit up when you ask things about documentation or mix and match things from different libraries. Normal search is still the best for docs. Anything javascript related it's probably fine tho.
atleastoptimal 2y ago
students will only need AI skills for the next 2-3 years, after which point AGI will render the "need" to have any skills meaningless as it would be to expect students to have woodworking or metalsmithing skills
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Yes, but more precisely the skill of needing to use anything going by the name of AI...
- phito 2y ago
  I'm so, soooo sick of people claiming so certainly AGI will be there in X time. You don't know. Nobody knows. Anyone claiming they know are full of shit. Stop speaking in absolutes.
  - charlieyu1 2y ago
    I still remember people said fusion energy will be available in a few decades, in a few decades ago.
    - skeaker 2y ago
      The rest of this comment chain aside, this is silly. "Someone predicted something wrong before so all predictions are sure to be wrong going forward."
    - lordnacho 2y ago
      On the other hand, we actually do have a computer, with access to all knowledge, in our pockets, right now. EDIT. The point of the comment is not to say that you will in fact have all knowledge available. There's guidelines about how you're supposed to read here on HN. The point was that this device that people could only dream of a few decades ago actually became available. Maybe it's worth reminding people that you used to not be able to sit on your butt at home and still access just about any undergraduate level material you could think of, along with a street map of everywhere, as well as a way to take pictures, deal with your finances, and a zillion other applications.
phkahler 2y ago
Maybe employers are just believing the hype from companies like OpenAI. The student responses seemed spot on to me. They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not chat with a bot.
- nicce 2y ago
  They need to learn the material at first. Then, AI is just a tool and you lose if you don’t use it.
  - amelius 2y ago
    The nice thing about OpenAI is that they are so open about their technology. They even have programs that teach students how to build their own LLMs so they never become dependent on something they cannot control.
    - jampekka 2y ago
      OpenAI LLMs are some of the least open.
  - eqvinox 2y ago
    No, they need to learn the material at first, and then, if it is beneficial for the situation, they need to learn the shortcomings and pitfalls of AI (both generically and specifically to their use case) before using it. You're right in that AI is a tool that might be necessary to use, but just like with a heavy industry machine tool that can chop your arm off if you use it wrong, there need to be operator training requirements.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      Machine tools are deterministic enough: they have interlocks and if you defeat the interlocks or put your hand in a specific space, you're in trouble. Is AI deterministic enough for this approach to safety?
      - 2y ago
tkgally 2y ago
Ever since ChatGPT came out, I’ve been discussing it and other AI tools with the students in the university classes I teach. My impression matches the results of this survey. Some of the students have started following AI developments closely and using the tools, but many of them don’t seem interested and they wonder why I talk about it so much. Even when I told the students that they could use AI when doing some of their assignments, it was clear from their distinctive writing styles and grammatical mistakes that most of them had used it only sparingly or not at all.
DiscourseFan 2y ago
Its not really useful unless you're a highschool student or something. And even that's bad enough. There are definitely use cases but it will probably take like a decade or so to integrate it properly into industrial processes, and even then it will probably be limited and used in very strange ways you couldn't possibly imagine today. Like, someone is going to come up with something really fucking weird that saves a lot of time on some ultra-specific process and you won't even notice it. Meanwhile, people will expect work emails to be written with more personal expression or else they'll think an AI wrote it (I already know some people who got in trouble for using AI to write important emails and were then threatened with lawsuits for language in those emails that they themselves, of course, did not read).
- eru 2y ago
  > (I already know some people who got in trouble for using AI to write important emails and were then threatened with lawsuits for language in those emails that they themselves, of course, did not read). Of course, the solution to that is to have an AI that scans your email for problematic language.
  - DiscourseFan 2y ago
    Its not that the language was "problematical," its just that the contents were more sensitive then I think they realized, and so they were held to account for the specificities of the language they used.
    - pjc50 2y ago
      Like the Air Canada case? https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb... You are potentially liable for the contents of your work emails. This includes if you put a stupid disclaimer at the bottom. People have gone to jail over the contents of chat. It's one thing to take notes on a criminal conspiracy and another thing to have the AI make one up and drop you in it because you didn't read the email it sent.
rsynnott 2y ago
Oh, ffs. What are “ai skills”? I’m reminded that the big thing when I was in college was XML databases. XML databases, we were assured (though not particularly convincingly) were the future. I didn’t opt for the course covering XML databases, and somehow survive 20 years later; meanwhile no-one really remembers what an XML database even was. (It was, all told, a rather boring time for tech fads. The 90s AI bubble had imploded with such finality that people barely dared utter the term 'AI', the dot-com crash had just happened, and the gloss was off CORBA, so weird XML-y stuff got pressed into service for a few years until the next thing came along.)
TrackerFF 2y ago
So a nephew of mine starter studying CS this fall, and I've helped him out with his intro to CS class. They recently got a larger mid-term assignment which involves implementing some well-known, basic data structures, and the standard functionality associated with them. In one of the problems, they were given skeleton code to a bit more complex functionality - and their task is to explicitly use LLM of their choice to fill in the code, and test if the code works, using a set of tests. I think the class in general has been updated to assume that students are using LLMs more and more, as the problem sets this year are longer and more complex, compared to those of past years (which were made available to all current students).
TrackerFF 2y ago
Also, the way I see it: "AI skills" is comparable to what using a search engine was before. You'd be absolutely amazed how many people still can't use search engines, other than the absolute bare basics of typing something into google, and giving up if the result isn't on top of page 1. I've worked with plenty of (non-tech) people that are like fish out of water, when trying to find information. Just learning stuff like boolean opeators, searching for words in quotation marks, specifying which sites and dates to search for, is way beyond what most people know, or do. Some goes for LLMs. There's a difference between prompts, and knowing what to ask for, and how to structure your questions.
- salawat 2y ago
  Most search engines don't even actually do raw boolean searching anymore in favor of NN powered NL voodoo that takes an entire planets worth of internet and reduces it down to maybe 200 of the wrong site. All because we can't have a representative index exposed to the public anymore.
drivingmenuts 2y ago
Why do they need AI skills when they're going to be replaced by the same AI that is learning from their work?

