Expertise in the Age of AI(moderndescartes.com) |
Expertise in the Age of AI(moderndescartes.com) |
A high schooler can become an expert very quickly with AI, that used to require years and years of education and experience.
but the real expertise still will be to translate real world problems to technical solutions and iterate on design.
I've always believed that coding and development is an art and something analogous is the experience of a visual arts student. There's a level of experience required when one applies to an art school. The student builds a portfolio of passion projects and demonstrates a passion and skill along with creativity and other beneficial traits. If they are accepted, they learn the deeper theory, techniques, and more that will aide them in their career. This increases their exposure and overall experience.
Experience for a young developer is going to start with passion projects and be supplemented and bolstered through education in a similar way. You can take shortcuts as an arts student or a developer but you really just end up hurting yourself.
So everyone feels the needs to talk about it, to either get rid of this anxiety by ranting or trying to prove that it would be an opportunity, or a non-event depending on the point of view, etc
"I'm tired of all this internet talk" in 1990s?
People say AI is the new internet. I say AI is the new tobacco.
In current job market and pressure, we doesn't have time anymore. You need to be constantly delivering the new jira ticket, and the time expected to perform a task now decreased, as it's expected of the workers that now they are "more productive with AI".
At that time, you wish if there were some pipe through which you could reach John Carmack, Tim Sweeney, Gabe Nawell, Jonathan Blow some Casey Muratori and just ask one thing:
Sir, is this really the right direction?
These tools feel good when you yourself are a domain expert. I have written backend systems and designed REST APIs all my life in multiple languages in Java, Python, Go, Ruby for multiple verticals I'd say I am damn expert at API design including all the layers that go under it and I can confidently give a shut up call to an LLM knowing what I know.
Fuck the bean counters and the greedy parasite execs and VPs. Hug a junior today, society will need them tomorrow because I was a clueless junior once and my seniors were very kind to me that I am able to put bread for my family on the table.
Actually I tried that and you are correct about this.
With Claude it took me hundreds of iterations and I'm still not happy.
Many universities are not set up to take advantage of this opportunity because they lean heavily into theory and look down on coding, but some departments will make the pivot well. I hope that ours (Montana State) is one of them.
Are they? I would imagine they have the luxury to pick the brightest candidates, and set them to work on jobs for which their models don't have training data for, such as developing new models. Not writing React code.
This is especially true in the humanities and the social sciences. Where truth is hard to ascertain, and therefore it is easier to substitute political correctness for critical thought.
Both are at the same levels at +5 years after high-school, but they leads to different career paths.
So, yes. Universities are trade schools for the white collar world. Have been for quite a while. Never mind that most companies could spend 2-4 years running high school grads through an apprenticeship type of program and probably come out with better results.
Obviously this would be easier if our entire school system before university wasn't seemingly designed too destroy every last ounce of a child's curiosity.
Note: you can still be an avowed and serious leftist and have my respect if you allow your ideas to be questioned, hold yourself to a standard of proof, and tolerate dissent. What I’m criticizing is the way especially in universities, people jump right to “You’re a Nazi/fascist and the only acceptable response is to shut you down and eject you from the community” if someone doesn’t embrace all the same political dogma as you.