Training People for Jobs They Won't Do
200 Words of Wondering
Note: I’m going to try an experiment in short posts—200 words exactly—that get at questions bouncing around in my mind. I hope these posts, which will be very quick reads, provoke some conversation in this space and spark ideas for myself and others. Okay, here is my first go at “200 Words of Wondering.”
Higher Education, like most of our world, is enthralled with AI, even if we don’t precisely know what we’re talking about. We often say, “Everything will be AI.”
As an English professor, I see us as preparing students to essentially be “quality control” for AI. Ensure writing is good and error free, fact check research, “make sure nothing is completely fabricated like with those lawyers.”
Culture largely discusses technology as “replacement.” What invention will oust people from jobs? Make them obsolete? We take a certain pride in this. Should our new question be: “What should we train people in that they won’t actually do?”
Why? How can you assess AI writing if not trained in writing? How can you assess facts and research if not trained in research methods that eventually take written form? Won’t businesses need to know that their AI didn’t send invented data to all their costumers?
We’re fond of saying that people “will do jobs that haven’t been invented yet.” Instead, maybe we should say, “your actual job will not be the one you trained for, but simply to ensure something else is doing that job correctly.”
In other words, is this the future of redundancy?
What I've seen of Ai is cause for luddite revolution, programs that write kids homework or tech reports from fake character perspectives, a life defined by algorithm and marketed without your consent, cheap crap blame the robot customer a service and no accountability, oh, and the threat of human kind being wiped out terminator style, but it might build and run a colony on Mars, and yes, I agree it's likely to make us redundant. The upside is it frees us to do what we want to do instead of money whoring, which will create a society of individuals not robot sheep blrating
This is, in fact, the future of "reproduced" redundancy. A concept best demonstrated throughout the ridiculous but entertaining series "Upload"- but I digrest. Where "revisionism" perervades that space and while defragging is "refragged", there will always be scholarly work to be done, Prof Rybak. Unfortunately, facts (sometimes "truth") will be a moving target, says the cynic.