[alwa]

On the third hand, it’s hard to develop meta-level skills—nuanced judgment and wisdom in a domain—without engaging over a long period with the peas-and-carrots aspects of the domain. I guess it’s kind of the “where’s our next crop of senior engineers going to come from?” worry around these parts.

Then again maybe you’re right, maybe AI Operator is the domain where it’s important to develop meta-skills now. I can’t imagine someone who chose to use their school years specializing in that is anybody I’d want to hire or work with, though: it would seem to signal an incurious and timid mind, one that chose to optimize for metrics (grades) rather than the substance of the work at hand. But that bias is the same reason I don’t thrive in large corporate environments in the first place.

Still I have a hard time imagining that AI Operation skills take enough developing to be worth somebody’s time to specialize in as a student. Could just be old-fashioned, though—spoken like an outsider ignorant of the finer points of AI Operation...