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Expertise in the age of AI

moderndescartes.com

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Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#91

Post by farley13 »

talkingtab wrote: post #46

Here is the fundamental issue. We use the word "intelligence" for different things. Can you follow a recipe for making sour dough bread? Pretty easy. Can you make sour dough bread? Not so easy. Does following a recipe require "intelligence"? Yes. If something can follow a recipe can it also make bread? Not necessarily. And another question, perhaps the most important. Can you determine that a recipe is flawed? In imm…

I do love the appeal to bread making. It's a wonderful example. If people haven't made french bread by hand, it's a humbling exercise.

Recipes of course have evolved too. Old roman recipes were merely a list of ingredients. Water, flour, salt, yeast.

Written steps came after, then photos, videos, gradually replacing hands on training / kneading.

There are now recipes as code running sour dough assembly lines. Certainly capturing much more detail in technique than even a well made video. But I bet there is still human QA at the end judging "is this bread what folks expect?"

I suspect that in order of complexity you'll get "can I attempt to follow each step", "can I follow the intention of each step and understand if I've failed to meet it" (mitigated by using more specific and detailed steps) "can I follow the intention of the recipe itself - can I add or modify steps that are missing to give the ideal form of sour dough" (maybe you show a machine what good bread looks like, moisture content, crunch?) Those mostly overlap with the 3 you've called out. But I'd add "why would anyone make bread?" Why the heck are we still mixing flour and water together. Why does this recipe exist? Great crusty sourdough requires them all.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#92

Post by jltsiren »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

I think that the universities have an opportunity here to be the places where manual code is written so that juniors can gain the coding expertise necessary to become effective with AI. 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.

Residency programs, as in medicine. After completing your degree, you spend a few years working as a junior under formal supervision. The incentives are kind of bad but solvable.

If the underlying issue is that you need more skills to be worth hiring, it cannot be solved by shuffling the curriculum. The actual answer is more education and more training.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#94

Post by _hao »

I'm doing a degree (part-time) in Mathematics and Physics to get away from AI crap and challenge myself now in my early 30's. The client I work for now has deemed us "AI first"... Even though the back-end work and optimizations that I do are not that impacted I'm just fed up with colleagues that are not programmers (or are programmers that are not on my level) to tell me how to do stuff with Claude or GPT. It's all so tiresome.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#95

Post by david_doji »

_hao wrote: post #94

I'm doing a degree (part-time) in Mathematics and Physics to get away from AI crap and challenge myself now in my early 30's. The client I work for now has deemed us "AI first"... Even though the back-end work and optimizations that I do are not that impacted I'm just fed up with colleagues that are not programmers (or are programmers that are not on my level) to tell me how to do stuff with Claude or GPT. It's all s…

Would you mind to share which one?

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#96

Post by _hao »

david_doji wrote: post #95
_hao wrote: post #94

I'm doing a degree (part-time) in Mathematics and Physics to get away from AI crap and challenge myself now in my early 30's. The client I work for now has deemed us "AI first"... Even though the back-end work and optimizations that I do are not that impacted I'm just fed up with colleagues that are not programmers (or are programmers that are not on my level) to tell me how to do stuff with Claude or GPT. It's all s…

Would you mind to share which one?

If you are asking about the degree it's with the Open University - https://www.open.ac.uk/courses/maths/degrees/bsc-mathematics...

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#97

Post by jimbokun »

b3kart wrote: post #3
recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

I think that the universities have an opportunity here to be the places where manual code is written so that juniors can gain the coding expertise necessary to become effective with AI. 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.

so universities become trade schools? one concern is where does one get theoretical knowledge required for e.g. going to graduate school and then doing research to push the state of the art. that's one of the reasons universities emphasize theory: it's seen as the first step on the academic ladder, not as a trade school

That is a vanishingly small portion of undergraduates.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#98

Post by danielbln »

ygouzerh wrote: post #55
recursivedoubts wrote: post #2

I think that the universities have an opportunity here to be the places where manual code is written so that juniors can gain the coding expertise necessary to become effective with AI. 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.

LLM are quite a good learning opportunity, mostly in classes where learning is sequential/needs building blocks, like mathematics, where if you miss a trimester, it's finished. Here it's like a free and immediately accessible private tutor. It would be great for computer sciences classes indeed.

I would have killed for access to an LLM during school. Not to do my homework (though that too, homework is an antipattern imo) but to fill my gaps at my own pace and level of patience. Just endlessly pestering the AI "ok, but why?" until I grokked it.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#99

Post by danielbln »

dakolli wrote: post #52
bijowo1676 wrote: post #38

AI compresses the time to acquire expertise. 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.

This is already studied, people do not retain knowledge when learning with AI. Learning with AI only creates the most mediocre of people, I've witnessed this myself over and over and over again over the last couple of years. Read a book, write, think and you'll be fine. Use LLM and your brain is going to become completely reliant on its ability to access some billionaires thinking machine in order to read and write.…

I can (and do!) pay the power company a pittance to run a surprisingly strong local model on a little box next to my keyboard, that does a fine job. Maybe not as fine as the billionaires thinking machine, but good enough and often better. Given that fact, I consider reliance on LLMs as much of an "issue" as reliance on a computer.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#100

Post by asty21 »

_hao wrote: post #96
david_doji wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you mind to share which one?

If you are asking about the degree it's with the Open University - https://www.open.ac.uk/courses/maths/degrees/bsc-mathematics...

OU maths is top notch. Really learned to admire maths while studying with them.
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