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

insidehighered.com

11–20 of 77 posts

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

#11
post #6

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,…

Damn, I would be sending AI-generated pull-requests your way all day! Closing tickets left and right.

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

#14
post #2

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…

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?

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

#15

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

Yes, but more precisely the skill of needing to use anything going by the name of AI...

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

#16

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 inte…

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.

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

#17

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

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.

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

#18
post #6

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,…

Exactly. I expect people to know, be proficient with, and use all relevant tools available to them. Including AI; but not just AI. There are a lot of people trying to argue why they don't want/need to use certain tools. A job interview would be the wrong place to have that argument. A good, open interview question these days would be asking candidates how they are using AI in their work and what challenges they are facing with it.

Say, you are a python developer and you are working on some FastAPI rest service. Do you 1) ask chat GPT to generate documentation for your API. 2) do this by hand. or 3) routinely skip that sort of thing. 1) would be the correct answer. 2) would be you being inefficient and slow 3) would be lazy. It takes 1 minute to generate perfectly usable documentation. Tweak it a little if you need to and job done.

Bonus points for generating most/all of the endpoints. I did that a few weeks ago. And the tests that prove it works. And the documentation. And the bloody README as well. Slightly tedious and you need to be good at prompting to get what you need. But I managed.

Artisanal software is not going to be a thing for very long. I expect people to get standard stuff like that out of the way efficiently; not to waste days doing things manually.

I would also encourage candidates to use chat gpt during coding tests. If I actually believed in those, which I don't. I'd be more interested in their ability to understand the challenge then to produce a working solution from memory. Use tools for that.

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

#19
post #6

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,…

Some people are just really good without AI so I wouldn't immediately hard pass on them.

They are still going to be slow doing things manually.

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

#20
post #17

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

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.

I still remember people said fusion energy will be available in a few decades, in a few decades ago.
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