Tiny Thoughts: Surviving in the World of AI
I’ve been thinking a lot about AI and how work will change. With the rise of generative AI, certain skills become cheaper and more accessible. Using this as a tool we can be even more creative and productive in our work.
Here’s what I’ve got so far in what skills will still be useful with AI to supplement, we humans will still need:
To write. Writing helps thinking, thinking is needed to write your prompt to the AI and break problems down into ways you can get something useful from the AI.
Curators of content. Amazon is flooded with AI generated books. With all this AI generated content, how will people know what’s worth their time?
User Interfaces/ User Experiences. The AI models are the engines, but we need people to build the car around it.
People skills. If your employees are more productive, they can go faster. The hard skills like how to write code become less important than how to lead teams of people utilizing AI.
Going to market fast. Small creators and companies not building new AI models will need the ability to get products out fast to find out what users like/ don’t like, etc. AI can likely help here
Combining things (being creative). Models are being trained for specific niches. Some are more general than others. But finding ways to combine models with other systems is another medium for humans to get creative here.
I’ve been trying to use AI in my life as much as possible, mainly to learn how to live with it because I don't anticipate it going away. I even started paying for GPT Plus and began testing Github Copilot for writing code.
Having used it, the hardest thing is giving it the right context. Or sharing as much context as you have that’s relevant to do a good job.
Think “garbage in, garbage out”. The trouble with using AI, like solving most problems, is asking the right questions. Make sure you are providing the right amount of context.
It’s a useful tool to aid in brainstorming, researching, learning - drilling into nuances, and doing some of the more tedious things like automating tests, translating between languages, generating small functions that you scope well.
My favorite use is having it as a teacher. Mainly to act like an interactive Google session when learning or debugging.