29 points by hdvr 2y ago

TimGlowa 2y ago

[dead]

zingababba 2y ago

My company fired devs and replaced with AI... It's coming.

Onavo 2y ago

For the STEM students, what they need is statistics (with a focus on high level Bayesian and statistical learning theory, not just frequentist regression tricks) and differential equations. Then they can build AI. AI, or specifically deep neural network enabled machine learning, isn't some sort of magical black box solution with no weaknesses. (I will however admit that it is the best universal function approximator that we currently know of) Otherwise you end up with an uneducated public whose main education is from Hollywood and ChatGPT. You need to start from high school, the AP classes need to be revamped. Currently they are focused on purely frequentist statistics. Frequentist statistics is great for most empirical sciences like biology. The formulas are mostly plug and play and even pure life science people with no mathematical talent can wield them without trouble. The problem is that they are very far from statistical learning. Here's the current AP stats curriculum, it is meant to be equivalent to Stat 1. https://library.fiveable.me/ap-stats https://library.fiveable.me/ap-stats If you want to develop a strong foundation for ML, Unit 6, 7, and 8 ought to be thrown out entirely. The level they are taught at doesn't really teach anything more than plugging formulas. Unit 4.5 (Conditional Probability) and Unit 5 (Sampling) need to be further developed to cover the Bayesian theories, perhaps a segue into graphical models and Markov chains. Generative ML for example interprets likelihood as an information generator (since in the Bayesian formula, it is roughly the "inverse" of conditional probability), unfortunately most stats classes outside of physics and high level ML theory will never mention this. Heck most classically trained statisticians won't ever encounter this idea. But it is the bread and butter of generative AI. Having a vague idea of KL-divergence and what Metropolis-Hastings is coming out of high school is infinitely more useful for their career in ML than knowing how to fiddle with a p-value. You can teach most of these concept without calculus if you simplify some things and replace integrals with their discrete summation versions. Rejection sampling for example is very easy to teach. The Common Core needs a revamp, and perhaps it's time to shift away from the historical focus on calculus/pre-calc as the central tenet of pre-college mathematical teaching.

