| There are a number of assumptions in what you say that don't necessarily hold. 1) That school is simply about landing a job. 2) That there is a value in students knowing how to have the AI do problems for them. 3) That follow-on effects of manually solving difficult problems is discountable compared to the direct output of the work. I would say you're absolutely correct in that people pay for the result and they don't really care how you got there. But that's a pretty shallow rationale which overvalues the ability to be the conduit from the source of requirements to the final output and undervalues the individual ability to think for one's self when faced with the challenges of technological, geopolitical, or simply uncontrolled personal circumstances. "The conduit", who you seem to be believe is the one with marketplace advantage, is exactly the person I would say is the most vulnerable. Not because getting the AI to produce demands is without value, but that its quickly becoming a task that doesn't need the intermediary at all. Those magicians that can prompt/agent/mcp/etc their way through to positive successes are actively being challenged by the very AI producers which our conduits people now depend on. Removing the need for intermediaries would be a great competitive advantage for any AI vendor able to achieve it. But insofar as intermediaries create output from LLMs, they'll not be very well differentiated: the common wisdom tends to be the output, lest the AI be accused of hallucination or being overly supportive. But when everyone is using AI for everything the opportunities will be in arbitraging that which is missed by common wisdom... filling in the cracks that any responsible AI would simply never venture to consider. Our conduit-person will be at a decided disadvantage because it takes real thought to know when it's best to color within the lines, and when it's best to not do so. And that's really it. A good education is teaching you about the process of thought and becoming practiced at thinking. I would expect a better educated, thinking person to more easily adapt and make use of technology such as generative AI to solve problems more so than a person that just knows how to deal with today's prompting needs. The thinking person will be able to understand the bigger picture to better get a consistent and high quality series of results than the person just getting results as needed. And that's really it. The output of a good education is you as a thoughtful & knowledgeable person: the output on the page is merely a means to that end. But if you focus solely on the answer on the page and the only important thing... you're really evaluating the AI, not the person that acted as intermediary. In otherwords, if the person following your advice comes for a job, simply ask them which AIs they used in the interview and then just sign contracts with those vendors instead... you'll get better bang for your buck cutting out the middleman. |