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The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

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Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#41

Post by brightball »

arkj wrote: post #5

Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support explora…

This is my constant concern these days and it makes me wonder if grading needs to change in order to alleviate some of the pressure to get the right answer so that students can focus on how.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#42

Post by layer8 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #26
schneems wrote: post #12

The flip side of focus (to me) is responsiveness. A post to SO might deliver me the exact answer I need, but it will take focus to write the correct question and patience to wait for a response and then time spent iterating in the comments. In contrast an LLM will happily tell me the wrong thing, instantaneously. It’s responsive. Good engineers must also be responsive to their teammates, managers, customers, and the…

This is why I honestly like discord over forums

When you’re on the asking side, sure, instant gratification is great. On the answering side, not so much. Chat interfaces are not a good fit for anything you may have to mull over for a while, or do some investigation before answering, and for anything where multiple such threads may occur in parallel, or that you want to reference later.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#43

Post by nonrandomstring »

arkj wrote: post #5

Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students. It’s not just LLMs, almost every app and startup is competing for the same limited attention from every user. What LLMs have done for most of my students is remove all the barriers to an answer they once had to work for. It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works. That said, I think LLMs can support explora…

> Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students.

Gaining focus as a skill is something to work on with every batch of new students

We're on the same page. I'm turning that around to say: let's remember focus isn't something we're naturally born with, it has to be built. Worked on hard. People coming to that task are increasingly damaged/injured imho.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#44

Post by bluefirebrand »

trollbridge wrote: post #9
djsavvy wrote: post #7

> This idea summarizes why I disagree with those who equate the LLM revolution to the rise of search engines, like Google in the 90s. Search enginers offer a good choice between Exploration (crawl through the list and pages of results) and Exploitation (click on the top result). > LLMs, however, do not give this choice, and tend to encourage immediate exploitation instead. Users may explore if the first solution does…

I’m finding the same usage of LLMs in terms of what actually I use them for day to day. When I need to look up arcane information, an LLM generally does better than a Google search.

How do you verify the accuracy of "arcane information" produced by an LLM?

"Arcane Information" is absolutely the worst possible use case I can imagine for LLMs right now. You might as well ask an intern to just make something up

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#45

Post by vjvjvjvjghv »

Being allowed to focus seems to be a privilege these days.

When I started in the 90s I could work on something for weeks without much interruption. These days there is almost always some scrum master, project manager or random other manager who wants to get an update or do some planning. Doing actual work seems to have taken a backseat to talking about work.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#46

Post by knallfrosch »

When I use LLMs, I quickly lose focus.

Copy-paste, copy-paste. No real understanding of the solutions, even for areas of my expertise. I just don't feel like understanding the flood of information, without any real purpose behind the understanding. While I probably (?) get done more, I also just don't enjoy it. But I also can't go back to googling for hours now that this ready-made solution exists.

I wish it would have never been invented.

(Obviously scoped to my enjoyment of hobbyist projects, let's keep AI cancer research out of the picture..)

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#47

Post by exceptione »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #27
iwontberude wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It compiles and runs …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. This second order effects make the “compile and run” focus paradoxically efficient and correct use of resources. Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnec…

> …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially. Did they? Like I have no data for this nor would I know how one would set about getting it, but like, from my personal experience and the experiences of folks I've spoken to for basically my entire career, the requirements we have for our software barely change at all. I do not expect…

MS produces some very good software, like .net core, garnet etc. Their biggest asset is however Marketing. They have perfected selling software, no matter how bad it is.

Their end-user software ranges from "bad but could be worse" to "outlandish crap that should be illegal to ship". Their user base however doesn't know much better, and decision makers in commercial settings have different priorities (choosing MS would not be held against you).

But even in tech circles MS Windows is still used. I know the excuses. MS can continue focusing their efforts productising the clueless user that doesn't understand anything and doesn't give a shit about all the leaks, brittle drivers, performance degradation, registry cluttering etc. MS follows the right $$ strategy, their numbers don't lie.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#48

Post by rf15 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #22
the_snooze wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a way, I think it shows why "superfluous" things like sports and art are so important in school. In those activities, there are no quick answers. You need to persist through the initial learning curve and slow physical adaptation just to get baseline competency. You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process.

> You're not going to get a violin to stop sounding like a dying cat unless you accept that it's a gradual focused process. You can sample that shit and make some loops in your DAW. Or just use a generative AI nowadays.

There are many ways to be a skillless hack, but why celebrate it?

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#49

Post by rglover »

obscurette wrote: post #28

I'm old enough to remember myriad of experts 10+ years ago who were active selling a view, that smartphones with constantly connected social media will change everything, we just have to learn to use it wisely.

And AI will be no different. People will rush head first into the fire and be flabbergasted when all of the hype and promise of utopia results in utter chaos and inequality.

If we assume that civilization is already teetering thanks to the smartphone/social media, the fallout of AI would make Thomas Cole blush.

Re: The skill of the future is not 'AI', but 'Focus'

#50

Post by spacemadness »

knallfrosch wrote: post #46

When I use LLMs, I quickly lose focus. Copy-paste, copy-paste. No real understanding of the solutions, even for areas of my expertise. I just don't feel like understanding the flood of information, without any real purpose behind the understanding. While I probably (?) get done more, I also just don't enjoy it. But I also can't go back to googling for hours now that this ready-made solution exists. I wish it would ha…

I recommend using them to ask questions about why something works rather than spit out code. They excel at that a lot of the time.
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