kubb 2y ago
But that’s how employers understand AI. It’s ChatGPT.
throwaway314155 2y ago
The article is more discussing a sort of tool-level competency that is lacking. This looks more like adding classes to teach how to incorporate generative AI into learning and way less like the very advanced curriculum you're prescribing. Think "how to effectively use a search engine" (or even just typing) classes but for ChatGPT. Believe me, most students of the common core don't know or care about the difference between Bayesian and frequentist statistics. Are you only interested in helping the straight-A students that have better chances getting into Harvard? Did you read the article?
dxbydt 2y ago
Throwing out units 6,7,8 is a horrible, horrible idea. That’s the only useful part of the curriculum. In fact, most of the rest of the sections are not even stat. They are just plain math. Rest of your suggestions are just plain wild. If there is some unicorn high schooler out there who meets your wild template - knows no calculus but knows rejection sampling and MH - I would like to see which foolish employer hires this clown.
- Onavo 2y ago
  > Rest of your suggestions are just plain wild. If there is some unicorn high schooler out there who meets your wild template - knows no calculus but knows rejection sampling and MH - I would like to see which foolish employer hires this clown. The point is to build intuition, those take time and unless the student is particularly mathematically inclined, you can't rush it. That's why you have to start in high school. Right now, the focus of pre calc is to induce them into calculus through slopes, limits, and derivatives. But a good chunk of high level statistics don't need that to build intuition. For example, we generally teach students y=mx+b in middle school and high school. This is considered a perfectly normal part of math education. It's accepted that the students may not understand the full meaning of linearity and regression at first, but at higher levels the formula would be second nature to them. This is the point I am trying to make about statistical learning (not specifically Bayesian theory in particular, but the key concepts around it). Generative ML and stuff like LLMs require a specific frame of mine and view of the world, and it's best to develop it early. The way we are teaching statistical learning theory, at the lower levels, is essentially dumping a massive bag of tricks on them and hoping for the best. We need to change that approach and start treating it like pre-calc and algebra, something to be taught level by level, with building intuition as a core focus. It's not easy to communicate the idea that "the next word prediction of the LLM (depending on the model) is generally the joint probability of all other words that come before it by sampling from a multidimensional probability distribution" to most 14-16 year olds.

bamboozled 2y ago

Who cares what people want \s

Nevermark 2y ago
I expect most people don’t want their preferences to be coddled in a way that leaves them at a disadvantage when they graduate. AI is improving fast enough that maintaining fluency with its benefits seems like a credible “very good idea” for a lot of people.
- bamboozled 2y ago
  I mean, we're getting "ai" whether we like it or not so yeah
- amonith 2y ago
  Tbh, as a AI power user (dev) - what is there to learn? Maybe one day to figure out that you have to write prompts in a certain way but you don't have to learn that "before the job" in any shape or form. It's way more important to know what to ask about and if the AI is not hallucinating (so, the actual stuff those students learn currently) than any tools. It's pointless like wasting time teaching highschoolers how to fill tax forms.
joegibbs 2y ago
It's not really a representative sample of what people want, only 2% responded to the section about AI and only half of those are anti-AI. You'd have to assume as well that the people most likely to respond to the AI section would be the people who hate AI the most.

Almondsetat 2y ago

Perhaps AI will achieve what Excel, scripting or programming failed at? Education is slow, people still don't know how to use a spreadsheet software or scripting language to enhance their lives/work. Students don't use Excel or python to cheat on their homework or exams, so they don't really have reasons to learn those tools. Meanwhile, user-facing AI tools are often extremely intuitive and feel quite natural to interact with, so by the time young people reach working age they already have familiarity with what they need

