The newest offerings like ChatGPT are impressive and will only get better over the next few years. I’m wondering if any of my fellow parents on here have changed their career advice they give their kids?
This is all so new I can’t imagine what type of advice to give. No one knows where this will go. So what do you tell your kids? Don’t go into any career that involves producing a written product? So no programmers, lawyers, journalists, speech writers, creative writers, song writers, etc. I think our kids are just going to have to figure out how to navigate this world as they work through their careers.
5 Likes
Yes, any advice I would give will probably be outdated a year from now.
1 Like
I’m not qualified to give my kids career advice.
1 Like
I think everything is at risk. The thing that worries me is that unlike other technology innovations, I don’t know if this will create replacement jobs/careers.
1 Like
I think all of y’all are in the same place I am. It feels like a big change is coming but I’m not in a position to have a knowledgeable opinion.
This all started when my nephew texted asking about the impacts to the law profession. In the fall he had decided to take a consulting job, work there for a few years, and then go to law school. Now he’s questioning whether law school is worth the time and money.
Change is definitively coming, but the rate of change (for now) will be slower than most people think. For the near future these technologies should be seen as tools to make things easier. They will be that for a while before completely displacing entire career fields.
2 Likes
The most important thing that I’ll be conveying to my kids is how this reinforces the need for sharp critical thinking. I’m an engineer, and the overwhelming sentiment in my circle is that ChatGPT — while good (great, even!) at some things — presents confident and convincing language that is very often incorrect. As an example:
ChatGPT’s firm grasp of language makes it seem like an omniscient AI. It speaks English perfectly, it’s confident and assertive, and it appears to be able to answer any question you throw at it. But after spending some time grilling the chatbot on my area of expertise, it became clear that like much of Silicon Valley, it revels in just confidently stating false information. Myself being a researcher by trade, it’s easy to check the AI on its frequent use of misinformation, but this is not something the average layperson is going to consider doing. As a matter of fact, I’ve even run into multiple instances of researchers writing articles based on nonsensical ChatGPT output, which evidently wasn’t fact-checked in any way, shape, or form. (source)
I don’t mean to dodge the core question of “how will AI tools impact career paths?”, but I think there’s a lot we don’t know about how things will go with it. But one thing I’m confident about is that it’ll only be more important that our kids have the tools to think critically when faced with confident-but-possibly-wrong information.
Here’s a NY Times article (gift link) about a teacher who seems to be approaching it well, with an attitude of “here’s an opportunity to enhance students’ critical thinking about AI”: At This School, Computer Science Class Now Includes Critiquing Chatbots