[d4rkp4ttern]

I can see where it's coming from. Putting it starkly, at a high level, the broad effect of AI is this:

    devaluation of expertise,

whether in coding, or drawing, or music composition, or writing, or translation, or so many other areas.

College students working hard to gain expertise in specific areas are faced with the prospect that this very expertise is being "democratized" by AI, putting it in the hands of literally anyone. Sure, true expertise is still needed to "validate" (and train) the AI, etc, etc, but that's a small consolation.

Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.

[snowwrestler]

No, expertise is more important when working with AI, because it can make mistakes. Expertise is the ability to predict, understand, and mitigate such mistakes.

In science for example, anyone can do an experiment about gravity. In fact millions of high school kids do every year. What makes an expert scientist is the ability to understand all the many ways such experiments can fail to accurately measure the underlying reality.

Or consider an AI writing a press release. A PR expert will catch nuances of wording that will confuse readers, or leave fodder for others to attack or mischaracterize the announcement.

College students know this because they are working with AI. And what makes them mad is the human-driven false notion that AI devalues expertise. AI looks like magic to non-experts. But it’s not, it’s more like a “junior engineer” or “PR intern” to people with actual expertise to evaluate its output.

[vitally3643]

You and I know this. The people making hiring decisions do not. Managers and CEOs are too enamored by the thought of reduced labor costs to see reason.

Facts don't matter, only what the person making the hiring decision believes to be true, or has been fed.

College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is, the hysteria is what is causing problems.

[thunky]

> College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is

I doubt it. If there was nothing behind the hysteria then there would be nothing to be afraid of.

If I was entry level I would be genuinely worried, because hysteria or not, I now have to compete with AI and prove I'm worth hiring. Not an easy thing to do.

So I don't think the anger is about not being able to find a job in the field today, it's about not being able to find one ever.

[d4rkp4ttern]

I agree with this (and the earlier comment about perceived expertise vs actual expertise), and I think it goes beyond hiring managers.

The core demoralizing fact is that when people perceive that AI can give results at least as good as human experts, they choose AI, because it is faster and/or cheaper.

[wrxd]

Expertise is more important if you care about a good end result. People pushing for AI often don't care about the end result at all. They care about quantity over quality.

This can be really frustrating for someone who spent time getting experienced. They get hit twice. First they don't get a chance to do a job because "AI replaced you, sorry". Then they look at the result and what they see is low quality slop.

[freedomben]

> Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.

I'm in a very similar boat! I've had rust on my to-do list for a very long time, but never found the bandwidth in the personal life to actually dig in enough to get proficient. Since AI has come around, I've been able to write a lot of tools in rust and just learn little pieces as I need to. My first couple results were not very great as I didn't know what I was doing, but I've learned enough about structuring good rust apps from the experimentations that I can crank out something pretty decent now.

The AI is so good at holding my hand that it has fundamentally changed how I approach unknown languages and stacks. I used to pick the best stack that I was proficient with for the job. Now I pick the best stack for the job, and become proficient in it. Pretty wild times we live in.

[LtWorf]

> and become proficient in it

From reading your comment, I suspect you are not becoming as proficient as you might think.

[freedomben]

That's fair, I should have defined proficient a little better. By proficient I mean, I can read Rust code and roughly understand what it's doing. I understand idiomatic patterns, and can identify when something especially an AI, has gone against those. I am familiar with the toolings capabilities and limitations, and I can make use of them directly. I can write rust code without having to use AI, though I do still need to lean on documentation, but I don't consider that to be non-proficient as I am definitely at least proficient in C++, elixir, Ruby, JavaScript/type script, and a few others, having written many non-trivial applications in all of those over the last 20 years, and I still reference documentation all the time. I can look at a rust project's organization and infer details from it, and spot areas where things look janky. I can read and understand the details and code examples in the rust book without having to look up earlier sections on syntax and things like that. The point where I would consider myself proficient was when I was able to read the ownership sections and understand them.

Note that when I say proficient, I in no way mean mastery. It will take years to get to that point. Rust is still one of my weakest languages overall, but I've been surprised at how quickly I've been able to get up to speed with AI assistance.

At this point, nothing I've written with AI is something I don't think I could have written by hand if I had significantly more time to do so.

On a side note, one thing that I have not enjoyed about the Rust community, is a general attitude that rust is hard. I personally find rust to be a whole lot easier than c++ was/is. There's definitely a lot to learn around the ownership model, but it's not rocket science. One of the things I love about Rust is how expressive it is, without compromising on performance and developer empowerment. I'm not implying that this is what you did with your comment as I have no idea what your intentions or thoughts were, just making an observation that this is something I haven't liked.

AI is definitely not a silver bullet for anything, but it has bridged a gap that kept me from diving fully into rust in the past, which is that at the end of the day I need to actually ship something. I learn languages for fun, but also for practical use. A theoretical language that I never use is not interesting to me because it's not useful to me because I can't ship anything with it. AI lets me ship actually useful things for just myself as part of the learning process, and it also gives me a great opportunity to debug Rust code that I know the exact intention of. When trying to clone someone else's project and review or debug that, there's a massive upfront step of understanding what it's supposed to do. When it's my code AI generated, I know what it's supposed to do because the requirements/prompts came from my own mind. That's hugely powerful and something that a lot of other old school developers don't seem to understand yet.

[everfrustrated]

I would frame it more that AI will cause the value of knowledge to plummet.

College provides knowledge but never provided expertise. That comes from experience in the real world. Capturable value has always been in the application of knowledge.

Experience will possibly become more valuable as a pipeline of people stop entering many industries. Some of that will be very industry specific in terms of market forces and has still to play out.

[soupspaces]

I see your point but it's the wrong framing I think. The etymology of education is “to train, mold, nurture”, “to draw out.". Task output can be emulated more cheaply, sure.

[keybored]

I don’t understand how this, in the context of people like Eric Schmidt lecturing people about AI, is putting it in stark terms. Starkly is to contrast these millionaire’s/billionaire’s ambitions to put them out of a job, permanently. But as usual the Silicon Valley tech disruption is put in terms of “democratizicing” X (scare quotes or not), just like taxi side hustling has been democraticized I guess.

People aren’t afraid of being out of a job, they say. It’s the usual jealously guarded guild expertise, by people who haven’t even entered any professions yet.