tourmalinetaco 2y ago
I truly hope so, even IT majors at my college gave me weird looks when I said I used Excel and later Python to quickly do our math homework. I was taught very explicitly in my engineering course to do so, as my teacher had an Excel sheet made for calculating hydraulic cylinder requirements which inspired me to do all the work ahead of time. “Do everything to reduce downtime”, he’d say, because downtime is lost revenue.
amonith 2y ago
There’s a high possibility that AI will have exactly the opposite effect on work productivity for young people, at least for this generation, because technology in companies around the world lags years or even decades behind for simple economic reasons. In a similar way, the overuse of simplified touchscreen-based devices makes them unprepared for working with computers and other “old tech” permeating the modern office. Many of them do not even know what files are, and their tech skills make them almost completely unhireable.
- eru 2y ago
  I suspect the average tech skill is about the same as in earlier generations. It's just that for older folks amount of time spent with computing devices was a decent proxy for tech skills. That correlation has probably broken down.
  - amonith 2y ago
    I'm not sure about the average but I have 0 data. We will see in the future because the generation currently entering the workforce still used computers a bit due to tablets and phones not being that powerful. It's all about peeps currently in school. You need to spend time with computers to learn how to use them so if average PC usage drops I'd expect the average skill to drop as well.

cheema33 2y ago

AI is just another tool. A pretty good one. And there is a skill to using it efficiently. If you ask it dumb questions, you will get dumb answers. Garbage in, garbage out. I am a software developer and I hire devs as well. If somebody is ignorant of AI or refuses to use it, that is hard pass for me. It is not all that different from an accountant not wanting to use computers. Sure, you could still do some work. But, you will not be competitive.

kachapopopow 2y ago
Some people are just really good without AI so I wouldn't immediately hard pass on them.
- jillesvangurp 2y ago
  They are still going to be slow doing things manually.
  - kachapopopow 2y ago
    You write automation tools for that.
- kolinko 2y ago
  Perhaps if they are super specialised in one narrow niche. The moment they need to write code in a new language/framework/algorirhms/domain, they benefit tremendously from chatgpt. Or even just redacting their documentation entries. I’d say the main devs that don’t benefit is mid-level ones. Good enough to do some programming, but not good enough to figure out how to benefit from gpt.
  - kachapopopow 2y ago
    AI's are currently not helpful since they make shit up when you ask things about documentation or mix and match things from different libraries. Normal search is still the best for docs. Anything javascript related it's probably fine tho.

atleastoptimal 2y ago

students will only need AI skills for the next 2-3 years, after which point AGI will render the "need" to have any skills meaningless as it would be to expect students to have woodworking or metalsmithing skills

DiscourseFan 2y ago
Yes, but more precisely the skill of needing to use anything going by the name of AI...
phito 2y ago
I'm so, soooo sick of people claiming so certainly AGI will be there in X time. You don't know. Nobody knows. Anyone claiming they know are full of shit. Stop speaking in absolutes.
- charlieyu1 2y ago
  I still remember people said fusion energy will be available in a few decades, in a few decades ago.
  - skeaker 2y ago
    The rest of this comment chain aside, this is silly. "Someone predicted something wrong before so all predictions are sure to be wrong going forward."
  - lordnacho 2y ago
    On the other hand, we actually do have a computer, with access to all knowledge, in our pockets, right now. EDIT. The point of the comment is not to say that you will in fact have all knowledge available. There's guidelines about how you're supposed to read here on HN. The point was that this device that people could only dream of a few decades ago actually became available. Maybe it's worth reminding people that you used to not be able to sit on your butt at home and still access just about any undergraduate level material you could think of, along with a street map of everywhere, as well as a way to take pictures, deal with your finances, and a zillion other applications.

phkahler 2y ago

Maybe employers are just believing the hype from companies like OpenAI. The student responses seemed spot on to me. They need to learn the material and how to do their job, not chat with a bot.

