Learn AI now or risk losing your job, experts warn
Learn AI now or risk losing your job, experts warn
These experts on AI are here to help us understand important things about AI.
Who are these generous, helpful experts that the CBC found, you ask?
"Dr. Muhammad Mamdani, vice-president of data science and advanced analytics at Unity Health Toronto", per LinkedIn a PharmD, who also serves in various AI-associated centres and institutes.
"(Jeff) Macpherson is a director and co-founder at Xagency.AI", a tech startup which does, uh, lots of stuff with AI (see their wild services page) that appears to have been announced on LinkedIn two months ago. The founders section lists other details apart from J.M.'s "over 7 years in the tech sector" which are interesting to read in light of J.M.'s own LinkedIn page.
Other people making points in this article:
C. L. Polk, award-winning author (of Witchmark).
"Illustrator Martin Deschatelets" whose employment prospects are dimming this year (and who knows a bunch of people in this situation), who per LinkedIn has worked on some nifty things.
"Ottawa economist Armine Yalnizyan", per LinkedIn a fellow at the Atkinson Foundation who used to work at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Could the CBC actually seriously not find anybody willing to discuss the actual technology and how it gets its results? This is archetypal hood-welded-shut sort of stuff.
Things I picked out, from article and round table (before the video stopped playing):
Does that Unity Health doctor go back later and check these emergency room intake predictions against actual cases appearing there?
Who is the "we" who have to adapt here?
AI is apparently "something that can tell you how many cows are in the world" (J.M.). Detecting a lack of results validation here again.
"At the end of the day that's what it's all for. The efficiency, the productivity, to put profit in all of our pockets", from J.M.
"You now have the opportunity to become a Prompt Engineer", from J.M. to the author and illustrator. (It's worth watching the video to listen to this person.)
Me about the article:
I'm feeling that same underwhelming "is this it" bewilderment again.
Me about the video:
Critical thinking and ethics and "how software products work in practice" classes for everybody in this industry please.
Well, you know, you don't want to miss out! You don't want to miss out, do you? Trust me, everyone else is doing this hot new thing, we promise. So you'd better start using it too, or else you might get left behind. What is it useful for? Well... it could make you more productive. So you better get on board now and, uh, figure out how it's useful. I won't tell you how, but trust me, it's really good. You really should be afraid that you might miss out! Quick, don't think about it so much! This is too urgent!
"learn AI now" is interesting in how much it is like the crypto "build it on chain" and how they are both different from something like "learn how to make a website".
Learning AI and Building on chain start with deciding which product you're going to base your learning/building on and which products you're going to learn to achieve that. Something that has no stability and never will. It's like saying "learn how to paint" because in the future everyone will be painting. It doesn't matter if you choose painting pictures on a canvas or painting walls in houses or painting cars, that's a choice left up to you.
"Learn how to make a website" can only be done on the web and, in the olden days, only with HTML.
"Learn AI now", just like "build it on chain" is nothing but PR to make products seem like legitimised technologies.
Fuckaduck, ai is the ultimate repulseware
i'd be fine with losing my job. i hate working, let a computer do it.
only problem is my salary, which i cannot live without
I want to see "AI" bend pipe and pull wire.
"Experts were quick to clarify that this only applies to the very few people who still have jobs - namely those who followed experts' previous warnings and learned programming, started a social media account, adapted to the new virtual reality corporate world, and invested in crytpo before the dollar crashed."
Edit: And invested in a smart home and created a personal website.
see their wild services page
C-suit Reporting sounds cool.
The great* Jakob Nielsen is all in on AI too btw. https://www.uxtigers.com/post/ux-angst
I expect the AI-driven UX boom to happen in 2025, but I could be wrong on the specific year, as per Saffo’s Law. If AI-UX does happen in 2025, we’ll suffer a stifling lack of UX professionals with two years of experience designing and researching AI-driven user interfaces. (The only way to have two years of experience in 2025 is to start in 2023, but there is almost no professional user research and UX design done with current AI systems.) Two years is the bare minimum to develop an understanding of the new design patterns and user behaviors that we see in the few publicly available usability studies that have been done. (A few more have probably been done at places like Microsoft and Google, but they aren’t talking, preferring to keep the competitive edge to themselves.)
*sarcasm
We are being astroturfed big time.
Ugh, fuck this punditry. Luckily, many of the views in this article are quickly dispatched through media literacy. I hate that, for the foreseeable future, AI will be the boogeyman whispered about in all media circles. But knowing that it is a boogeyman makes it very easy to tell when it's general sensationalist hype/drivel for selling papers vs. legitimate concerns about threats to human livelihoods. In this case, it's more the former.