The AI is taking our jerbs thread

[HangTime]

I do worry about young people that rely on it more than actually learning core information and skills

I have a somewhat controversial opinion which is that learning information is getting less important in the modern world, and that it's more important to a) know what information you need and b) know how to retrieve (and ultimately harness) that information efficiently. To a lesser extent I even think we need to reimagine what skills are, if we have tools that can remove most of the need for that skill. An example would be, the rise of pocket calculators probably harmed mathematical skills but the reality is it is very rare you need to do anything more than basic arithmetic unaided by technology. So it becomes more about framing the question you are trying to answer than actually being able to answer it unaided, and I see AI is going down this route somewhat. If you can prompt an AI effectively, and appraise the results it provides you with (challenging where appropriate) then it may replace the need for you to hold some information/skills.

I'm saying this an an AI luddite that hardly ever uses it aside from meeting summaries, and someone who is potentially at risk from AI because it is helping others do stuff that I've traditionally considered a strength of mine. Probably the biggest surprise for me is how much it is used by middle-aged people, not just younger people. I really ought to experiment a lot more with it, the problem I've had is that I ask it to do things and it does 80% of what I've asked but the remaining 20% is not straightforward to manually fill. An example would be I had what I considered a fairly basic character recognition thing (a screenshot with a big list in it), I wanted Copilot to extract the list and put it in digital format (so I could just dump it in a spreadsheet). But it kept missing items off the list despite numerous prompts and requests to include the full list so in the end it was quicker to manually type them all in. I know there might be other tools to do that, but one of the selling points of these tools is that you should be able to give it a wide variety of tasks rather than needing an armoury of 50 different tools.

 

[adam cool dude]

I have a somewhat controversial opinion which is that learning information is getting less important in the modern world, and that it's more important to a) know what information you need and b) know how to retrieve (and ultimately harness) that information efficiently. To a lesser extent I even think we need to reimagine what skills are, if we have tools that can remove most of the need for that skill. An example would be, the rise of pocket calculators probably harmed mathematical skills but the reality is it is very rare you need to do anything more than basic arithmetic unaided by technology. So it becomes more about framing the question you are trying to answer than actually being able to answer it unaided, and I see AI is going down this route somewhat. If you can prompt an AI effectively, and appraise the results it provides you with (challenging where appropriate) then it may replace the need for you to hold some information/skills.

I'm saying this an an AI luddite that hardly ever uses it aside from meeting summaries, and someone who is potentially at risk from AI because it is helping others do stuff that I've traditionally considered a strength of mine. Probably the biggest surprise for me is how much it is used by middle-aged people, not just younger people. I really ought to experiment a lot more with it, the problem I've had is that I ask it to do things and it does 80% of what I've asked but the remaining 20% is not straightforward to manually fill. An example would be I had what I considered a fairly basic character recognition thing (a screenshot with a big list in it), I wanted Copilot to extract the list and put it in digital format (so I could just dump it in a spreadsheet). But it kept missing items off the list despite numerous prompts and requests to include the full list so in the end it was quicker to manually type them all in. I know there might be other tools to do that, but one of the selling points of these tools is that you should be able to give it a wide variety of tasks rather than needing an armoury of 50 different tools.

Intelligence has to come from somewhere. We will get to a point where IQ will regress over generations if it isn't already because AI will do everything and we do nothing taxing anymore.

It wasn't so long ago that we were doing everything with dos. Slipstreaming updates into a windows XP installation and making a new bootable iso. Making games in visual basic. Coding everything by hand. Even doing LAN was an effort. It is all just so easy now.

You can attribute this to many walks of life.

Take flying for example. You get taught the old fashioned way using a CRP5 flight computer which is essentially a posh slide rule. You use it to calculate a flight track. The amount of drift correction needed for wind. The ground speed you are going to fly and how long it will take. It can also be used for many other things but requires a certain amount of brain power to use.

Now all you do with GPS is follow the purple line and that's it.

It does make you wonder that if we got to a certain point and a world catastrophic event happened would we have the brain power to start all over again without the help of Ai?

Everyone would have forgotten basic skills like agriculture or even building shelter.