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If 1 is true, why does he assume the people in 2 (new grads) aren't capable of using AI tools to achieve breakthroughs and build new products?
It a classic mistake also made by central planners. You don't know what you don't know. We are often surprised by the second and third order effects of change. Sometimes a cascade of things can happen and result in something no one imagined. This can be a good thing or a bad thing.
If AI tools are making entry level jobs obsolete, this really just means senior researcher doing frontier research became the new entry level.
This is a raising of the bar. We have seen this many times before just as we have seen the same fear mongering about technology advancement many times before.
The truth is, we will likely have transitions in times of technology advancement where some are negatively affected. But almost always the vast majority of people are positively effected.
Personally, I think it is far too soon to say what the effect generative AI will actually be. I don't have a sense that it is going to be as trans-formative as many think. I heard a guy said it won't be like the harnessing of electricity but it will be more like the launch of the iPhone. That might sound silly to some but think about the effects both positive and negative of the iPhone. It actually took a while for it to really impact society. I think we are in that phase with generative AI.
Its not making massive leaps right now. Its progress has slowed but there are serious skill gaps in using it. Even in the skill professions like software development. MIT just recently released a study showing that a large number of AI projects done by companies have failed to show profit.
This isn't surprising to me as I've been working on one of these myself. AI isn't magic and there is knowledge required to use it effectively. But I think it will get better and we will get better at using it. Both extremes on this topic sound off to me.
176 sats \ 8 replies \ @optimism 15h
I think it is far too soon to say what the effect generative AI will actually be.
This. Plus, I feel that the most interesting AI applications today aren't purely generative, but transformative. The most used application today is probably search result enhancement because every search engine has it, and second, practical digestion of information, per #1223147.
So while it's super-awesome that you can with 1 voice command let it reply to all your emails with nonsense, that is not the killer app. The killer app in software is almost always that what empowers humans, not what replaces them.
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The killer app in software is almost always that what empowers humans, not what replaces them.
Or what empowers some humans to replace their reliance on other humans hahaha
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I'm having a hard time to think of an example where it actually worked out like that.
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Oh, all kinds. Mechanization reduced our reliance on human farmworkers, for example.
Of course, those former farmworkers went on to find other things to do.
I always tell people worried about "AI taking jobs" is to simply ask the question, "In an age of AI, what can humans do to continue bringing value to each other." That's how you will figure out what the jobs are in the AI age.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 15h
My nephew thanked me the other day for recommending a book to him over 15 years ago. Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? by Seth Godin. He told me the mindset described in that book has helped him excel at every job he's had.
Related to AI, before it was what it is now I thought that any task that could be scripted would be and I better focus on hard problems. That is still the case now. Do the hard things.
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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @kepford 15h
Spell check
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @optimism 15h
Maybe, but doesnt that mean that the reviewer could focus more on things like coherence instead of spelling?
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 15h
Sure, but before spell check you would have someone review your writing for spelling mistakes. I'm old enough to remember having people read my papers for spelling errors. Yeah, I'm that old.
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100 sats \ 0 replies \ @kepford 15h
Yep, search enhancement is huge. Classic innovation. People mostly use search to answer questions. Sometimes they want to find a page or site.
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