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Expertise in the age of AI

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Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#81

Post by btilly »

xp84 wrote: post #26
btilly wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that professors say "learn to think critically", then actually just want the students to learn to sound like them, and agree with them. Actual critical thought has been on the decline for some time. 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.

Some will probably dismiss your comment as partisan but it is very hard to (honestly) argue that this isn’t the case. “Think critically…” but only about the cliché punching bags of academia: capitalism, Western culture, American foreign policy, The Patriarchy, etc. I didn’t witness any college classes that encouraged us to think critically about socialism, or think critically about Islam, or think critically about no…

Thank you for getting it.

The essay https://www.paulgraham.com/say.html captures the problem perfectly. I think that Paul Graham was completely correct when he said:

"I suspect the biggest source of moral taboos will turn out to be power struggles in which one side only barely has the upper hand. That's where you'll find a group powerful enough to enforce taboos, but weak enough to need them."

Those on the left have been trying to advance their power through creating new taboos that cement their position. But they've misjudged. As a result Trump, by simply speaking to the resulting pain points, has been put on a potential course towards dictator. (Note, he doesn't have to do anything about it - just name the pain.) Will he succeed? Probably not, but he's certainly making a try of it.

Very few on the left are willing to engage in the self-reflection to realize how they have contributed to Trump's rise. It should be obvious - if Trump is an existential threat then you should reach out to people you dislike, who dislike Trump more than you. But no. We've been doubling down on ideological purity. And the horrible result is in the (currently partially demolished) White House.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#82

Post by eikenberry »

okdood64 wrote: post #72

I don't see this discussed often enough but high school and universities need to adapt FAST, like yesterday, to the current reality. More in-class study and "hands-on" work with proctored in-person exams. There is no incentive for students to go through their courses "the honest way" and build this intuition themselves. Can you blame them?

> More in-class study and "hands-on" work with proctored in-person exams.

If you move to in-class, hands-on work you don't need exams at all as you will see their performance develop in class as well. Exams are for things you can't see them actually use first hand.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#83

Post by jghn »

Daishiman wrote: post #61
jghn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 years ago it was web3. 5 years before that it was Haskell and monads. It’s how things work

Haskell wasn't threatening to dramatically transform the industry like AI is.

The poster to whom I was replying was complaining about how the front page is dominated by a single topic. I don't see why this point is relevant to that.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#86

Post by Thanemate »

hopelessluca wrote: post #10

Sorry for the off-topic comment, but what happened to the front page? At the time I’m writing this, 11/30 submissions are related to AI. Maybe my comment is cliché too, but I’m honestly tired of all the AI stuff.

The crowd who came for the love of computers either left or switched to be the ones who were fed up with building things out of thin air, and are fine with swiping their credit cards to have someone else do the work for them while they're micromanaging that someone else (AI).

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#87

Post by jeffreygoesto »

k__ wrote: post #49
wg0 wrote: post #17

Actually - to disillusion yourself from AI, try dabbling into something you do not know. Try writing a production quality 3D engine. Trust me, a 3D engine has its own domain knowledge besides just graphics. No, seriously. And then see how helpless you feel when you yourself do not have the expertise to judge whether the direction being taken is the right or wrong. At that time, you wish if there were some pipe throug…

I tried it with embedded programming, and failed miserably.

You? Or it? Or you together?

Srsly. Welcome to my day job. I can see that the LLMs' center of training is so far off from where I'd need it, I can accelerate auxillary stuff but prompt never beats the weights and it constantly pulls back into it's middle...

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#88

Post by jsemrau »

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…

In my opinion, the bread example doesn't really work that well because it bridges into the physical domain which most cognitive systems don't have access to. That said, for grounding context and therefore creating truth having a version of a world model is very important (See Yan LeCun's work). My experience is that given the right world to operate in, an agent can indeed find flaws in recipes and fix it even though the agent has not been prompted explicitly to do it. This world, as far as I understand it now, is a combination of sequential (at which step am I in a process), conversational (what was talked about alread/ what had I done already), and context memory (what is the frame or reference/plane of existence).

Self-correcting agents are already here: https://jdsemrau.substack.com/p/hyperagents-and-self-correct...

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#89

Post by recursivedoubts »

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

First off I don’t like the tone most people use when they say “trade school”. Most cs students go to a job out of school. Of the roughly 10% who go on to grad school, 10% will pursue a PhD.

So 99/100 students in undergrad will not be pursuing higher computer science. We should acknowledge that and the new circumstances where writing code by hand is harder to do in corporations who use AI.

Universities can provide a place to do so.

I also happen to think that writing a lot of code is an excellent way to prepare yourself for computer science theory.

Re: Expertise in the age of AI

#90

Post by xeromal »

esafak wrote: post #80
xeromal wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Going off this thought tangent a bit, I think many engineers could be gatekeepers because it's a pretty hard industry to get into and it's just not everybody's cup of tea. Now that AI is assisting people who wouldn't necessarily make it in the old world, it turns out business just cares about results and the gatekeepers don't matter as much anymore. It's creating quite a big split between the old guard and people who…

Welcome to the club, but remember: you break it, you own it. You will be expected to take part in incident response and explain why it broke and how to remediate it in the post-mortem.

Believe me, I know. I am completely an entirely responsible for a service that receives around 500 requests a second. AI assisted coding has really helped me get through a backlog of things I've wanted to do but never had the time because I was one man.
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