Apprenticeship Erosion

“My biggest fear is that we're not replacing the apprentice level people like and they still need a fundamental of whatever their craft is without AI... who's going to watch the watchers who will know that something is wrong because they never did it.”

“People are even arguing that AI moderated researchers are better than human researchers, which I'm like, I don't know about that.”

“Everybody's like, 'Looks cool.' And then I'm like, 'No, but read it.' Does any of this [make sense]?”

“No, absolutely not. I'm intentionally not using it because I'm learning." And I said, "Okay, good call. I agree with you. Since you're trying to learn, maybe you can use it afterwards as a benchmark. The first thing, the first draft of the moderation guide, the first screening, is only you with your thoughts, because you're learning the craft.”

“I mean, I watched both my kids when I was in school. My parents' biggest worry was, am I on drugs? When my kids were in school, like in high school, five, six years ago, my biggest worry was like, are they cheating off of others? Everyone seemed to be crowdsourcing all the homework. And I'm like, is anyone actually learning anything other than just how to get by in an ethically dubious way? And now I feel like AI has almost given rise to the legitimacy of that now in a way.”

“Well, I kind of think of, I don't know that I have many concerns because when we, my only concern is that we don't start with the basics in school and that we give AI too soon. So I'm talking about elementary years, primary years. Because I'm thinking back to when I learned long division and multiplication and the basics of math, it was like learning a language without knowing you're learning a language.”

“There's a logic behind it. And I feel like if we skip over learning [the basics of math, long division and multiplication], maybe we'll have people who can't think for themselves. But we're starting to see that now with students coming up because they're over-tested, just because of over-testing. So I feel like, you know, we used to farm and we used to be really active and walk and now we just go to the gym. So those who have the motivation to hone their creative thinking or critical thinking skills, they will. Those who don't want to won't. And that's where the divide will be, I think.”

“Yeah. I mean I think when AI can work right now, I think this is true for engineering but for design because that's what I know, it's because you have somebody with the judgment to know when the output is working or not working or quality or not quality and you can adjust from there, but that comes from experience. And it's almost like managing a type of more junior role except faster and so your brain has to move faster. And so that is a really good question because you don't get that judgment and that experience without doing the work and being hands-on in it in a way.”

“So there are certain things that I don't know if people will need to pick up in the future, like I don't know some of the detailed UI kind of work which the details of were tedious and took a long time in the past and now they're so automatic, or even like responsive design patterns. It was such a tedious thing before and it's so much easier now. And will there be a need for people to learn that? That's a good question. I don't know. But there's another aspect of just designing something to a certain context or problem that will be really important. So how do you train people to do that? Well, it will be interesting. My wife actually teaches English as a part-time lecturer at a university and she's gone from trying to have students use AI in really specific ways to being, like this current class, she's having them write everything by hand in the context of the classroom. She can't trust anything anymore. And it's going to be extremely painful for them, but they're actually, the idea is that they're actually learning and doing the work.”

“Yeah, I think about this every day. That's why I said earlier that I feel fortunate that this is happening at the end of my career because, while I can see there's room for people to use the tools, once they get to the lights out software factory then the entry level coder is not needed anymore.”

“Maybe for the worse because I don't like Agile. I miss the old waterfall days where you had a design on paper before you start coding. Actually, iterative development was fun. Prototyping and iterating on that, I think, was my favorite method of work. But I think in the short term it's going to impact the people who just graduated. I feel bad for them because they've been told, just get a degree in software, computer science or software development or whatever. And now that's not the skill that's going to have any value because the value of that career is the experience that you learn over time through coming up through the junior ranks and dealing with all these problems in the field or in your own code. You learn a lot about, well, how do we avoid this? And to some extent some of those learnings are not valuable because the AI is going to take care of that. It's going to be doing the mechanics of writing code and finding the bugs. So that's not the skill that's needed anymore. The skill that's needed is again the higher level, like the solution level capability of going to a customer, getting requirements, building a spec, giving it to AI, and somehow making sure that what goes back to the customer meets that.”

“The same thing goes for the people who started their career, um, during covid. They never, like, I spent the first four years of my IT and design career in an office where we had access to leadership, we had access to networking, we had real people to talk to.”

“I have major concerns, especially having young kids, that they, you need to understand, you need to be able to think on your own. You need to be able to think on the fly and come up with your own ideas. And there's a time and a place for technology. There's a time and a place for. Sorry, I got to go back to plug it. But there's a time and a place for any sort of technology tool. It's just how you use it that is what's going to make or break you, I guess. I don't know. I think the same thing goes for the people who started their career, um, during covid. They never. Like, I spent the first four years of my IT and design career in an office where we had access to leadership, we had access to networking, we had real people to talk to. And now, it's one of those things where, feel like people need to be more cautious too. Like, I know, like interviewing skills.”

“For me, when I look at it and what is my potential role in this, like, if I was a coder, I'd be terrified, right? Because I'm not a person who can look at that and be able to verify where their code is. But I know that for a lot of entry-level jobs, and I know there's been a lot of talk about this, it's not about cost savings. It's about building the next generation of people who can be the senior developers who are going to look at this and be able to do it. The same thing is going to happen with design. The same thing is going to happen with research. People are going to have very short-term thinking about it. You're going to lose the ability to generate the people who are going to be necessary in order to do the overall evaluation of whether this thing is working correctly or not.”

“In my previous job I had a few direct reports, and they were always fresh grads. This last round, like 20 to 22, was the age range. And I could see every email I was getting was written by AI.”

“And that's what I worried about with my previous employees. Are they using critical thinking when it comes to patients? Like, how often are they turning to chatbots for things that they really need to think about, rather than just these minimal tasks that are fine to do?”