Prompt engineering is just the "good at google searching" of tomorrow. That said, I think there is a lot more potential depth to it, seeing how inexpressive web searches are by comparison.
Personally I think it will be fairly easy to convince an LLM to do prompt engineering not far from now. They just lack training data, because they are based on information from the web, but "how to prompt engineer" pages are spreading across the web and the next irritation of ChatGPT will probably pick all of that info up.
How would an LLM do prompt engineering for you? At some level, as others have stated, prompt engineering is about specifying the important details so the LLM can do the job. If you don't specify those details, how would the LLM know them? Some may be arbitrary and so whatever the LLM makes up might be good enough, but at the end of the day, you have to specify the important details.
Even now so many people suck at the most basic Google searching. I consistently get easily Googlable questions from some family members - and I’m not talking about geriatric or illiterate ones. And I take my time to explain how they can just look it up (without being rude).
So I’m not sure if AI tools will help for these types of people without basic skills of logic and inquiry. And I don’t mean that in an insulting manner, I’m not even close to being the sharpest tool in the shed. But you really do have to have baseline IQ and knowledge to be able to make use of these tools.
Judging by most of the comments on Reddit (and about half the comments on select HN posts) … I think you’re right. Many adults lack the critical thinking and systems thinking necessary to use LLMs like ChatGPT effectively.
I’d like to think that the conversational style shortcuts their usual analytic skill, and maybe the next generation will more widely have a native understanding of the difference between LLM responses and human responses. But I think it’s more closely related to the phenomenon where many humans can’t currently choose whether total summations, year over year changes, or per capita representations are the most correct to use for a given situation.
There’s a lack of “validating input” in both online and IRL conversations which is a huge barrier to a person really analyzing information that they’re presented with. Many people are “below the median” in their ability to do this. But more importantly, I’m not sure which percentile cutoff currently is “good enough” at it.