nicce 2y ago
They need to learn the material at first. Then, AI is just a tool and you lose if you don’t use it.
- amelius 2y ago
  The nice thing about OpenAI is that they are so open about their technology. They even have programs that teach students how to build their own LLMs so they never become dependent on something they cannot control.
  - jampekka 2y ago
    OpenAI LLMs are some of the least open.
- eqvinox 2y ago
  No, they need to learn the material at first, and then, if it is beneficial for the situation, they need to learn the shortcomings and pitfalls of AI (both generically and specifically to their use case) before using it. You're right in that AI is a tool that might be necessary to use, but just like with a heavy industry machine tool that can chop your arm off if you use it wrong, there need to be operator training requirements.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Machine tools are deterministic enough: they have interlocks and if you defeat the interlocks or put your hand in a specific space, you're in trouble. Is AI deterministic enough for this approach to safety?
    - 2y ago

tkgally 2y ago

Ever since ChatGPT came out, I’ve been discussing it and other AI tools with the students in the university classes I teach. My impression matches the results of this survey. Some of the students have started following AI developments closely and using the tools, but many of them don’t seem interested and they wonder why I talk about it so much. Even when I told the students that they could use AI when doing some of their assignments, it was clear from their distinctive writing styles and grammatical mistakes that most of them had used it only sparingly or not at all.

DiscourseFan 2y ago

Its not really useful unless you're a highschool student or something. And even that's bad enough. There are definitely use cases but it will probably take like a decade or so to integrate it properly into industrial processes, and even then it will probably be limited and used in very strange ways you couldn't possibly imagine today. Like, someone is going to come up with something really fucking weird that saves a lot of time on some ultra-specific process and you won't even notice it. Meanwhile, people will expect work emails to be written with more personal expression or else they'll think an AI wrote it (I already know some people who got in trouble for using AI to write important emails and were then threatened with lawsuits for language in those emails that they themselves, of course, did not read).

eru 2y ago
> (I already know some people who got in trouble for using AI to write important emails and were then threatened with lawsuits for language in those emails that they themselves, of course, did not read). Of course, the solution to that is to have an AI that scans your email for problematic language.
- DiscourseFan 2y ago
  Its not that the language was "problematical," its just that the contents were more sensitive then I think they realized, and so they were held to account for the specificities of the language they used.
  - pjc50 2y ago
    Like the Air Canada case? https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatbot-misinformation-what-travellers-should-know https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-chatb... You are potentially liable for the contents of your work emails. This includes if you put a stupid disclaimer at the bottom. People have gone to jail over the contents of chat. It's one thing to take notes on a criminal conspiracy and another thing to have the AI make one up and drop you in it because you didn't read the email it sent.

rsynnott 2y ago

Oh, ffs. What are “ai skills”? I’m reminded that the big thing when I was in college was XML databases. XML databases, we were assured (though not particularly convincingly) were the future. I didn’t opt for the course covering XML databases, and somehow survive 20 years later; meanwhile no-one really remembers what an XML database even was. (It was, all told, a rather boring time for tech fads. The 90s AI bubble had imploded with such finality that people barely dared utter the term 'AI', the dot-com crash had just happened, and the gloss was off CORBA, so weird XML-y stuff got pressed into service for a few years until the next thing came along.)

TrackerFF 2y ago

So a nephew of mine starter studying CS this fall, and I've helped him out with his intro to CS class. They recently got a larger mid-term assignment which involves implementing some well-known, basic data structures, and the standard functionality associated with them. In one of the problems, they were given skeleton code to a bit more complex functionality - and their task is to explicitly use LLM of their choice to fill in the code, and test if the code works, using a set of tests. I think the class in general has been updated to assume that students are using LLMs more and more, as the problem sets this year are longer and more complex, compared to those of past years (which were made available to all current students).

TrackerFF 2y ago

Also, the way I see it: "AI skills" is comparable to what using a search engine was before. You'd be absolutely amazed how many people still can't use search engines, other than the absolute bare basics of typing something into google, and giving up if the result isn't on top of page 1. I've worked with plenty of (non-tech) people that are like fish out of water, when trying to find information. Just learning stuff like boolean opeators, searching for words in quotation marks, specifying which sites and dates to search for, is way beyond what most people know, or do. Some goes for LLMs. There's a difference between prompts, and knowing what to ask for, and how to structure your questions.

salawat 2y ago
Most search engines don't even actually do raw boolean searching anymore in favor of NN powered NL voodoo that takes an entire planets worth of internet and reduces it down to maybe 200 of the wrong site. All because we can't have a representative index exposed to the public anymore.

drivingmenuts 2y ago

Why do they need AI skills when they're going to be replaced by the same AI that is learning from their work?